TARAS BULBA AND OTHER TALES
By Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
Introduction by John Cournos
Contents:
Taras Bulba
St. John’s Eve
The Cloak
How the Two Ivans Quarrelled
The Mysterious Portrait
The Calash
INTRODUCTION
Russian literature, so full of enigmas, contains no greater creative
mystery than Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol (1809-1852), who has done for
the Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian
poetry. Before these two men came Russian literature can hardly have
been said to exist. It was pompous and effete with pseudo-classicism;
foreign influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there
was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them
the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the debris
which made for sterility and erected in their stead a new structure out
of living Russian words. The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul
and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was
it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with
Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into
an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into
its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.
More than that. The nomad and romantic in him, troubled and restless
with Ukrainian myth, legend, and song, impressed upon Russian
literature, faced with the realities of modern life, a spirit titanic
and in clash with its material, and produced in the mastery of this
every-day material, commonly called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense
with beauty. A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian
critic’s observation about Gogol: “Seldom has nature created a man so
romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic
in life.” But this statement does not cover the whole ground, for it is
easy to see in almost all of Gogol’s work his “free Cossack soul” trying
to break through the shell of sordid to-day like some ancient demon,
essentially Dionysian. So that his works, true though they are to our
life, are at once a reproach, a protest, and a challenge, ever calling
for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us. And they have all the joy
and sadness of the Ukrainian songs he loved so much. Ukrainian was to
Gogol “the language of the soul,” and it was in Ukrainian songs rather
than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little contemptuous, that
he read the history of his people. Time and again, in his essays and in
his letters to friends, he expresses his boundless joy in these songs:
“O songs, you are my joy and my life! How I love you. What are the
bloodless chronicles I pore over beside those clear, live chronicles!
I cannot live without songs; they... reveal everything more and more
clearly, oh, how clearly, gone-by life and gone-by men.... The songs
of Little Russia are her everything, her poetry, her history, and her
ancestral grave. He who has not penetrated them deeply knows nothing of
the past of this blooming region of Russia.”
Indeed, so great was his enthusiasm for his own land that after
collecting material for many years, the year 1833 finds him at work on
a history of “poor Ukraine,” a work planned to take up six volumes; and
writing to a friend at this time he promises to say much in it that has
not been said before him. Furthermore, he intended to follow this work
with a universal history in eight volumes with a view to establishing,
as far as may be gathered, Little Russia and the world in proper
relation, connecting the two; a quixotic task, surely. A poet,
passionate, religious, loving the heroic, we find him constantly
impatient and fuming at the lifeless chronicles, which leave him cold as
he seeks in vain for what he cannot find. “Nowhere,” he writes in 1834,
“can I find anything of the time which ought to be richer than any
other in events. Here was a people whose whole existence was passed in
activity, and which, even if nature had made it inactive, was compelled
to go forward to great affairs and deeds because of its neighbours, its
geographic situation, the constant danger to its existence.... If the
Crimeans and the Turks had had a literature I am convinced that no
history of an independent nation in Europe would prove so interesting as
that of the Cossacks.” Again he complains of the “withered chronicles”;
it is only the wealth of his country’s song that encourages him to go on
with its history.
Too much a visionary and a poet to be an impartial historian, it is
hardly astonishing to note the judgment he passes on his own work,
during that same year, 1834: “My history of Little Russia’s past is an
extraordinarily made thing, and it could not be otherwise.” The deeper
he goes into Little Russia’s past the more fanatically he dreams of
Little Russia’s future. St. Petersburg wearies him, Moscow awakens no
emotion in him, he yearns for Kieff, the mother of Russian cities, which
in his vision he sees becoming “the Russian Athens.” Russian history
gives him no pleasure, and he separates it definitely from Ukrainian
history. He is “ready to cast everything aside rather than read Russian
history,” he writes to Pushkin. During his seven-year stay in St.
Petersburg (1829-36) Gogol zealously gathered historical material and,
in the words of Professor Kotlyarevsky, “lived in the dream of becoming
the Thucydides of Little Russia.” How completely he disassociated
Ukrainia from Northern Russia may be judged by the conspectus of his
lectures written in 1832. He says in it, speaking of the conquest of
Southern Russia in the fourteenth century by Prince Guedimin at the head
of his Lithuanian host, still dressed in the skins of wild beasts, still
worshipping the ancient fire and practising pagan rites: “Then Southern
Russia, under the mighty protection of Lithuanian princes, completely
separated itself from the North. Every bond between them was broken;
two kingdoms were established under a single name--Russia--one under the
Tatar yoke, the other under the same rule with Lithuanians. But actually
they had no relation with one another; different laws, different
customs, different aims, different bonds, and different activities gave
them wholly different characters.”
This same Prince Guedimin freed Kieff from the Tatar yoke. This city had
been laid waste by the golden hordes of Ghengis Khan and hidden for a
very long time from the Slavonic chronicler as behind an impenetrable
curtain. A shrewd man, Guedimin appointed a Slavonic prince to rule
over the city and permitted the inhabitants to practise their own
faith, Greek Christianity. Prior to the Mongol invasion, which brought
conflagration and ruin, and subjected Russia to a two-century bondage,
cutting her off from Europe, a state of chaos existed and the separate
tribes fought with one another constantly and for the most petty
reasons. Mutual depredations were possible owing to the absence of
mountain ranges; there were no natural barriers against sudden attack.
The openness of the steppe made the people war-like. But this very
openness made it possible later for Guedimin’s pagan hosts, fresh from
the fir forests of what is now White Russia, to make a clean sweep
of the whole country between Lithuania and Poland, and thus give the
scattered princedoms a much-needed cohesion. In this way Ukrainia was
formed. Except for some forests, infested with bears, the country was
one vast plain, marked by an occasional hillock. Whole herds of wild
horses and deer stampeded the country, overgrown with tall grass, while
flocks of wild goats wandered among the rocks of the Dnieper. Apart from
the Dnieper, and in some measure the Desna, emptying into it, there were
no navigable rivers and so there was little opportunity for a commercial
people. Several tributaries cut across, but made no real boundary line.
Whether you looked to the north towards Russia, to the east towards the
Tatars, to the south towards the Crimean Tatars, to the west towards
Poland, everywhere the country bordered on a field, everywhere on a
plain, which left it open to the invader from every side. Had there been
here, suggests Gogol in his introduction to his never-written history
of Little Russia, if upon one side only, a real frontier of mountain or
sea, the people who settled here might have formed a definite political
body. Without this natural protection it became a land subject to
constant attack and despoliation. “There where three hostile nations
came in contact it was manured with bones, wetted with blood. A single
Tatar invasion destroyed the whole labour of the soil-tiller; the
meadows and the cornfields were trodden down by horses or destroyed
by flame, the lightly-built habitations reduced to the ground, the
inhabitants scattered or driven off into captivity together with cattle.
It was a land of terror, and for this reason there could develop in it
only a warlike people, strong in its unity and desperate, a people whose
whole existence was bound to be trained and confined to war.”
This constant menace, this perpetual pressure of foes on all sides,
acted at last like a fierce hammer shaping and hardening resistance
against itself. The fugitive from Poland, the fugitive from the Tatar
and the Turk, homeless, with nothing to lose, their lives ever exposed
to danger, forsook their peaceful occupations and became transformed
into a warlike people, known as the Cossacks, whose appearance towards
the end of the thirteenth century or at the beginning of the fourteenth
was a remarkable event which possibly alone (suggests Gogol) prevented
any further inroads by the two Mohammedan nations into Europe. The
appearance of the Cossacks was coincident with the appearance in Europe
of brotherhoods and knighthood-orders, and this new race, in spite of
its living the life of marauders, in spite of turnings its foes’ tactics
upon its foes, was not free of the religious spirit of its time; if it
warred for its existence it warred not less for its faith, which was
Greek. Indeed, as the nation grew stronger and became conscious of its
strength, the struggle began to partake something of the nature of a
religious war, not alone defensive but aggressive also, against the
unbeliever. While any man was free to join the brotherhood it was
obligatory to believe in the Greek faith. It was this religious unity,
blazed into activity by the presence across the borders of unbelieving
nations, that alone indicated the germ of a political body in this
gathering of men, who otherwise lived the audacious lives of a band
of highway robbers. “There was, however,” says Gogol, “none of the
austerity of the Catholic knight in them; they bound themselves to no
vows or fasts; they put no self-restraint upon themselves or mortified
their flesh, but were indomitable like the rocks of the Dnieper among
which they lived, and in their furious feasts and revels they forgot
the whole world. That same intimate brotherhood, maintained in robber
communities, bound them together. They had everything in common--wine,
food, dwelling. A perpetual fear, a perpetual danger, inspired them with
a contempt towards life. The Cossack worried more about a good measure
of wine than about his fate. One has to see this denizen of the frontier
in his half-Tatar, half-Polish costume--which so sharply outlined the
spirit of the borderland--galloping in Asiatic fashion on his horse, now
lost in thick grass, now leaping with the speed of a tiger from ambush,
or emerging suddenly from the river or swamp, all clinging with mud, and
appearing an image of terror to the Tatar....”
Little by little the community grew and with its growing it began to
assume a general character. The beginning of the sixteenth century found
whole villages settled with families, enjoying the protection of the
Cossacks, who exacted certain obligations, chiefly military, so that
these settlements bore a military character. The sword and the plough
were friends which fraternised at every settler’s. On the other hand,
Gogol tells us, the gay bachelors began to make depredations across the
border to sweep down on Tatars’ wives and their daughters and to marry
them. “Owing to this co-mingling, their facial features, so different
from one another’s, received a common impress, tending towards the
Asiatic. And so there came into being a nation in faith and place
belonging to Europe; on the other hand, in ways of life, customs, and
dress quite Asiatic. It was a nation in which the world’s two extremes
came in contact; European caution and Asiatic indifference, niavete and
cunning, an intense activity and the greatest laziness and indulgence,
an aspiration to development and perfection, and again a desire to
appear indifferent to perfection.”
All of Ukraine took on its colour from the Cossack, and if I have drawn
largely on Gogol’s own account of the origins of this race, it was
because it seemed to me that Gogol’s emphasis on the heroic rather than
on the historical--Gogol is generally discounted as an historian--would
give the reader a proper approach to the mood in which he created “Taras
Bulba,” the finest epic in Russian literature. Gogol never wrote either
his history of Little Russia or his universal history. Apart from
several brief studies, not always reliable, the net result of his many
years’ application to his scholarly projects was this brief epic
in prose, Homeric in mood. The sense of intense living, “living
dangerously”--to use a phrase of Nietzsche’s, the recognition of courage
as the greatest of all virtues--the God in man, inspired Gogol, living
in an age which tended toward grey tedium, with admiration for his more
fortunate forefathers, who lived in “a poetic time, when everything was
won with the sword, when every one in his turn strove to be an active
being and not a spectator.” Into this short work he poured all his love
of the heroic, all his romanticism, all his poetry, all his joy. Its
abundance of life bears one along like a fast-flowing river. And it
is not without humour, a calm, detached humour, which, as the critic
Bolinsky puts it, is not there merely “because Gogol has a tendency to
see the comic in everything, but because it is true to life.”
Yet “Taras Bulba” was in a sense an accident, just as many other works
of great men are accidents. It often requires a happy combination
of circumstances to produce a masterpiece. I have already told in my
introduction to “Dead Souls” (1) how Gogol created his great realistic
masterpiece, which was to influence Russian literature for generations
to come, under the influence of models so remote in time or place
as “Don Quixote” or “Pickwick Papers”; and how this combination of
influences joined to his own genius produced a work quite new and
original in effect and only remotely reminiscent of the models which
have inspired it. And just as “Dead Souls” might never have been written
if “Don Quixote” had not existed, so there is every reason to believe
that “Taras Bulba” could not have been written without the “Odyssey.”
Once more ancient fire gave life to new beauty. And yet at the time
Gogol could not have had more than a smattering of the “Odyssey.”
The magnificent translation made by his friend Zhukovsky had not yet
appeared and Gogol, in spite of his ambition to become a historian, was
not equipped as a scholar. But it is evident from his dithyrambic letter
on the appearance of Zhukovsky’s version, forming one of the famous
series of letters known as “Correspondence with Friends,” that he was
better acquainted with the spirit of Homer than any mere scholar could
be. That letter, unfortunately unknown to the English reader, would make
every lover of the classics in this day of their disparagement dance
with joy. He describes the “Odyssey” as the forgotten source of all that
is beautiful and harmonious in life, and he greets its appearance in
Russian dress at a time when life is sordid and discordant as a thing
inevitable, “cooling” in effect upon a too hectic world. He sees in its
perfect grace, its calm and almost childlike simplicity, a power for
individual and general good. “It combines all the fascination of a fairy
tale and all the simple truth of human adventure, holding out the
same allurement to every being, whether he is a noble, a commoner, a
merchant, a literate or illiterate person, a private soldier, a lackey,
children of both sexes, beginning at an age when a child begins to love
a fairy tale--all might read it or listen to it, without tedium.” Every
one will draw from it what he most needs. Not less than upon these
he sees its wholesome effect on the creative writer, its refreshing
influence on the critic. But most of all he dwells on its heroic
qualities, inseparable to him from what is religious in the “Odyssey”;
and, says Gogol, this book contains the idea that a human being,
“wherever he might be, whatever pursuit he might follow, is threatened
by many woes, that he must need wrestle with them--for that very purpose
was life given to him--that never for a single instant must he despair,
just as Odysseus did not despair, who in every hard and oppressive
moment turned to his own heart, unaware that with this inner scrutiny
of himself he had already said that hidden prayer uttered in a moment of
distress by every man having no understanding whatever of God.” Then he
goes on to compare the ancient harmony, perfect down to every detail of
dress, to the slightest action, with our slovenliness and confusion and
pettiness, a sad result--considering our knowledge of past experience,
our possession of superior weapons, our religion given to make us holy
and superior beings. And in conclusion he asks: Is not the “Odyssey” in
every sense a deep reproach to our nineteenth century?
(1) Everyman’s Library, No. 726.
An understanding of Gogol’s point of view gives the key to “Taras
Bulba.” For in this panoramic canvas of the Setch, the military
brotherhood of the Cossacks, living under open skies, picturesquely and
heroically, he has drawn a picture of his romantic ideal, which if far
from perfect at any rate seemed to him preferable to the grey tedium of
a city peopled with government officials. Gogol has written in “Taras
Bulba” his own reproach to the nineteenth century. It is sad and joyous
like one of those Ukrainian songs which have helped to inspire him to
write it. And then, as he cut himself off more and more from the world
of the past, life became a sadder and still sadder thing to him; modern
life, with all its gigantic pettiness, closed in around him, he began to
write of petty officials and of petty scoundrels, “commonplace heroes”
he called them. But nothing is ever lost in this world. Gogol’s
romanticism, shut in within himself, finding no outlet, became a flame.
It was a flame of pity. He was like a man walking in hell, pitying. And
that was the miracle, the transfiguration. Out of that flame of pity the
Russian novel was born.
JOHN COURNOS
Evenings on the Farm near the Dikanka, 1829-31; Mirgorod, 1831-33; Taras
Bulba, 1834; Arabesques (includes tales, The Portrait and A Madman’s
Diary), 1831-35; The Cloak, 1835; The Revizor (The Inspector-General),
1836; Dead Souls, 1842; Correspondence with Friends, 1847; Letters,
1847, 1895, 4 vols. 1902.
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS: Cossack Tales (The Night of Christmas Eve, Tarass
Boolba), trans. by G. Tolstoy, 1860; St. John’s Eve and Other Stories,
trans. by Isabel F. Hapgood, New York, Crowell, 1886; Taras Bulba: Also
St. John’s Eve and Other Stories, London, Vizetelly, 1887; Taras Bulba,
trans. by B. C. Baskerville, London, Scott, 1907; The Inspector: a
Comedy, Calcutta, 1890; The Inspector-General, trans. by A. A. Sykes,
London, Scott, 1892; Revizor, trans. for the Yale Dramatic Association
by Max S. Mandell, New Haven, Conn., 1908; Home Life in Russia
(adaptation of Dead Souls), London, Hurst, 1854; Tchitchikoff’s
Journey’s; or Dead Souls, trans. by Isabel F. Hapgood, New York,
Crowell, 1886; Dead Souls, London, Vizetelly, 1887; Dead Souls, London,
Maxwell 1887; Dead Souls, London, Fisher Unwin, 1915; Dead Souls,
London, Everyman’s Library (Intro. by John Cournos), 1915; Meditations
on the Divine Liturgy, trans. by L. Alexeieff, London, A. R. Mowbray and
Co., 1913.
LIVES, etc.: (Russian) Kotlyarevsky (N. A.), 1903; Shenrok (V. I.),
Materials for a Biography, 1892; (French) Leger (L.), Nicholas Gogol,
1914.
TARAS BULBA
CHAPTER I
“Turn round, my boy! How ridiculous you look! What sort of a priest’s
cassock have you got on? Does everybody at the academy dress like that?”
With such words did old Bulba greet his two sons, who had been absent
for their education at the Royal Seminary of Kief, and had now returned
home to their father.
His sons had but just dismounted from their horses. They were a couple
of stout lads who still looked bashful, as became youths recently
released from the seminary. Their firm healthy faces were covered with
the first down of manhood, down which had, as yet, never known a razor.
They were greatly discomfited by such a reception from their father, and
stood motionless with eyes fixed upon the ground.
“Stand still, stand still! let me have a good look at you,” he
continued, turning them around. “How long your gaberdines are! What
gaberdines! There never were such gaberdines in the world before. Just
run, one of you! I want to see whether you will not get entangled in the
skirts, and fall down.”
“Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, father!” said the eldest lad at length.
“How touchy we are! Why shouldn’t I laugh?”
“Because, although you are my father, if you laugh, by heavens, I will
strike you!”
“What kind of son are you? what, strike your father!” exclaimed Taras
Bulba, retreating several paces in amazement.
“Yes, even my father. I don’t stop to consider persons when an insult is
in question.”
“So you want to fight me? with your fist, eh?”
“Any way.”
“Well, let it be fisticuffs,” said Taras Bulba, turning up his sleeves.
“I’ll see what sort of a man you are with your fists.”
And father and son, in lieu of a pleasant greeting after long
separation, began to deal each other heavy blows on ribs, back, and
chest, now retreating and looking at each other, now attacking afresh.
“Look, good people! the old man has gone mad! he has lost his senses
completely!” screamed their pale, ugly, kindly mother, who was standing
on the threshold, and had not yet succeeded in embracing her darling
children. “The children have come home, we have not seen them for over a
year; and now he has taken some strange freak--he’s pommelling them.”
“Yes, he fights well,” said Bulba, pausing; “well, by heavens!” he
continued, rather as if excusing himself, “although he has never tried
his hand at it before, he will make a good Cossack! Now, welcome, son!
embrace me,” and father and son began to kiss each other. “Good lad! see
that you hit every one as you pommelled me; don’t let any one escape.
Nevertheless your clothes are ridiculous all the same. What rope is this
hanging there?--And you, you lout, why are you standing there with your
hands hanging beside you?” he added, turning to the youngest. “Why don’t
you fight me? you son of a dog!”
“What an idea!” said the mother, who had managed in the meantime to
embrace her youngest. “Who ever heard of children fighting their own
father? That’s enough for the present; the child is young, he has had
a long journey, he is tired.” The child was over twenty, and about six
feet high. “He ought to rest, and eat something; and you set him to
fighting!”
“You are a gabbler!” said Bulba. “Don’t listen to your mother, my lad;
she is a woman, and knows nothing. What sort of petting do you need? A
clear field and a good horse, that’s the kind of petting for you! And do
you see this sword? that’s your mother! All the rest people stuff your
heads with is rubbish; the academy, books, primers, philosophy, and all
that, I spit upon it all!” Here Bulba added a word which is not used in
print. “But I’ll tell you what is best: I’ll take you to Zaporozhe
(1) this very week. That’s where there’s science for you! There’s your
school; there alone will you gain sense.”
(1) The Cossack country beyond (za) the falls (porozhe) of the
Dnieper.
“And are they only to remain home a week?” said the worn old mother
sadly and with tears in her eyes. “The poor boys will have no chance of
looking around, no chance of getting acquainted with the home where they
were born; there will be no chance for me to get a look at them.”
“Enough, you’ve howled quite enough, old woman! A Cossack is not born
to run around after women. You would like to hide them both under your
petticoat, and sit upon them as a hen sits on eggs. Go, go, and let
us have everything there is on the table in a trice. We don’t want any
dumplings, honey-cakes, poppy-cakes, or any other such messes: give us
a whole sheep, a goat, mead forty years old, and as much corn-brandy as
possible, not with raisins and all sorts of stuff, but plain scorching
corn-brandy, which foams and hisses like mad.”
Bulba led his sons into the principal room of the hut; and two pretty
servant girls wearing coin necklaces, who were arranging the apartment,
ran out quickly. They were either frightened at the arrival of the young
men, who did not care to be familiar with anyone; or else they merely
wanted to keep up their feminine custom of screaming and rushing away
headlong at the sight of a man, and then screening their blushes for
some time with their sleeves. The hut was furnished according to the
fashion of that period--a fashion concerning which hints linger only in
the songs and lyrics, no longer sung, alas! in the Ukraine as of yore by
blind old men, to the soft tinkling of the native guitar, to the
people thronging round them--according to the taste of that warlike and
troublous time, of leagues and battles prevailing in the Ukraine after
the union. Everything was cleanly smeared with coloured clay. On the
walls hung sabres, hunting-whips, nets for birds, fishing-nets,
guns, elaborately carved powder-horns, gilded bits for horses, and
tether-ropes with silver plates. The small window had round dull
panes, through which it was impossible to see except by opening the one
moveable one. Around the windows and doors red bands were painted. On
shelves in one corner stood jugs, bottles, and flasks of green and
blue glass, carved silver cups, and gilded drinking vessels of various
makes--Venetian, Turkish, Tscherkessian, which had reached Bulba’s cabin
by various roads, at third and fourth hand, a thing common enough in
those bold days. There were birch-wood benches all around the room,
a huge table under the holy pictures in one corner, and a huge stove
covered with particoloured patterns in relief, with spaces between it
and the wall. All this was quite familiar to the two young men, who
were wont to come home every year during the dog-days, since they had
no horses, and it was not customary to allow students to ride afield on
horseback. The only distinctive things permitted them were long locks of
hair on the temples, which every Cossack who bore weapons was entitled
to pull. It was only at the end of their course of study that Bulba had
sent them a couple of young stallions from his stud.
Bulba, on the occasion of his sons’ arrival, ordered all the sotniks or
captains of hundreds, and all the officers of the band who were of any
consequence, to be summoned; and when two of them arrived with his
old comrade, the Osaul or sub-chief, Dmitro Tovkatch, he immediately
presented the lads, saying, “See what fine young fellows they are! I
shall send them to the Setch (2) shortly.” The guests congratulated
Bulba and the young men, telling them they would do well and that there
was no better knowledge for a young man than a knowledge of that same
Zaporozhian Setch.
(2) The village or, rather, permanent camp of the Zaporozhian
Cossacks.
“Come, brothers, seat yourselves, each where he likes best, at the
table; come, my sons. First of all, let’s take some corn-brandy,” said
Bulba. “God bless you! Welcome, lads; you, Ostap, and you, Andrii. God
grant that you may always be successful in war, that you may beat
the Musselmans and the Turks and the Tatars; and that when the Poles
undertake any expedition against our faith, you may beat the Poles.
Come, clink your glasses. How now? Is the brandy good? What’s
corn-brandy in Latin? The Latins were stupid: they did not know there
was such a thing in the world as corn-brandy. What was the name of the
man who wrote Latin verses? I don’t know much about reading and writing,
so I don’t quite know. Wasn’t it Horace?”
“What a dad!” thought the elder son Ostap. “The old dog knows
everything, but he always pretends the contrary.”
“I don’t believe the archimandrite allowed you so much as a smell of
corn-brandy,” continued Taras. “Confess, my boys, they thrashed you well
with fresh birch-twigs on your backs and all over your Cossack bodies;
and perhaps, when you grew too sharp, they beat you with whips. And not
on Saturday only, I fancy, but on Wednesday and Thursday.”
“What is past, father, need not be recalled; it is done with.”
“Let them try it know,” said Andrii. “Let anybody just touch me, let any
Tatar risk it now, and he’ll soon learn what a Cossack’s sword is like!”
“Good, my son, by heavens, good! And when it comes to that, I’ll go with
you; by heavens, I’ll go too! What should I wait here for? To become a
buckwheat-reaper and housekeeper, to look after the sheep and swine, and
loaf around with my wife? Away with such nonsense! I am a Cossack; I’ll
have none of it! What’s left but war? I’ll go with you to Zaporozhe to
carouse; I’ll go, by heavens!” And old Bulba, growing warm by degrees
and finally quite angry, rose from the table, and, assuming a dignified
attitude, stamped his foot. “We will go to-morrow! Wherefore delay? What
enemy can we besiege here? What is this hut to us? What do we want with
all these things? What are pots and pans to us?” So saying, he began to
knock over the pots and flasks, and to throw them about.
The poor old woman, well used to such freaks on the part of her husband,
looked sadly on from her seat on the wall-bench. She did not dare say a
word; but when she heard the decision which was so terrible for her, she
could not refrain from tears. As she looked at her children, from whom
so speedy a separation was threatened, it is impossible to describe the
full force of her speechless grief, which seemed to quiver in her eyes
and on her lips convulsively pressed together.
Bulba was terribly headstrong. He was one of those characters which
could only exist in that fierce fifteenth century, and in that
half-nomadic corner of Europe, when the whole of Southern Russia,
deserted by its princes, was laid waste and burned to the quick by
pitiless troops of Mongolian robbers; when men deprived of house
and home grew brave there; when, amid conflagrations, threatening
neighbours, and eternal terrors, they settled down, and growing
accustomed to looking these things straight in the face, trained
themselves not to know that there was such a thing as fear in the world;
when the old, peacable Slav spirit was fired with warlike flame, and
the Cossack state was instituted--a free, wild outbreak of Russian
nature--and when all the river-banks, fords, and like suitable places
were peopled by Cossacks, whose number no man knew. Their bold comrades
had a right to reply to the Sultan when he asked how many they were,
“Who knows? We are scattered all over the steppes; wherever there is a
hillock, there is a Cossack.”
It was, in fact, a most remarkable exhibition of Russian strength,
forced by dire necessity from the bosom of the people. In place of the
original provinces with their petty towns, in place of the warring
and bartering petty princes ruling in their cities, there arose great
colonies, kurens (3), and districts, bound together by one common danger
and hatred against the heathen robbers. The story is well known how
their incessant warfare and restless existence saved Europe from the
merciless hordes which threatened to overwhelm her. The Polish kings,
who now found themselves sovereigns, in place of the provincial princes,
over these extensive tracts of territory, fully understood, despite the
weakness and remoteness of their own rule, the value of the Cossacks,
and the advantages of the warlike, untrammelled life led by them. They
encouraged them and flattered this disposition of mind. Under their
distant rule, the hetmans or chiefs, chosen from among the Cossacks
themselves, redistributed the territory into military districts. It
was not a standing army, no one saw it; but in case of war and general
uprising, it required a week, and no more, for every man to appear on
horseback, fully armed, receiving only one ducat from the king; and in
two weeks such a force had assembled as no recruiting officers would
ever have been able to collect. When the expedition was ended, the army
dispersed among the fields and meadows and the fords of the Dnieper;
each man fished, wrought at his trade, brewed his beer, and was once
more a free Cossack. Their foreign contemporaries rightly marvelled at
their wonderful qualities. There was no handicraft which the Cossack was
not expert at: he could distil brandy, build a waggon, make powder,
and do blacksmith’s and gunsmith’s work, in addition to committing wild
excesses, drinking and carousing as only a Russian can--all this he was
equal to. Besides the registered Cossacks, who considered themselves
bound to appear in arms in time of war, it was possible to collect at
any time, in case of dire need, a whole army of volunteers. All that was
required was for the Osaul or sub-chief to traverse the market-places
and squares of the villages and hamlets, and shout at the top of his
voice, as he stood in his waggon, “Hey, you distillers and beer-brewers!
you have brewed enough beer, and lolled on your stoves, and stuffed
your fat carcasses with flour, long enough! Rise, win glory and warlike
honours! You ploughmen, you reapers of buckwheat, you tenders of sheep,
you danglers after women, enough of following the plough, and soiling
your yellow shoes in the earth, and courting women, and wasting your
warlike strength! The hour has come to win glory for the Cossacks!”
These words were like sparks falling on dry wood. The husbandman broke
his plough; the brewers and distillers threw away their casks and
destroyed their barrels; the mechanics and merchants sent their trade
and their shop to the devil, broke pots and everything else in their
homes, and mounted their horses. In short, the Russian character here
received a profound development, and manifested a powerful outwards
expression.
(3) Cossack villages. In the Setch, a large wooden barrack.
Taras was one of the band of old-fashioned leaders; he was born
for warlike emotions, and was distinguished for his uprightness of
character. At that epoch the influence of Poland had already begun to
make itself felt upon the Russian nobility. Many had adopted Polish
customs, and began to display luxury in splendid staffs of servants,
hawks, huntsmen, dinners, and palaces. This was not to Taras’s taste. He
liked the simple life of the Cossacks, and quarrelled with those of his
comrades who were inclined to the Warsaw party, calling them serfs of
the Polish nobles. Ever on the alert, he regarded himself as the legal
protector of the orthodox faith. He entered despotically into any
village where there was a general complaint of oppression by the revenue
farmers and of the addition of fresh taxes on necessaries. He and his
Cossacks executed justice, and made it a rule that in three cases it
was absolutely necessary to resort to the sword. Namely, when the
commissioners did not respect the superior officers and stood before
them covered; when any one made light of the faith and did not observe
the customs of his ancestors; and, finally, when the enemy were
Mussulmans or Turks, against whom he considered it permissible, in every
case, to draw the sword for the glory of Christianity.
Now he rejoiced beforehand at the thought of how he would present
himself with his two sons at the Setch, and say, “See what fine young
fellows I have brought you!” how he would introduce them to all his old
comrades, steeled in warfare; how he would observe their first exploits
in the sciences of war and of drinking, which was also regarded as one
of the principal warlike qualities. At first he had intended to send
them forth alone; but at the sight of their freshness, stature, and
manly personal beauty his martial spirit flamed up and he resolved to go
with them himself the very next day, although there was no necessity for
this except his obstinate self-will. He began at once to hurry about and
give orders; selected horses and trappings for his sons, looked through
the stables and storehouses, and chose servants to accompany them on
the morrow. He delegated his power to Osaul Tovkatch, and gave with it
a strict command to appear with his whole force at the Setch the very
instant he should receive a message from him. Although he was jolly, and
the effects of his drinking bout still lingered in his brain, he forgot
nothing. He even gave orders that the horses should be watered, their
cribs filled, and that they should be fed with the finest corn; and then
he retired, fatigued with all his labours.
“Now, children, we must sleep, but to-morrow we shall do what God wills.
Don’t prepare us a bed: we need no bed; we will sleep in the courtyard.”
Night had but just stole over the heavens, but Bulba always went to
bed early. He lay down on a rug and covered himself with a sheepskin
pelisse, for the night air was quite sharp and he liked to lie warm when
he was at home. He was soon snoring, and the whole household speedily
followed his example. All snored and groaned as they lay in different
corners. The watchman went to sleep the first of all, he had drunk so
much in honour of the young masters’ home-coming.
The mother alone did not sleep. She bent over the pillow of her
beloved sons, as they lay side by side; she smoothed with a comb their
carelessly tangled locks, and moistened them with her tears. She gazed
at them with her whole soul, with every sense; she was wholly merged in
the gaze, and yet she could not gaze enough. She had fed them at her
own breast, she had tended them and brought them up; and now to see them
only for an instant! “My sons, my darling sons! what will become of you!
what fate awaits you?” she said, and tears stood in the wrinkles which
disfigured her once beautiful face. In truth, she was to be pitied, as
was every woman of that period. She had lived only for a moment of love,
only during the first ardour of passion, only during the first flush of
youth; and then her grim betrayer had deserted her for the sword, for
his comrades and his carouses. She saw her husband two or three days in
a year, and then, for several years, heard nothing of him. And when
she did see him, when they did live together, what a life was hers! She
endured insult, even blows; she felt caresses bestowed only in pity;
she was a misplaced object in that community of unmarried warriors, upon
which wandering Zaporozhe cast a colouring of its own. Her pleasureless
youth flitted by; her ripe cheeks and bosom withered away unkissed and
became covered with premature wrinkles. Love, feeling, everything that
is tender and passionate in a woman, was converted in her into maternal
love. She hovered around her children with anxiety, passion, tears, like
the gull of the steppes. They were taking her sons, her darling sons,
from her--taking them from her, so that she should never see them again!
Who knew? Perhaps a Tatar would cut off their heads in the very first
skirmish, and she would never know where their deserted bodies might
lie, torn by birds of prey; and yet for each single drop of their blood
she would have given all hers. Sobbing, she gazed into their eyes, and
thought, “Perhaps Bulba, when he wakes, will put off their departure for
a day or two; perhaps it occurred to him to go so soon because he had
been drinking.”
The moon from the summit of the heavens had long since lit up the whole
courtyard filled with sleepers, the thick clump of willows, and the tall
steppe-grass, which hid the palisade surrounding the court. She still
sat at her sons’ pillow, never removing her eyes from them for a moment,
nor thinking of sleep. Already the horses, divining the approach of
dawn, had ceased eating and lain down upon the grass; the topmost leaves
of the willows began to rustle softly, and little by little the
rippling rustle descended to their bases. She sat there until daylight,
unwearied, and wishing in her heart that the night might prolong itself
indefinitely. From the steppes came the ringing neigh of the horses, and
red streaks shone brightly in the sky. Bulba suddenly awoke, and sprang
to his feet. He remembered quite well what he had ordered the night
before. “Now, my men, you’ve slept enough! ‘tis time, ‘tis time! Water
the horses! And where is the old woman?” He generally called his wife
so. “Be quick, old woman, get us something to eat; the way is long.”
The poor old woman, deprived of her last hope, slipped sadly into the
hut.
Whilst she, with tears, prepared what was needed for breakfast, Bulba
gave his orders, went to the stable, and selected his best trappings for
his children with his own hand.
The scholars were suddenly transformed. Red morocco boots with silver
heels took the place of their dirty old ones; trousers wide as the Black
Sea, with countless folds and plaits, were kept up by golden girdles
from which hung long slender thongs, with tassles and other tinkling
things, for pipes. Their jackets of scarlet cloth were girt by flowered
sashes into which were thrust engraved Turkish pistols; their swords
clanked at their heels. Their faces, already a little sunburnt, seemed
to have grown handsomer and whiter; their slight black moustaches now
cast a more distinct shadow on this pallor and set off their healthy
youthful complexions. They looked very handsome in their black sheepskin
caps, with cloth-of-gold crowns.
When their poor mother saw them, she could not utter a word, and tears
stood in her eyes.
“Now, my lads, all is ready; no delay!” said Bulba at last. “But we must
first all sit down together, in accordance with Christian custom before
a journey.”
All sat down, not excepting the servants, who had been standing
respectfully at the door.
“Now, mother, bless your children,” said Bulba. “Pray God that they may
fight bravely, always defend their warlike honour, always defend the
faith of Christ; and, if not, that they may die, so that their breath
may not be longer in the world.”
“Come to your mother, children; a mother’s prayer protects on land and
sea.”
The mother, weak as mothers are, embraced them, drew out two small
holy pictures, and hung them, sobbing, around their necks. “May God’s
mother--keep you! Children, do not forget your mother--send some little
word of yourselves--” She could say no more.
“Now, children, let us go,” said Bulba.
At the door stood the horses, ready saddled. Bulba sprang upon his
“Devil,” which bounded wildly, on feeling on his back a load of over
thirty stone, for Taras was extremely stout and heavy.
When the mother saw that her sons were also mounted, she rushed towards
the younger, whose features expressed somewhat more gentleness than
those of his brother. She grasped his stirrup, clung to his saddle, and
with despair in her eyes, refused to loose her hold. Two stout Cossacks
seized her carefully, and bore her back into the hut. But before the
cavalcade had passed out of the courtyard, she rushed with the speed of
a wild goat, disproportionate to her years, to the gate, stopped a
horse with irresistible strength, and embraced one of her sons with mad,
unconscious violence. Then they led her away again.
The young Cossacks rode on sadly, repressing their tears out of fear of
their father, who, on his side, was somewhat moved, although he strove
not to show it. The morning was grey, the green sward bright, the birds
twittered rather discordantly. They glanced back as they rode. Their
paternal farm seemed to have sunk into the earth. All that was visible
above the surface were the two chimneys of their modest hut and the tops
of the trees up whose trunks they had been used to climb like squirrels.
Before them still stretched the field by which they could recall the
whole story of their lives, from the years when they rolled in its dewy
grass down to the years when they awaited in it the dark-browed Cossack
maiden, running timidly across it on quick young feet. There is the
pole above the well, with the waggon wheel fastened to its top, rising
solitary against the sky; already the level which they have traversed
appears a hill in the distance, and now all has disappeared. Farewell,
childhood, games, all, all, farewell!