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What are we to do with prose like this? It lacks the logic of a novel's narrative. It is, instead a prose version of the succession of images by which an epic poem tells a story.
Even the romantic elements in Taras Bulba are somehow naïve—naïve as Gogol imagines Homer is naïve: a naïveté achieved only at the farthest end of artfulness. When Andri, in love with a beautiful Polish girl, forsakes his family to fight beside the Poles against the Cossacks, his father shouts out to him during the battle, "These are your own people"—and Gogol adds,
But Andri could no longer tell what men were in front of him, whether they were his own people or not. He could see nothing but locks of hair, long beautiful locks, and a swan-white breast and a snow-white neck, and beautiful shoulders, all made for rapturous kisses. "Men! Quick! Draw him over to the forest!" Taras shouted, and thirty of the swiftest Cossack riders set out to draw Andri into the forest.
Critics make much, and rightly, of Gogol's birth in the Ukraine and his use of backward, rural Ukrainian settings in his collections of stories known as Evenings on a Farm, which provided for Russian readers—as stories set in the South would later provide for American readers—both broad comedy and a nostalgic feeling for a world that was already passing away. Even the translated titles of those stories that made the young author's reputation—like "St. John's Eve" and "How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich"—convey what the urban Russians found comic and sweet in them.
But it's worth remembering that Gogol was already, by the time he wrote Evenings on a Farm, established at the worldly salons of St. Petersburg as the protégé of Pushkin. There exists an extraordinary letter from Gogol to his mother, demanding accounts of all the folk stories she can remember, together with all the Ukrainian details he himself never, in fact, really experienced. "That is very, very necessary for me. I expect from you in your next letter a complete description of the costume of a village deacon, from his underclothes to his boots, with the names used by the most rooted, ancient, undeveloped Little Russians."
In the heartbreakingly brief literary career that followed, it was as though Gogol set one perfect marker on each of the paths down which subsequent Russian writers would have no choice but to go. A suggestion from Pushkin produced from Gogol the comic play The Inspector General, from which Russian theater still hasn't recovered. The picaresque novel Dead Souls set the conditions all later comedy would have to obey. And then there are the short stories—so few of them, and each pregnant with what would become the history of Russian literature: "Viy," "Nevsky Prospect," "The Diary of a Madman." Dostoyevsky brought something very Russian to completion with Notes from Underground, but Gogol had pointed the way with "The Overcoat." The absurd that runs through Russian literature was simultaneously born and transcended in his story "The Nose."
Along the way, Gogol set himself to study his nation's history—even teaching it, briefly and very badly, at the university in St. Petersburg. His letters about his studies swing back and forth. At some moments, he gladly folds the history of Little Russia into the emerging history of the Greater Russian behemoth. At other moments, he sees the Muscovites and White Russians as the great betrayers of Ukrainian culture.
Though he intended to write a multivolume history, his obsessive historical research issued only in Taras Bulba. Both his distaste for White Russia and his Greater Russian nationalism are discernible in the book, which makes it difficult to place in the usual categories of historical fiction. But he wanted, from his little epic poem in prose, more than just a chance to play in the fields of history. He looked both to celebrate the platonic ideal of Russia and to escape from the modern reality that Russia was becoming. That, too, is very Russian: yet another theme from which his successors could not break free. Gogol needed to find the unmodern mind and dwell within it for himself.
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