Taras Bulba | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected].

Taras Bulba and Other Tales
By Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Introduction by John Cournos

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."