Clairvoyance of the Past
How are the classical pieces of historical prose made? Obviously, they take root in the caches of their author’s memory which interacts, in a mysterious and unfathomable way, with the people’s memory. The places Gogol came from seemed to be breathing with history. Panteleimon Kulish noted long ago, “Gogol was born into a family only one or two generations away from the epoch of Cossack wars.” A Dykanka church once kept the bloodstained shirt of supreme judge Vasyl Kochubei executed by order of Peter I. Next stood the oak-tree under which Motria Kochubei and old Hetman Ivan Mazepa had their meetings. Little Gogol saw and absorbed all this from his very infancy.
Gogol never regarded history as something detached, dry and cold like the ashes of a put-out bonfire. In his vision, the past is a living heartbeat of real-life people (perhaps even more real than his contemporaries). “The clairvoyance of the past suddenly came down on my soul, and I feel many of the things that now seldom occur” — these lines from Gogol’s letter to S. P. Shevyriov are a graphic illustration of his inimitable talent.
But it should be noted that the “clairvoyance” of a great artist (including Gogol) does not usually occur “suddenly.” The writing of Taras Bulba was preceded by a months-long painstaking study of historical sources (The History of the Rus’ with its clearly-pronounced Ukrainian patriotic idea, The Description of Ukraine by Beauplan, the chronicles of Samovydets and Hrabianka, A History of Zaporozhzhian Cossacks by Mysziecki, etc.). Gogol paid an extremely high price to make Taras Bulba “simple” and “clear:” he is known to have rewritten the story nine times (!) by hand, and in 1842, seven years after the story had been published as part of Myrhorod and become widely known, he fundamentally redrafted it.
When writing Taras Bulba, the author was guided by the well thought out principles he laid down inspiringly in the article, “On Teaching General History” (1834), “Everything in history — peoples and events — must above all be living: every nation and every state should preserve its world and its colors, a nation — with all its exploits and impact on the world — should present itself brilliantly, in exactly the same shape and costume as in olden times. To this end, one must glean just a few, but the most expressive, original and outstanding, features typical of the nation being depicted.”
Indeed, the old Taras Bulba himself is a really monumental, stone-hewn archetype of a Ukrainian: a man of deep and frenzied passions and unbending willpower (but also, especially in the 1842 second draft, of a bold and noble enterprise). Although Gogol made wide use of the artistic contrast method to create this undying character (“the actual effect lies in a sharp opposition; beauty is never so brilliant and noticeable as in contrast,” he said), Bulba’s character sketch is far from being one-dimensional and simple. “Bulba was stubborn to a fault,” the author writes, but the same Taras was also able to vary his military tactics in a surprisingly flexible way. This is a strikingly realistic image: despite his purely Cossack- type contempt for the peaceful life (“Me to sow buckwheat, keep the house, look after sheep and pigs, and bill and coo with my wife? Damn it, I’m a Cossack, I don’t want this!”), he still feels a bit embarrassed, setting off to Sich with his sons (a hunch that he goes there forever?). “Despising” bookish learning, he remembers the name of Horace “who used to compose Latin verses,” and, moreover, he swore that his elder son Ostap would never see the Sich until he “learned all the sciences.”
Was he a daring swashbuckler who clearly divides the world into friend and foe? But a reader who has exactly this idea of Bulba will be surprised, reading the following words he addressed to no other than “friends” in his famous speech on comradeship: “I know that our land is now full of scum; all they think about is granaries, haystacks, herds of horses, and honey- filled jars in cellars... They scoff at their language; one stays aloof from another; one sells out another as if he were a soulless animal at a market. They cherish the grace of an alien king, or even not a king but a slimy Polish magnate who kicks them in the mug with his yellow boot, much more than any kind of brotherhood.” Undoubtedly, Gogol put his bitterest and deepest thoughts in the mouth of his most beloved character...
The story of genius provides a chimerical and peculiar reflection of medieval Ukraine’s historical reality. The question is not even that Bulba had no real-life historical prototype (although among the colorful Ukrainian names of Vovtuzenko, Cherevaty, Zakrutyhuba, Pokotypole or Kukubenko there also are real-life historical figures of Hetman Ostrianytsia and Kyiv voyevoda governor Adam Kysil). The book intentionally mixes historical facts and things of life: once the author drops a word that the story is set in the fifteenth century, then he says about the same period, “Immediately after the Union” (in the sixteenth century), while many other facts and events correspond to the seventeenth century.
Clearly, these are not just the authors’ mistakes. It was always typical of Gogol to lean toward legendary symbols and figurative generalization (“Everything looks like the truth, everything can happen to a man” — heroic death, treachery, minor and negligible mundane things, and the high flight of spirit). Taras Bulba is a masterpiece because it fuses high tragedy and the facts of history with a wonderful sense of proportion. And what strikes us, readers, in the story is not only a full-blooded life (Ukrainian nature, the feelings and mores of typical people who “don’t take their hats off” even to their unit commander). The wonder of the cross epoch contact is as follows: although we do not belong to the heroic generation of Taras Bulba, we still cannot be indifferent to Gogol’s words, “A true nation is one that has an objective” Or take Bulba’s words, “So does it mean that the Cossack power should go down the drain, that a man should die like a dog, without doing any good to his fatherland and the whole Christian world? What’s the use of living then, what the hell are we living for?” And despite the all too obvious element of utopianism in this unique lyrical and romantic epic, Gogol’s clairvoyance is incomparably more truthful than the commonplace and wretched reality of those bogged down in the facts.
