Customer Reviews

Taras Bulba (Modern Library)

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Gogols Taras Bulba is a good example of how a literary work can return to topicality with a vengeance; not so much news that stays news, as it were, as news that re-emerges as news. Accompanied by a brief introduction by professional geo-pessimist Robert D Kaplan (reprinted in the April 2003 Atlantic magazine), this novella confronts the reader with an account of a pre-modern mindset which is only too relevant to understanding current international events.
Set sometime in the 17th century, Taras Bulba describes the life of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, a people so accustomed to war that it has become the focus of their existence. Taras is a Cossack colonel, an old fighter who has survived into middle age and fathered two sons, now themselves on the verge of manhood. Far from slipping into complacent quiescence, however, he is as warlike as ever, and his sons return home from their seminary studies rouses him to return from semi-retirement to full-time work (i.e. raiding and pillaging). His overriding motive is to initiate his sons into full Cossack manhood. The military  or personal  consequences are irrelevant. What matters is that his sons must learn war.
After an interval at their stronghold, the Sech, an all-male enclave where the Cossacks practise the arts of peace (i.e. getting roaring drunk), Taras is able, with little difficulty, given the nature of his audience, to foment a campaign against the neighbouring (and therefore enemy) Poles. This situation exemplifies a clash-of-civilizations scenario wherein the Orthodox Cossacks are engaged in chronic conflict with the Catholic Poles on the one hand and the Muslim Turks and Tatars on the other. Taras war goes swimmingly at first (the Cossacks kill many of their enemies), and later not so well (their enemies kill many of the Cossacks).
Gogols account is a subtle blend of folk tale and modern storytelling. The traditional picture would have shown the Cossacks in brighter, more heroic colours, their cause justified by the outrages of their wicked enemies, and their defeat brought about by treachery and betrayal. In Gogols more nuanced presentation, Taras is an out-and-out war-monger and the Cossacks are shown in full, their weaknesses and vices detailed together with their nobility, strengths and virtues. The sorry fates of those lower in the social order, specifically Cossack women and Jews, are not allowed to escape the readers attention, even though these observations are accompanied by a casual anti-Semitism. At the same time, however, Gogol also preserves the magical atmosphere of the folk tale: the horses are swift, the warriors are fierce, the young women are beautiful and the doomed are doomed.
In the end, Taras sons reap the full measure of what their father has sowed. Taras shares their tragedy, of course, but so do all the Cossacks. The geopolitics of endless sporadic warfare have made them a culture where military prowess is the supreme human attribute. In such a context, Taras most natural and benevolent paternal instinct  to see his sons become fully established members of the community  is diverted into starting an unnecessary war which ends in disaster. Yet in the aftermath Taras does not even think of changing his ways. Rather he intensifies them, draining the bitter cup of war to its dregs. There is no other way: a Cossack cannot become a peacenik.
As Kaplan points out, the mentality of a Taras Bulba is only too relevant to the modern world. Just as recent events have shown that infectious disease is not a vestige of an archaic past, so the various ancient tribalisms, ethnic, national and religious group identities, and the diabolical passions they engender, only recently dismissed as obsolete, are now boiling up again as vigorously as ever. The role of religion in the story is particularly noteworthy. Although the Cossacks place great store by their faith  a rock rising from the depths of a stormy ocean  its role in their lives is purely totemic. It is the symbol which identifies them and distinguishes them from their enemies. The actual doctrines of this faith  specifically its injunctions against violence  are entirely ignored; the devoutly Christian Cossacks can throw Jews into the river or skewer Polish newborns without a second thought. Religion, we see, is both remarkably protean and plastic in its interpretations, and whether a faith becomes the talisman of war or peace seems to depend mostly on the culture, circumstances and interests of its adherents.
The world of Taras Bulba, while it may appeal to our desire to be free of the burdensome complexities of modern reality (which likely accounts for the enthusiastic back-jacket blurb by Hemingway), is at least as oppressive as our own, and not simply by virtue of the ever-present threat of violence, but also because of the stultifying force of an all-encompassing group identity, inescapable except through heavy drinking or unconsciousness, and the remorseless sacrifice of humanity to the fighters ethos. Those of us who no longer have to live this way should be thankful.

Modern Library has produced a handsome hardcover edition, but the full price for a novella of only 140 pages will probably only appeal to cosmopolitan sophisticates. The wretched of the earth will have to wait for the paperback version.

I love Gogol. I love him when he is funny and I love him when he is sad. After reading Taras Bulba, I also love his "adventure" story. The book is decidedly anti-Semitic in tone but I think this is mostly a reflection of the subject matter. I see it as a kind of a show the demon for what it is. Russian society and especially the Cossacks were not the friendliest place for Jewish people. As is obvious in Taras Bulba, they also had little love for the Poles, the Turks and the Tartars. At this crossroads of the world, hatred was abundant. The fact that Gogol pulled no punches with his descriptions illustrates his honesty. Unfortunately, the Cossack mentality of either being with me or against me seems to inform the modern world as well.

What is really interesting for me is the comparison of Taras Bulba with And Quiet Flows the Don and Tolstoy's Cossacks. All three are very different illustrations of Cossack life, from bias but honorable villains in Gogol to stories of heroes in Tolstoy to Sholokov's sad demise of a way of life. Any way you look at it, the Cossacks are an interesting subject matter. So, that all being said, I suggest you read this book. It is short and fast and works on multiple levels.

"Taras Bulba" is a magnificent story which portraits the life of the Ucrainian Cossacks who lived by the river Dnieper in the XVI Century. Taras Bulba is an old and hardened warrior who feels a little rusty by the lack of action. When his two sons return from school at Kiev, he eagerly takes them to the "setch", the camping and training island of the Cossacks. There they spend their time drinking and remembering old glories. It happens that the Cossacks are going through an uneasy truce with their Turkish hegemones and the Tartar horsemen. Taras Bulba, always the warmonger, harangues the Cossacks, engineers a change in leadership and leads them to attack the Catholic Poles (with religious arguments and some information that the Poles have shut down Orthodox churches and vexated priests). The Cossacks ride West, razing down everything they meet with extraordinary brutality, and they set siege on a walled city. It is there where the drama surfaces: Andrew, Taras's younger son, finds out the woman he loves is inside the city, and through her maid he learns that they are starving. He goes into deep agony, a moral dilemma, and finds himself in an impossible situation. I won't spoil the rest for you, but believe me this is one of the cruellest and bloodiest tales you'll ever read. It brings to life religious and racial hatred in all its crudity and absurdity. It reminds you of Tolstoi's story about the old Chechenian warrior, Hadji Murad (especially now that Shamil Basayev was killed). But even for all its brutality and sadness, it is masterful.

I like Gogol - I loved "Dead Souls' and "The Nose". But Taras Bulba totally caught me by surprise - which was (ironically) both pleasant and a disappointment. The story tells the tale of the Zaphorizhian Cossacks of the Ukriane and their struggle for independence from the domination of the Cathlic Poles. Returning from university, Taras Bulba's sons Ostap and Andrei partake in their first Cossak foray into the steppe. Enroute, Andrei falls in love with a Polish nobleman's daughter, and in the seige the follows, betrays his hetman (leader) and people to defend her. Tragedy ensues.
First, I was disappointed by the lack of depth he wrote for his characters - they never really sprung to life for me. Rather, they read more like charactures - carousing, drinking, rallying to the "true, Orthodox faith", pirating and plundering. This is as true of the minor characters as it is of Taras Bulba and his sons themselves - characters you would expect more "fleshing out" given the nature of the novel. I was also disappointed by the lack of scope - for a novella about the struggle for Ukrainian independence, the story itself was remarkably thin, dealing only with the events surrounding Tara's attack upon an unnamed Polish city, and his subsequent quest for revenge.

However, there is much to like about Taras Bulba. As one would expect from Gogol, the imagry is fabulous - vivid descriptions of Cossack life from their humble steppe homes, to their flamboyant dress, to the very way in which they drink themselves into a stupor. For this alone, the book is worth the time and effort to read it.

Peter Constantine's translation of Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba is the best version I've read. All previous translations seem to be lacking in verve and energy.

Constantine's version of Taras Bulba seems to differ also from other translations in that Constantine translates Taras Bulba's sons as sporting 'chub', a scalplock on an otherwise shaven head. All other translations (at least the ones I've read) translate 'chub' as sidelocks or "... long locks of hair on the temples...", much like the jewish peyots. Considering that 'chub' in Ukrainian means 'crest' it seems Constantine has got it right.

Anyway, I digress...

I recommend this version of Gogol's Taras Bulba to anyone interested in those land-pirates, the Cossacks, Ukrainian history and storytelling, and to anyone who doesn't believe religion can be made an excuse for thuggery and war.

It seems to me as if the only image of Russia accessible in this country is that of audacious radicals waving their fists chanting the communist rhyme. Now Gogol as the master of Russian shortstory may have struggled to attain the balance between realism and the love he bore for the art of folklore. No doubt Taras Bulba as one of Gogol's earliest work did emerge as something quite different from his later satires, but just as the radical image mentioned above, Russia itself is a great mural that awaits discovery as readers probe into the colorful reality of the Cossacks. The title character is a Cossack leader stationed in Ukraine, whose sons bring about complications to his seemingly simplistic military life. It may be a mere ethnical trait how belligerent the Cossacks are--shedding exuberant blood for the sake of religion as well as pride. Taras Bulba finds himself riding another wave of great unrest towards a Polish town where his younger son Andrei loses faith to passion. What follows is a grand panaroma of Russian soil, streched afar patiently waiting for future battles made to change boys into men and transform strangers into brothers. As Andrei forsakes his identity to be with the beautiful Polish girl whose home is besieged, Taras Bulba leads the Cossack spirit into a realm of great passion, of lust, of trust, and of courage.

This is an epic novel in which the action takes place in the XIVth century. It is the first relevant novel written by Gogol, and he came up with it as he intended to write a history of Ukraine, the country where he was born. It narrates Ukraine's struggles against Asian invaders through the adventures of Taras Bulba, a tough, brave Cossack and his young sons.

Those readers who are fond of writers such as Dostoievsky, Turgueniev or Chejov may find that Gogol lacks the depth of other Russian writers when it comes to characters construction. Far from what we see in subsequent novelists, here the characters are merely outlined to serve the purposes of the saga. They are simple devices to depict what Ukraine's situation was at the time and to develop the feats of the Cossack army in the countless battles they held against Tartars, Poles, etc.
Resembling The Iliad or The Odyssey, the gory and scary scenes are abundant and the author uses no euphemisms. Yet, the novel misses the richness of characters and situations Homer builds in his epic poems. Taras, the Cossack lacks Ulysses sagacity and appears to be a brutish when he is put side by side with the Greek hero. However, I grant that I may be balancing things that have nothing to do but I am to blame since I haven't read much epic literature and I lack references to make good comparisons.

There are some details that confer the story its value, though: Cossack' disposition portray of towards war. The idea of granting life a sense: that of patriotism, or preserving national values. And how in a land where nothing but coldness, hunger or alcohol is left to its inhabitants, war arises as the only raison d'ętre for men who are confronted with their insignificant lives day after day. Dying for the sake of religion or the land is what makes a man a hero, as Taras himself says "Shall men end up their existences as dogs, without having served their country and Christianity? What do we live for then?".

Love also emerges as a conflictive element. Like Helena in Homer's Iliad, there is a Polish woman who is capable of giving birth to uncontrollable passions or mad actions, such as betraying blood and roots or even the murder of a son. And, fairly enough for a romantic character, her powers rely on her overwhelming beauty rather than on any other trait.
There are also beautiful metaphors and descriptions throughout the story, which taint the characters with nobility no common man would ever deserve, but suitable for an epic hero and to make the Slavic race immortal.

Nikolai Gogol is justly regarded as one of the greatest Russian writers, but that status does not rest on TARAS BULBA. It is a Ukrainian epic, and it may loom large as a part of Ukrainian nationalistic heritage and it may be valuable as an ethnography of the Ukrainian or Zaporozhian Cossacks, but it is not great literature - far from it.

The tale begins promisingly enough, as the two sons of Taras Bulba, a Cossack chief, return home from their education at the Kiev Seminary. Taras and his sons then leave their wife and mother ("She put up with insults, even blows, and tenderness was hardly ever shown her at all.") to go to Camp Zaporozhe, the 16th Century military encampment of the Cossacks on an island in the middle of the Dnieper River. To get there, they pass through the virginal grassy plains of the Ukrainian steppe, which from Gogol's glorious depiction must have resembled the American plains before plow and cattle.

Once at Camp Zaporozhe - "the nest from which the strong, bold Cossacks took off and rode all over the Ukraine" - the story shifts gears and becomes increasingly frenzied and, as battles between the Cossacks and the Poles pile on top of one another, increasingly gory. Gogol himself provides a summary:

"Today one's hair would stand on end at the horrible marks of bestiality that the Zaporozhe Cossacks of that wild century left in their wake. Babes with broken skulls, women with breasts cut off, the skin from the soles of the feet to the knees flayed from the legs of those who were left alive. In brief, the Cossacks paid back with interest the horrors they had suffered themselves."

It does not make for pleasant reading. And what makes TARAS BULBA more unpleasant are the frequent slurs directed at Poles and Jews. Many of the Poles, though, exhibit courage and ferocity equal to that of the Cossacks. Not so the Jews. They invariably are portrayed as physically weak and morally corrupt. At one point, Yankel, a Jew whom Taras Bulba uses as a spy of sorts, considers betraying Bulba for the reward the Poles have placed on his head, but Yankel "was ashamed of his own greed and tried to suppress the everlasting obsession with gold that torments the Jewish soul."

As for Taras Bulba and his sons, two become mythical heroes and one becomes a mythical traitor. The last words of Taras Bulba are:

"Wait, the time will come when you'll find out what the Russian Orthodox faith is like! Even today nations far and wide are beginning to feel that a tsar will arise on the Russian land, and there'll be no power on earth that won't submit to him!"

Gogol wrote much of TARAS BULBA towards the end of his literary career, as he developed a vision of a powerful Russian nation, devoted to the czar and the Russian Orthodox Church and imbued with the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian Cossacks. The novel is romantic nationalism, but an ugly, jingoistic, racist, and savage strain of it. Nor is the novel redeemed by high-quality prose. For the most part, after the first two chapters the writing has a slapdash, oddly "comic book" feel to it.

It appears from Amazon's listing of different editions of TARAS BULBA that it is another one of the victims of "on demand" publishing. I avoid them like the plague. If you really want to acquire a copy of TARAS BULBA, I recommend the edition translated by Peter Constantine and published by the Modern Library, with what appears to be a useful and contemporary introduction by Robert D. Kaplan. (The version I read and quote from is an old 1960 Signet Classic paperback, as translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew. I suspect that his translation is not top rank.)

This is probably the most unabashedly masculine novel I've ever read, chock full of bloodshed, adventure, drinking, feasting, carousing, bravery, horsemanship, swordplay and all manner of derring do, with hardly a woman in the entire story. Gogol depicts the harsh and brutal brotherhood of the Russian Cossacks with a romantic splendor that is fun and easy to read.

The book also serves as a great commentary on the lengths to which religious fervor and vengence will drive man.

If you're a teacher, beware of studying this novel, as it reads like a primer on prejudice, anti-semitism and even misogyny, and surely many parents will want to challenge your choice.

But that doesn't have to stop average readers from enjoying a great, old-fashioned adventure story.

Gogol gives us in this little book a romantic snapshot from Russian history. Essential reading for all lovers of Russian literature.