Nikolai Gogol’s pseudo-historical novel/novella Taras Bulba (Тарас Бульба) is neither a poem nor an epic. But I’ll be damned if Gogol didn’t nearly produce an epic poem in the classic tradition of Homer, Virgil, Milton, Mickiewicz, Ariosto, Spenser and those bards.
The piece, like much of the Russian and Ukrainian material I’ve written about, probably formed the required reading for every Soviet pupil. But I left the Soviet Union circa fifth grade shortly after the dissolution and didn’t reach this gem until last week’s voracious reading marathon.
The twelve chapters of the expanded 1842 edition could easily form the twelve partitions characteristic of a classic epic. The narrative already boasts the explosive, biased, lopsided, nationalist grandeur incumbent of one.
The sequence of events, with some rearranging and mild expansion lends to an epic sequence. Tragedy, triumph and humour manifest, with ample spotlight on an epic number of character profiles. As customary of Gogol, much of the narrative already reads like poetry. All that lacks is the versification.
And however imprecise, misleading or plain inaccurate, Gogol produces dialogue which to a lay imagination as mine comes second to none in mimicking what I can’t but conceive as the authentic Zaporogue Cossack jargon inspiring unwavering prejudice towards everything gentry, Jew, Muslim, Turk, Tatar, heretic, feminine and non Ukrainian-Russian Orthodox.
An entire chapter narrates events from Bulba’s son Andriy’s viewpoint. Battle sequences are arranged in horrid detail. Much Cossack, Ukrainian, Polish and military jargon; armory, battle camps, attire, habits, ethnography.
Should the above have failed for an epic per se, a mock epic could’ve guaranteed the next plausible product, though I earnestly wager on the real thing devoid of satire or farce.
Imagine not only a Ukrainian but the Cossack epic poem depicting the carnage that did away with more Jews than all but for the Holocaust; that massacred severe numbers of the Polish population; that burned villages, peasants, women, infants, cattle and livestock; a Cossack epic through a Cossack lens, contrasting something like Henryk Sienkiewicz’s first part of the trilogy relating similar developments through the Polish.
Some Yiddish literature must surely present a more sympathetic Jewish point of view of said events. Jews are dealt a moral and physical butchering like I’m not used to in the classics, though such was the custom among by far not only the Zaporogue Cossacks, and not only then.
The Oliver Twist Jew, the Merchant of Venice Jew, the Candide Jew, their disparaging portrayals left me uninitiated for the whole complex nation of Polish/Ukrainian Jews targeted and ridiculed within this period novel.
But such are the demands of a nationalist epic of this ambition. For if I were to reproach Gogol in this regard, as the matters stood vis-a-vis the Jews not only in the 17th century but his contemporary, I’d have to reproach every favourite Russian non-Jewish 19th century writer and then some: not limited to Pushkin and Lermontov and Tolstoy and the other Tolstoy and Turgenev and Dostoevsky and Chekhov.
And everything considered, Taras Bulba must certainly have become my favourite work of Gogol’s yet; whose quality resonates no less than Tolstoy’s chef d'oeuvre or any similarly framed historical fiction for that matter. (Notably satirical works like Don Quijote or Candide rank apart.)
And I stake Gogol’s poetic articulation next to Isaac Babel’s, whose capacity to depict devastating realism in the poetic register I’ve considered, perhaps naively, incontestable.
What a beauty.
Questions, comments? Connect.