Taras Bulba (Modern Library) Review

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(More customer reviews)Gogol's '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).
Gogol's 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 Gogol's 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 reader's 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 fighter's 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.

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The First New Translation in Forty YearsSet sometime between the mid-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century, Gogol’s epic tale recounts both a bloody Cossack revolt against the Poles (led by the bold Taras Bulba of Ukrainian folk mythology) and the trials of Taras Bulba’s two sons.As Robert Kaplan writes in his Introduction, "[Taras Bulba] has a Kiplingesque gusto . . . that makes it a pleasure to read, but central to its theme is an unredemptive, darkly evil violence that is far beyond anything that Kipling ever touched on. We need more works like Taras Bulba to better understand the emotional wellsprings of the threat we face today in places like the Middle East and Central Asia.” And the critic John Cournos has noted, "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 today 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.”

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