Taras Bulba | Page 5

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