Taras Bulba | Page 4

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