Taras Bulba | Page 6

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