Gogol's Taras Bulba

 

Jacket of the 1962 Lancer Books edition of Taras Bulba, translated by Bernard Farbar.

To each of Bulba's sons the esauls brought their old mother's blessing and a cypress icon from the Mezhigorsk Monastery in Kiev. Both brothers hung the holy images round their necks, and despite themselves grew pensive at the thought of their old mother. What did her blessing mean, what did it forebode? Was it a blessing for their victory over the enemy, and then for a happy return to the land of their fathers, with booty and glory, ever to be sung by the bandura-players? Or was it . . .? But the future is unknown, and it stands before man like the autumn mist that rises over the marsh; birds fly blindly up and down in it, flapping their wings and never seeing each other -- the hawk seeing not the dove, nor the dove the hawk -- and none ever knowing how far he may be flying from his death . . .

Ostap had long since returned to his duties and gone to the kurens. But Andrei, though he knew not why, felt a stifling weight at his heart. Already the Cossacks had finished their supper; evening had long since faded; the beautiful July night had filled the air; still he did not go to the kurens, nor lie down to sleep, captivated by the picture before him. Numberless stars twinkled, clear-cut and sharp, in the sky. The field was strewn far and wide with wagons, loaded with various goods and provisions captured from the enemy, with dripping tar-buckets hanging under them. All about the wagons Zaporozhians were to be seen, sprawling on the grass. They slept in peculiar positions, their heads resting on a sack, or a cap, or simply on a comrade's side. Sword, pistol, short-stemmed pipe with brass mountings, wire brushes and flint-box were inseparable from every Cossack. The heavy bullocks lay like huge whitish masses, their feet turned under them, resembling grey boulders scattered on the slopes of the field. On all sides the sonorous snoring of the sleeping host had already begun to arise, and was answered from the field by the ringing neigh of the stallions, indignant at having their feet hobbled. Meanwhile the beauty of the July night had acquired a magnificent and awesome quality. It was the glare of the neighbouring districts which had not yet burned to the ground. In one place the flame spread slowly and majestically over the heaven; in another, meeting with something inflammable and bursting into a whirlwind, it hissed and flew upwards to the very stars, and its severed tongues died in the highest regions of the sky. Here stood the charred, black monastery, like a stern Carthusian monk, displaying its gloomy grandeur at every new outburst of flame; there blazed the monastery garden. One could almost hear the trees hissing as they were wrapped up in smoke; and as the fire broke through, it suddenly lighted up clusters of ripe plums with a hot, phosphorescent, violet gleam or turned the yellow pears here and there to pure gold; and in the midst of all this, hanging against the wall of the building or from a bough, would be seen the black figure of some poor Jew or monk whom the fire was devouring together with the building. Birds, hovering far away above the conflagration, looked like a mass of tiny black crosses upon a fiery field. The beleaguered town seemed to be slumbering. Its spires, roofs, stockade, and walls flickered quietly in the glare of the distant conflagrations. 

(from Taras Bulba (1842 version), Ch 5, in Bernard Farbar's translation.)

It's a brilliant passage in a book with many. The description of this July night begins as pure calm pastoral, for instance the "huge whitish masses" of the bullocks. And then, without denying that, the passage develops dramatically, revealing the cossack forces as surrounded by the horrors they themselves have brought to a foreign country (Poland): corpses hanging from trees, fired buildings, a town being starved into submission. 

So, trenchantly as he expresses it, I can't accept that Simon Karlinsky describes Taras Bulba adequately when he calls it (truly) "one of the most ultra-nationalistic works works in all literature" and notes (truly, and with specific reference to the expanded 1842 version) that "Russian governments -- from that of Nicholas I to the present-day Soviet one -- value it for its insistence on the eternal unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people under Russian rule and its implicit opposition to any Ukrainian separatist tendencies" (The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (1976), p. 77). The author, a Ukrainian writing in Russian, had certainly, by 1842, embraced a Slavophile agenda, though there might have been some political pressure too. But the 1842 version's "Russian" (i.e. soul, character, etc) allows more than one interpretation, because the term "Little Russia" was used in Gogol's time to mean central Ukraine, the historical area of the Cossack Hetmanate. 

As Taras Bulba developed from its embryonic 1835 version, Gogol increasingly cast it in a Homeric mode. Taras Bulba and his comrades are indeed heroes, but only in the same way that Achilles or Odysseus or Agamemnon are heroes: that is, formally. The Greek heroes were magnificent but they were not role models, they were really as appalling as they were magnificent. That's not a particularly modern view: Euripides would certainly have agreed, Plato said it outright. Gogol's story is quite open about e.g. Taras Bulba seeking a pretext to make war on the basis of little more than tittle-tattle, greed and lust for violence. This hero doesn't so much have values and integrity as prejudices and ingrained habits. 

And so I want to say that Taras Bulba is also deeply anti-nationalist. It's a hymn of Slavophile ideals but also an exposure of their rotten foundations. And since that insight applies to all other nationalisms and patriotisms too, it has an international dimension. 

*

I wasn't going to write about Taras Bulba: I've got a house move looming and was hoping to quickly read it and fling it into the clearance pile. What changed my mind was discovering that the Scott influence I'd vaguely hypothesised while reading had some real substance to it. Scott was, apparently, Gogol's favourite foreign author (I learned this from Gary Rosenshield's essay, referenced below). 

Of course, that hypothesis was scarcely very bold. Any historical fiction from the 1830s is probably going to have some sort of Scott connection, unless it comes from wholly outside the European tradition. 

Still, the Scott influence is quite deeply submerged in Taras Bulba. Its surface is a "miscellany of styles" (David Bentley Hart) among which Homeric epic, zany comic exaggeration and Ukrainian folktale are some of the more prominent. (I ought to say that the brilliant passage I quoted at the head of the post is by no means typical of the novel as a whole, except in demonstrating the breadth of Gogol's resources; here the story is momentarily filtered through Andrei's lyrical and reflective temperament.)

But none of its styles is like Scott. Nevertheless the influence is there, as Gary Rosenshield demonstrates, specifically comparing (and contrasting) the handling of Jewish characters in Ivanhoe. One could go further, for instance in noticing Scott's way of celebrating a somewhat mythologized historical past while also criticizing it by balancing it against other cultural perspectives. Taras Bulba's two sons, for example, fresh from the Kiev seminary, bring something of an outsider's perspective to our view of an older Cossack culture, an idea very familiar from Waverley and its successors. Further still, the scene in Ch 7 where Yankel tells Taras Bulba about Andrei's betrayal while affecting to be quite unaware of his listener's discomfiture, adopts a very characteristic situation in Scott's novels, though without the same context of a settled society. It's still comedy, but it isn't social comedy. 

Or consider how Scott always looks away discreetly from the details of bloodshed and atrocity (even in The Legend of Montrose, closest in time to the historical events of Taras Bulba, and most clearly focussed on the grim realities of war). Superficially, Gogol's practice is in total contrast to Scott's: streams of blood flow during its Homeric combats, savagery abounds. But the explicitness is a little illusory because it's intentionally not very realistic, and the reader is supposed to understand that. For all its invocation of epic and folktale, this is distinctly a modern (nineteenth-century) creation with a conscious distance from the events and cultures it portrays. Gogol's novel is very different from Scott's, but his conception of historical fiction does owe something to his predecessor. 

*

"Short-stemmed pipe with brass mountings.. "

Gogol often mentions the Cossacks' passion for pipe-smoking, and you might wonder, as I did, whether they were already smoking tobacco in early 17th-century Ukraine. Well, I found an informative reply here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/apuvib/what_would_an_average_zaphorozian_cossack_put_in/

The answer is yes. Tobacco was introduced via Spain (c. 1500) to Ottoman culture, and before 1600 the Ottomans were already cultivating it in Anatolia. The Cossacks swiftly embraced the habit and were soon growing it in SE Ukraine too.

*

Bernard Farbar's translation seemed pretty good to me (the "miscellany of styles" is a challenge, you cannot just flatten it to modern English), but I discovered after reading it that the publishers' claim that it's "Complete and Unabridged" was untrue. It drops the whole episode (in Ch 4) in which the enraged Cossacks set about drowning the local Jews (and Taras Bulba spares Yankel, for his own ends).  Instead, when Yankel shows up in Ch 7, he's introduced as a new character ("a merchant"). Presumably this bowdlerization was what the publishers meant by "This new translation is designed especially for modern readers." 

The bowdlerization doesn't achieve much in the way of purging Taras Bulba of gross Jewish stereotypes, nor of portrayals of Jews being killed; there is plenty of both elsewhere. But it does arguably mean that something important gets missed: Yankel's desperate plea that the Jews and Cossacks are brothers. At the time this only raises Cossack fury to new heights. But as the novel proceeds Taras Bulba is increasingly compelled to accommodate himself to what Yankel says. His appalling vengeance in Ch 12 is aimed entirely at Poles, not at Jews. (Not that this makes it anything but appalling.) And while Yankel is portrayed as avaricious and cowardly and ridiculous in the tradition of anti-Semitic stereotype, I don't think this precludes arguing that Yankel's, nevertheless, is the novel's wisest voice.  

Anyway, you can read the whole of Taras Bulba here: 

  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1197/1197-h/1197-h.htm

(No translator is credited, but I believe this is C. J. Hogarth's translation, first published in 1918.)

*

Recommended: 

David Bentley Hart's 2004 article for First Things on Taras Bulba: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/01/taras-bulba .

Gary Rosenshield's "Taras Bulba and the Jewish Literary Context: Walter Scott, Gogol, and Russian Fiction", Ch 2 of his 2008 book The Ridiculous Jew: The Exploitation and Transformation of a Stereotype in Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky : https://academic.oup.com/stanford-scholarship-online/book/14660/chapter-abstract/168821161?redirectedFrom=fulltext . I was apparently lucky to read this excellent chapter. When I went back for another read, the institutional shutters had firmly come down.  

Ali Salami and Midia Mahammadi's 2021 paper "A Postcolonial Reading of Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba" (University of Chitral Journal of Urdu Language & Literature 4(II):131-143): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355445029_A_Postcolonial_Reading_of_Nikolai_Gogol's_Taras_Bulba .

Ilya Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, painted 1880-1891.

(Photo taken in Bolero Lounge, Yate.)

The cossacks write an insulting and ribald response to the Turkish sultan. Based on a dubiously historical event of 1679. The man in the white hat is meant to be Taras Bulba. The figures were mostly modelled by Repin's friends. The model for the man in the yellow hat (left of Taras Bulba) was Igor Stravinsky's father.