In the introduction he penned to the 2004 Modern Library edition of Nikolai Gogol's epic historical novella of the Ukrainian steppes, Taras Bulba, Robert Kaplan observes that the Russian author's "account" of the region's violent history "mirrors the conflicts, the confusions, and the nuances of our own era." One is already prepared to acknowledge that Kaplan's words are only too true. But then he pinpoints what he has in mind with words that seem even more startlingly prescient, with the benefit of hindsight: "It remains unclear, for instance, whether Ukraine will survive as an independent country or at some point will dissipate within the pressure cooker of a resurgent Russian Empire."
Kaplan's words must have sounded alarmist and morbid in 2004 (or rather 2003, when the introduction was copyrighted). Most Americans were at that point still optimistic about the ultimate success of the post-Soviet Russian democracy. The George W. Bush administration was seeking a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin, of whom the former had recently remarked that he had been able to "look into his eyes and see his soul." The conflicts and annexations that would justify warnings of a "resurgent Russian Empire"—from South Ossetia to Crimea to the 2022 Ukraine invasion—were all still far in the future. Two decades later, though, Kaplan's words seem preternaturally prophetic.
Reading the Gogol novella that follows, Kaplan's observation is confirmed: here is a work printed almost two centuries ago that nevertheless speaks directly to our time. Gogol first published the work in 1835, yet it is full of place-names that we will recognize from today's newspaper headlines: many of its actions unfold near Zaporizhzhia (Zaporozhye in the novel) and the Dnipro river (a.k.a. the Dnieper). One of the novella's many stirring descriptions of the natural beauty of this environment feels like it could be drawn from the tragic images we all witnessed in the news this week, after the Kakhovka dam burst—most likely in an act of deliberate sabotage:
They felt the closeness of the Dnieper. It gleamed in the distance; its dark ribbon stood out against the horizon and fanned them with its cold waves [....] This was the place where the Dnieper, hitherto locked in its banks, finally triumphed and broke free, roaring like the sea, the islands that had been hurled into its center pressing its waters even further out of its banks, its waves spreading wide over the earth, meeting neither rock nor mound. (Peter Constantine trans. throughout.)
But, far more troubling than the geographic affinities between the story's events and the contemporary war that obsesses the global imagination, is the aestheticized violence of Gogol's tale—and the fodder it provides for today's bloodthirsty expansionary nationalisms.
To be sure, Gogol's work is not straightforwardly chauvinistic in a simple-minded sense. He maintains an ambivalent distance from all the parties to the conflict he describes. Even as he admires and glamorizes the free, roughly democratic life of the Cossack raiders, for instance, he also portrays them as bigoted, and depicts them carrying out the most appalling atrocities. Likewise, he writes with as much sympathy of the son who betrays his comrades out of love as of the father who smites him in revenge by his own paternal hand. These are the passages that save the work from becoming blatant militarist propaganda.
Nonetheless, it must also be admitted that Gogol's novella leaves itself open to being appropriated for nationalistic ends. Even when Gogol's Cossacks murder women and infants, after all, or commit antisemitic pogroms, they are always portrayed as doing so because they are inflamed with noble patriotic fervor and a crusader's devotion to the Orthodox faith. (It is not at all clear, specifically, that the flagrantly antisemitic Gogol disapproves of the Cossacks' murder of their Jewish neighbors.) It is all too easy to imagine Russian nationalist bloggers riding into online battle (from a safe distance away from any actual bloodshed) while declaiming slogans from Taras Bulba, such as: "[I]s there fire, torture, or force powerful enough in all the world to subjugate the Russian spirit?"
Nor can it be said that the author would disclaim such a nationalist interpretation of his work. Gogol is one of those great Russian writers—Dostoevsky is another, Isaac Babel perhaps a third*—to whom people are often at pains to attribute any political views other than the ones that they explicitly endorsed in their work. With Gogol, this strained attempt at political reinterpretation began with even the first reviews of his novels. His satirical classic Dead Souls was adored by the country's liberal and left-wing intelligentsia, even as it devotes as much if not more of its sardonic gunpowder to demolishing the pretensions of contemporary social reformers (such as good government advocates trying—and failing—to eliminate bribery from local administration) as it does to mocking the old aristocracy.
Gogol told us in his later works that he was a Slavophilic conservative and supporter of autocracy, and there is no reason not to take him at his word. Perhaps, therefore, we should take literally lines in Taras Bulba like the following: "Just wait, the time will come when you will understand the meaning of the Russian Orthodox faith! Word has already spread through every nation: A Russian Czar will spring forth from the Russian earth, and there will be no power in this world that shall not yield to him!"
We are not far here from Putin's megalomaniac dreams of restoring the Soviet Empire; and one wonders if the Russian president would not fancy himself to be the imperial Russian Messiah prophesied in Gogol's/Bulba's words, which are among the last to be found in the novella. (Nor, it must be said, are we far—on the obverse side—from the kind of maximalist Ukrainian nationalism that would rather prolong the conflict unnecessarily in order to retake Crimea, than accept a flawed peace for the sake of preserving more lives).
Worse even than the nationalistic overtones of the novel, however—which, as I say, are at least leavened with a certain objective distance from all the story's deeply morally-compromised actors—is its frank admiration of violence. Even if Gogol retains a certain moral ambivalence toward all the parties to the conflict he portrays, it must be said that few authors have written as spiritedly and as movingly of the heroism and glory of war. In his introduction, Kaplan says as much, and urges us to re-read Gogol in modern times so as to be reminded of the timeless relevance of these emotions to the human character (Kaplan then seems to hint—taking on a downright sinister note, for a piece published in 2003—that the Iraq war might be worth prosecuting as the same kind of cathartic bloodthirsty crusade that the Cossacks periodically crave in order to anchor their own collective identity and purge themselves of excess vigor).
But even as Gogol seeks to cast his heroes in epic terms and bring romance and chivalry to the tales of the Ukrainian steppes, all I can see in the stories of the Cossacks' violence (especially in light of the present Russian invasion—not to speak of the catastrophic US invasion of Iraq that Kaplan was darkly hinting toward)—is a tale of appalling waste. The Cossack raiders are portrayed as punishing theft within their own ranks with gruesome severity: yet the entire economic basis of their way of life is nothing but organized thievery. The peoples around them are planting, sowing, engaging in productive enterprises through the sweat of their brow. Then the Cossacks ride in and appropriate the fruits of all their hard labor to themselves by brute force (then burying the loot or using it to add splendor to Orthodox churches, where they hypocritically worship a savior who preached mercy and non-retaliation for violence). Where is the honor in that?
In a moment in history when brutal and pointless war is once more being fought over the same phantoms of "national honor," chauvinism, and religious bigotry that motivate the Cossacks in Gogol's tale, and over the same stretches of land that should have been allowed to develop peacefully in their natural splendor; in a moment when the aspirants to Gogol's prophecy of a untameable "Russian Czar" are once again rolling over the Ukrainian countryside leaving death and atrocities in their wake; in a moment when a negotiated peace to end the war seems as far off as ever, as Ukrainian forces undertake dangerously escalatory retaliations in Russian territory, and it seems likely that many more thousands of people will perish needlessly through the intransigence of both parties to the conflict, and the perennial willingness of human beings to sacrifice actual human lives for the sake of false abstract gods of "honor" and the invisible, historically-contingent lines in the sand we call national boundaries...
In such a moment, I say, it is possible to see that the writers who have done perhaps the greatest disservice to humankind are those who have portrayed war as a glorious and beautiful enterprise. Perhaps, in the face of Gogol's glamorizing portrayal of the Cossack raiders of the steppes, even as they murder and steal from those physically weaker than themselves, we would be better served by reminding ourselves of Hugh MacDiarmid's devastating appraisal, which he wrote of Housman's "army of mercenaries," but which could be said equally of any militaristic band of professional warmongers who prey on their neighbors: It is a God-damned lie to say that these/ Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride./ They were professional murderers and they took/Their blood money and their impious risks and died./In spite of all their kind some elements of worth/With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
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*I maintain that Red Cavalry is a much more one-dimensional and bigoted work of Bolshevik propaganda than it is often portrayed as being. As for Dostoevsky, why is it so hard for people to accept that he might have endorsed the Czarist autocracy as whole-heartedly as he claimed to, in his mature work?
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