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Taras Bulba Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol a new translation by Peter Constantine Modern Library, 2003 141 pp., $17.95

Take the wild history of the Cossacks in the Ukraine. Add the birth of nationalism and the drawing in of the principalities around Moscow to form a modern country. Include Eastern Orthodoxy's long struggle against the Catholic Poles and the Ottoman Muslims. Don't forget a love story in which a son betrays his father and his people for the sake of a beautiful daughter of the enemy. Mix in a big dollop of anti-Semitism and alternating moments of unselfconscious joy in the midst of battle and unselfconscious moroseness at night around the campfire. Finally, douse the whole thing in huge buckets of vodka, and the result can have only one name. Russia.

It's a curious thing, but perhaps the greatest historical novel ever written came from a literature that hardly existed at the moment of the book's composition. In the early 19th century, Russia had only the thinnest gloss of modern European civilization, and, apart from the efforts of Pushkin, the Russian language had hardly produced a book worth reading. And then came Nikolai Gogol, who, before his death in 1852 at the age of 43, suggested, in the barest handful of works, every path down which Russian literature would subsequently head. An "epic poem," he called Taras Bulba when he transformed an 1835 short story into a novel in 1842, though the book is entirely in prose and runs fewer than 150 pages. As it happens, Gogol was right. Taras Bulba is an epic, and it's structured like a poem. Tolstoy could not have written War and Peace without the epic feeling Gogol gave Russian literature—any more than Solzhenitsyn could have written A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich without the imagistic logic of poetry, rather than the narrative logic of fiction, with which Gogol endowed his nation's prose.

Taras Bulba is set in the 16th century, after the retreat of the Lithuanians had left the Ukraine under the intermittent rule of Poland. As the Poles struggled to absorb "Little Russia," the Ukrainians formed the military culture of the Cossacks—essentially a cross between crusaders and thieves, the center of the multi-sided fight against Poles, Turks, and Crimean Tatars.

Taras Bulba himself is an aging "colonel" of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, a lifelong warrior whose two sons, Andri and Ostap, have finished their schooling at the Orthodox seminary and returned to begin their careers as mounted soldiers. Actually, the word "soldiers" conveys too much, or too little, in this context. The Cossacks, as the novel shows them, were not an organized military but a horde; not an army but an entire people of war—and old Taras will live to kill one of his sons for joining the enemy and watch the other son tortured to death. No wonder the boys' mother weeps as they leave at the end of the first chapter to join the Cossack camp.

Indeed, that scene of the mother's certainty that she will not see her sons again is a perfect encapsulation of all the peculiar compellingness of Taras Bulba. Here it is, in the new translation Peter Constantine has done for Modern Library:

As they rode out of the gate she came rushing out with the lightness of a wild goat, unimaginable at her age, held one of the horses with incomprehensible strength, and embraced her son with blind, crazed fervor. She was carried again into the house. The young Cossacks rode off sadly, holding back their tears out of respect for their father, who was perturbed himself, although he struggled not to show it. It was a gray day. The green steppes glittered brightly. Birds chattered discordantly.

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