塔拉斯·布尔巴

A pipe drops in front of a Polish cavalryman's horse. A white-bearded old man won't let it go: he lunges after it, and for that alone the riders catch him, nail him to an oak tree by the road, and pile brushwood at his feet. As the fire takes hold, he is still shouting directions to his men. This is the last scene of Taras Bulba, and it is also the book's real opening. Gogol uses that pipe to tell you something about this world: an old Cossack will die for a piece of carved wood, but he will never bow to a living man.

Taras Bulba is a historical epic by the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol (1809 to 1852), first published in 1835 and expanded into its now-standard form in 1842. It is one of the rare true national epics in Russian literature: Gogol writes in a voice close to Homer's, turning the seventeenth-century Ukrainian Cossacks of the Dnieper into figures out of the ancient world, hard drinking, wild singing, headlong charges, and death met without flinching. The prose is rough and the pace pounds like a drum. What stays with readers is not delicacy of style but the raw, throat-tearing grandeur of it.

Taras Bulba is an aging Cossack leader at the Zaporozhian Sich, his face scarred, his voice like a cannon, a man who ranks Cossack brotherhood and Orthodox faith above his own life. His two sons have just come home from school in Kiev. The elder, Ostap, is solid and steady, built for the saddle and the fight. The younger, Andrii, is fine-featured and lives half in books, half in the memory of a woman's face. Taras cannot stand the schooling that clings to his sons. He welcomes them home by pouring liquor down their throats, mocking them, and goading his elder son into a brawl. By the next morning he has both boys on horseback, riding for the Sich on its island in the Dnieper. Their mother spends the night weeping and begging him to leave the boys behind. He does not look back.

The Sich is the spiritual home of the whole book: an armed camp on an island in the Dnieper, all men, no families, held together by war and Orthodox faith like a monastery that fights. The story's geography is small: the open Ukrainian steppe the army marches across, the Polish stronghold of Dubno under siege, and finally the execution ground in Warsaw. Three places, and each one drives this family a step further into a corner it cannot get out of.

The Sich has gone too long without a war, and the Cossacks are restless. Taras senses his chance. He works the camp, talks his brothers into tearing up the peace treaty, and argues that the Poles are oppressing their Orthodox kin and desecrating their churches. The assembly votes his way, and tens of thousands of riders pour out across the steppe. Taras rides out with both sons at his side. Ostap proves himself fast in the fighting and is soon hailed as one of the new leaders to watch. Andrii says little, and his mind is clearly somewhere other than on the campaign.

The Cossack army lays siege to Dubno and starves it out. Andrii has never stopped thinking about one person: the Polish governor's daughter he met years earlier as a student in Kiev. The night the city's food runs out, her Tatar maid slips past the Cossack lines and begs Andrii to save her mistress. He carries sacks of grain into the starving city through an underground passage, for no reason but to see her again. Gogol gives the reunion almost no commentary, just a young man climbing a wall and falling into the arms of the woman he has not forgotten, and after that he never returns to the Cossack banner.

The next day on the battlefield, the Cossacks see Andrii riding among the Polish cavalry, dressed as a Polish nobleman, sword raised against his own people. The camp is stunned first, then furious. Standing in front of everyone, Taras hears his son shout the line that would be enough to kill him ten times over: "My country is wherever my heart is." In Gogol's world, that single sentence cancels everything: blood, faith, brotherhood, all voided at once.

Father and son come face to face in the chaos of the battle. Taras does not call out, does not warn him. He raises his pistol and fires. Andrii falls from his horse, and with his last breath he says his lover's name, not his father's. Taras leans down from the saddle to look at him and speaks the coldest line in the book: "It was I who brought you into this world, and I who will take you out of it." This is not a killing done in a rage. It is a father carrying out, in front of tens of thousands of his men, the law he himself had declared. Gogol gives the scene almost no interior thought at all, only action: the shot, the fall, the horse riding on, and the effect is less brutal than solemn.

Ostap is captured in a later battle. The Polish authorities decide to make an example of him in Warsaw's main square: death by quartering, torn apart between four horses. Word reaches Taras, and he turns to an old acquaintance for help, Yankel, a Jewish merchant, bold and tangled in debts and favors of his own. Yankel smuggles Taras into Warsaw in disguise and gets him into the crowd gathered to watch. When the execution begins, Ostap is bound to the scaffold, his arms and legs pulled toward the four points of the square. He finds his father's face in the crowd and calls out with everything he has left: "Father, can you hear me?" Taras answers from inside the enemy crowd, at the risk of his own life: "I hear you!" Father and son finish their last conversation across a sea of foreign heads.

Taras makes it back to the Cossack army and stops talking almost entirely; after that there is only burning and killing. Polish cavalry chase him all the way to the Dnieper. In the melee he is thrown from his horse and his pipe flies out of his hand. He will not leave it behind, and the moment he bends to pick it up, the riders are on him. They nail him to an oak tree and light the brushwood at his feet. He does not beg and he does not scream. Instead he raises his arm toward the Dnieper and shouts the escape route to his surrounded men, and keeps shouting until the flames take his voice. A Cossack leader of an entire generation dies like that, over a pipe he had carried for years.

On the surface this is a war epic about seventeenth-century Cossacks. One layer down, it is a cold proposition: in Gogol's hands, loyalty to the group can consume love for a child, love between two people can destroy faith, and faith can turn around and consume that love in turn. Taras kills one son with his own hand, listens to the other die, and then dies in fire himself, three deaths, each one pushing the logic of honor-above-everything further than the last. That is exactly why the book needs to be read with some caution today. Gogol's anti-Polish and antisemitic passages are products of nineteenth-century nationalism, not historical fact to be taken at face value. And yet the old man who shouted himself hoarse did produce one of the rarer instances of genuine grandeur in literature.

Gogol's sharpest move is making brutality look sacred. The last thing Taras does before he dies is not take revenge and not beg for mercy: he gives his men directions. In that single act he turns from a rough old man into something closer to a martyr. The whole book runs on that kind of contradiction: drinking like an animal, dying like a saint; losing his life over a pipe, yet facing the fire for his comrades without flinching.

A companion guide can only tell you how the plot moves. What actually makes Gogol formidable is the sound of the thing: his Cossacks seem to shout, sing, and curse on the page, cups shatter, horses scream, and that near-Homeric rhythm only survives in the original, or in a good English translation. In the scene where the father kills the son, there is not one line of interior thought, only action, and it stops you cold: after the shot, Taras rides his horse straight over the body as if nothing has happened. By the time a summary reaches the two shouted lines on the execution ground in Warsaw, you already know how it ends, but on the page, that cry of "I hear you!" breaking out of the noise of a foreign crowd still lands like a blow. And there are the long scenes of Cossacks drinking and boasting around the fire, each man needling the others in his own rough, absurd, half-feral way of talking: the feeling of a group of men drinking themselves reckless and bragging to the sky the night before a battle they may not survive. No summary can carry that across.