Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge

We can say that character is our decision when faced with an event. An event, meanwhile, can be a thing of chance, or a thing of fate. Fate suggests an external ordering impulse, unlike random chance . Fate and character can be essentially the same if we say that each event that happens to someone is caused by a previous reaction of that character to an event so that everything is linked. Fate seems to presuppose the impossibility of the growth of character except within defined bounds, while randomness lets character change randomly. Randomness is real, whereas fate is generally reserved for stories that are consciously stories. To give us a neat little moral, this sense of cause and effect ought to be maintained. There is no room for randomness.

Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, subtitled “the Life and Death of a Man of Character”, is a grand drama about the fate of Michael Henchard, a man who makes decisions that are not usually very good. It is my first Hardy, and going into it I was aware that I was likely to become acquainted with a pessimistic worldview and challenging local accents. One reason why the work is interesting is that it sheds some light on a problem regarding this connection between character and fate.

The novel begins with Henchard selling his wife and daughter one evening while drunk. It is a shocking scene, as we witness Henchard becoming drunker and drunker, and his attempts to rid himself of his wife Susan ever more serious. At last, he succeeds, and his wife disappears to a sailor (who is only there for a page) in what we could call a thing of absolute chance – indeed, perhaps the only time where chance figures in the novel. The next morning Henchard wakes up and regrets his rash decision, makes a vow to quit drinking for twenty-one years, and half-heartedly tries to find his wife.

The next time we meet him almost twenty years have passed and Henchard is now the mayor of the town of Casterbridge. While he was selling his wife, he declared that she had been holding him back. So, indeed, it seems. But the rest of the novel becomes a downhill race for Henchard, as his wife and daughter return, his past keeps popping up, and he ruins himself through awful decisions. His character, brash, confident, powerful, and mercurial is to blame for these decisions. He fires an excellent manager, the Scot Donald Farfrae because he danced with his daughter. He disobeys his wife’s dying request and in so doing estranges himself from his daughter. It seems, to some extent, that Henchard’s character is responsible for his fate. Things do not happen to him so much as he, through his character, causes the events that bring about his downfall. In a brilliant phrase, Hardy declares that “the momentum of his character knew no patience.”

Henchard believes in fate. He obeys the oath to stop drinking that he swore in a church. And when things start going wrong, he believes a hostile, “occult”, force is working against him and grows increasingly paranoid. But Henchard’s faith in fate, even his damnable one, is not absolute. Late in the novel, Henchard visits a man who appears capable of magic to discover the fate of the upcoming harvest so that he can speculate profitably and destroy Farfrae, now a commercial rival. The seer provides an accurate forecast, but just before the harvest Henchard gets nervous and adjusts his financial position, losing all of his money when things go as predicted.

Henchard is right to believe in a hostile fate. His author is not a kind one. While Henchard’s character seems partly responsible for his miseries, it is certainly not the only thing. Hardy’s novel is peppered with ridiculous encounters orchestrated especially to make its protagonist miserable. If halfway through a chapter Henchard declares to himself that he will love his daughter, something is certain to happen a few pages later that dashes his hopes. People turn up who should have been dead precisely at the moment when they will cause the most suffering. It becomes increasingly ridiculous. Where Henchard’s character may have damned him to poverty, Hardy’s fate weaving damns him to an early grave and abject misery.

There is something important in this that is worth looking into. I liked the novel and agree with those assertions that Henchard is this larger-than-life, Shakespearian monster of a man. But there is something about its structure that is unsatisfying, and it relates to this very element of fate.  Stories, at least originally, seem to have been about unstoppable fate. Chosen ones fight chosen enemies. The universe has a plan and order that is God-given. Fate here determines the shape of lives before they are lived. The oracles, the prophecies, that haunt tragedies, are all bearers of this word. Characters attempt to fight their fates, but they always comply in the end, albeit often through ways unexpected.

But the fates that we think of are all simple. A dragon is slain, a mother is bedded, and a child is killed. They can be reduced to a single act. A tragedy, generally, works similarly – a single decision is what is necessary for the fall. Othello’s refusal to reflect, for example, seals Desdemona’s fate. By reducing the number of events to a small number, the character becomes more important. In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy writes that “in the end… no man can see his life until his life is done and where then to make a mending?” This is the case with lives that are made of small events. Henchard’s life, seen by a reader, has a shape, but for himself, it is like the one McCarthy describes – it takes time for his own character’s role within it to become visible to himself.

In a world where we have to make big decisions, a world of tragedy and high drama where the stakes are high, we see immediately the consequences of our actions and the role of our character in shaping the fundamental direction of our lives. You cannot drift in a tragedy; you can drift through ordinary life. Henchard’s daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, simply lives, passively, for most of the novel. She cannot be the main character. But you only need to force her to make one real decision to have a story. Any more, and you run the risk of getting something that seems picaresque, unreal. There are only so many serious decisions we can face in life. For a story, however, only one is often enough.

We cannot ask our stories both to show us character and to show us the world – the emphasis must be on one or the other for maximum effect. In The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy seems to want to do both – both show an objectively “sorry world”, and also a character that makes it sorrowful for himself. This undermines his artistic purpose here, I think. If bad things keep happening to Henchard, that is bad luck in real life or authorial cruelty in a work of fiction. If Henchard keeps making awful decisions, then it is his character that is to blame for his bad luck. But in the novel, Hardy seems to orchestrate matters so that it is precisely when Henchard seems most determined to make good decisions that bad luck creeps in. That is not fair, and though life itself is not fair, as noted it seems to dilute Henchard’s responsibility in the text whilst strengthening the resonance of his tragedy.

Donald Farfrae comes to Casterbridge and sets himself up as a successful merchant, eventually toppling without malice the man who gave him his first role there, Henchard himself. He marries, gains prestige, and life is good for him (mostly). His world is not that miserable one inhabited by the other characters, like Elizabeth-Jane or Henchard’s wife Susan. Their misery, however, in many cases stems from a refusal to utter a certain piece of information – in short, from decisions stemming from character, which takes us around in a circle. The point is that misery is the result of character in The Mayor of Casterbridge, except when it is the result of Hardy being mean. 

I spent most of the novel wondering how exactly Hardy was going to make me and all of the characters miserable at the end. He did not, of course, disappoint in this. And it is true that to have character failings make a tragedy, fate, or even just a story, we need events. Information, or its absence, can only have an effect when something happens whose outcome that information could have changed. But Hardy’s events are too much, too cleanly orchestrated. It made me conclude that if we want to make a truly blunt argument about the links between character and fate, we should probably rely upon those single powerful decisions and events that reveal character to the utmost, rather than attempting to substitute for them many smaller events. Or if we wish to use smaller events, making them seem like chance events, rather than forced events. We tolerate the deliberate tendency of a tragedy towards a single grand and silly conclusion, but the composite tragedy, built of many smaller but still deliberate things, is harder to stomach. It is hard to read The Mayor of Casterbridge and not think that Henchard is going to have struggles ahead. But he did not need Hardy standing behind him, constantly kicking him down the stairs.

Camus’s The Plague on Evil and Human Decency

Every classic is supposedly timeless; The Plague is one of those books that are fortunate enough to have the world remind us of their timeliness every so often. I did not return to it during the Covid years, but I have returned to it now, at a time when occupation and diffuse evils are once again relevant to our own lives – or at least to those whom we may feel are close to us. Camus began the novel in 1941 and saw it published in 1947, at a time when the French and the rest of liberated Europe wanted to understand how to perceive themselves. There were some who were undeniably heroic freedom fighters, and Camus was one of them, while on the other side of the spectrum were those who had collaborated with the occupants willingly. Besides these two groups, however, there was a great mass of people who were neither willing collaborators nor resistors and wanted to know what to think.

To these questions, Camus brings his philosopher’s eye, which makes The Plague an intellectually stimulating work, if not necessarily an emotionally stimulating one. My interest in it comes from its treatment of the ideas of decency and responsibility, which are explored through the character of Tarrou in particular.

The novel’s story is fundamentally simple. In the port of Oran in Algeria, a plague breaks out. The population are quarantined and endeavours to live within those conditions as best it can. Some men (and all the characters are men), for varying reasons, fight the plague and help its victims. Others do not. After some time, the plague leaves the town and things return to normal. The Plague is a curious work because we are used to having antagonists, villains, and a corresponding neat and clearly signposted moral taxonomy. Here the enemy is a plague, thoughtless and inscrutable. And just as there are no villains, Camus’s story does not give us much by way of heroes either.

We do have Dr Rieux, handsome and hardworking. He is “a man weary of the world in which he lived, yet who still had some feeling for his fellow men and was determined for his part to reject any injustice and any compromise.” His first action is to refuse to provide a report to a visiting journalist, Rambert, about the state of the healthcare in the region, on the grounds that he cannot tell the full truth. His philosophy is simple: “we must help one another.” It carries him through the book in spite of the challenges that the plague places upon him.

As a doctor, Rieux is at the forefront of the efforts to defeat the plague, tending to its victims, lancing boils and administering painful injections. But there are other people who join him in helping stem its tide. Joseph Grand, a civil servant, helps out with the more administrative side of things. The narrator considers him a hero, even while describing him as “insignificant and self-effacing”, with “nothing to recommend him but a little goodness in his heart.” There is also another man, Tarrou, who is in Oran attempting to work out his life philosophically and who comes to fight the plague as a result of the conclusions he reaches from his questionings through creating bands of volunteers.

The journalist, Rambert, is not from Oran. He is a visitor from Paris, and when the town is quarantined, he attempts to flee it to return to his partner across the seas. Various attempts to smuggle himself out go awry, but when one scheme finally works, he abandons it at the last moment and decides to commit himself to helping the sick. His change of heart, as he tells it to Rieux, comes down to a sudden sense of guilt at the thought of pleasure while others suffer: “there may be shame in being happy all by oneself.” Where once he had protested that the fate of the town is of no connection to him, as an outsider there, he comes to realise that by being there he is already a part of the whole, and thus must bear his share of responsibility for its wellbeing.

All of these characters and plenty of others who do not even receive a name act to resist the plague. They are not doing their job, as Rieux is, but doing something they are not obliged to do. The doctor, however, denies that it is a matter of heroism. Instead, the word that sums up the feeling of these men is “decency”. “The only way to fight the plague is with decency.” Why decency? For one, because the book is quite equivocal about whether any of the efforts to fight the plague, from the doctors’ serums to the efforts of the assistants, actually work. As Rieux at one point quips, “the burial is the same, but we keep a card index. No one can deny we have made progress.” It is not heroism if your efforts are for nought, after all, save the impression they produce.

The second reason for “decency” is that in times of quarantine and occupation, we humans grow lax. We need not consult Camus’ novel to know this, merely our recent memories. I do not refer to wearing tracksuits to work, or even a general sloppiness of manner, which are small sins, if they are sins at all. Rather, in a time of stress, we change as people. Our awareness of others decreases. We become selfish, callous, and cold. There is something lost in us which may provide temporary strength, just as Rieux discovers his growing hardness allows him to see “men dying who were made for life” without losing heart, but when we allow this feeling of humanity to be absent from us for too long, the crevice in our souls that houses it seals up. And at that point, it cannot easily return.  

The characters of The Plague are not philosophers, in the sense that few of them are animated by a clear world view. They are just people who do not want to lose themselves in petty compromises and mindlessness. Their variety – from the civil servant, Grand, to the priest Paneloux – speaks to the truth that everyone is capable of action in the face of evil. There are no effective excuses, whatever people actually do. As long as we have a common enemy – death – then we should find common ground with every decent human being on earth in the struggle against it.

Of all the characters, the most interesting is Jean Tarrou. He, like Rambert, is not of Oran, but immediately joins forces with Rieux against the disease, and the volunteer medical squads are in fact his suggestion. The most philosophical of the characters, early on he tells Rieux that his aim is “to find inner peace”, but it is only towards the novel’s end that we get close to him. Only then does he recount the story of his philosophical awakening. As a young man, he once accompanied his father, a prosecuting counsel, to the law courts. Here, rather than being in awe, Tarrou found himself identifying with the accused man instead. He realises that the people in the courtroom “wanted to kill this living man” and that such a thing was completely impossible for him to support in any way. He soon leaves home and begins the wanderings that eventually bring him to Oran.

Did the people in the courtroom really desire the accused man’s death? This is unlikely. But what is true is that when you find yourself becoming a representative of a thing or an idea you start to embody it yourself. This process is almost impossible to perceive objectively, but it is fatal. Because the process of becoming a thing takes away the responsibility – indeed, obligation – to know what one does and the consequences of what one does. For if there is an enemy in The Plague, it is the ignorance as much as the plague itself. St Bernard of Clairvaux once wrote that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In The Plague, it is those good intentions unmatched by the knowledge that are fatal.

This is what Camus’ novel has to say about this:

“The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer’s soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.”

In Tarrou, we have a character who is not blind. He has broken through the thick crust that conceals from us the true moral nature of things. That nature is that people die and we, through our actions and inactions, are more responsible for this than we would wish. “I learned that I had indirectly supported the deaths of thousands of men, that I had even caused their deaths by approving the actions and principles that inevitably led to them.” We can read Tarrou’s understanding of “actions and principles” according to our own beliefs. One may think of the slogan that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, or that by supporting a government that wages war, however, it may seem moral, we are complicit in the deaths of those innocents who inevitably die as the war is waged.

Awareness is isolation. Of other people, he notes: “I was with them, yet I was alone.” I feel the truth that Tarrou describes, this incredible complicity of breathing, of being alive in an unjust world. But this is not a general view. Upon confessing this feeling to another I have rarely found a sympathetic ear. As a rule, we do not want responsibility, we do not want to see. There is no joy in that, and certainly no peace. But the problem is that once we see, we cannot unsee without an avalanche of guilt. The knowledge of complicity forces one into a terrible decision – either to knowingly do bad or to endeavour as much as possible to do good. If we choose, even once, to do bad, then something happens to us, morally speaking. We surrender our obligations, we give ourselves up to the systems whose evil we acknowledge, and in doing so become destroyed:

“I decided that if one gave way once, there was no reason to stop. It seems that history has shown that I was right; nowadays it’s a free-for-all in killing. They are all carried away by a fury of killing and cannot do otherwise.”

Here, in Tarrou’s speech, we return at last to the plague itself. But not the bacillus that kills our lungs and covers us in boils. Instead, the plague that Tarrou sees is the potential lying dormant in all of us for surrendering to the evil actions we are forced by life to make: “we cannot make a gesture in this world without taking the risk of bringing death.” If we try to blind ourselves to this knowledge, once it is known, we spread the plague, we spread a moral contagion far worse than the disease that strikes Oran: “I know that we must constantly keep a watch on ourselves to avoid being distracted for a moment and find ourselves breathing in another person’s face and infecting him.” Goodness, then, is a combination of watchfulness and good action.

This is the simple conclusion that Tarrou reaches: “All I say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims – and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence. This may seem rather simple to you, and I don’t know if it is simple, but I do know that it is true.” And so, he fights the disease, he fights cowardice, he fights death. And he attains, so far as is possible, the “hope of peace.”

The messages of The Plague are simple, though that does not make them untrue. We must be decent. We must do good. We must be aware of the consequences and complicities of our actions, and we must do what we can to avoid bringing evil and death into the world.

The challenge with such ideas is bringing them into our own lives. The weight of the knowledge of the evils of life is even greater than it was in Camus’ day. One cannot buy a piece of fruit without thinking of the distance it has travelled and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it, emissions causing suffering by increased drought or wildfires. One cannot buy some chocolate without considering the palm oil it contains and the land use change and deforestation almost inevitably entailed thereby, no matter what the suppliers say. One cannot eat a fish without considering the depletion of the ocean’s stocks through wasteful trawling practices. There are other issues you may or may not acknowledge depending on your preferences, such as systematic racism and things connected to LGBTQ+ rights and so on. Even one who styles themself a “conservative” still has plenty to consider themselves responsible for within this scheme.

To acknowledge these things rather than hiding from them is one thing; to act upon them is yet another challenge on top of that. And then there is this question of decency. The poet, W.H. Auden, writing the 1930s, wrote that “we must love one another or die,” which is a good place to begin. But how do we assess decency? We come back to a moral scheme that is reliant upon our consciences, like that of Tolstoy after his religious crisis, with all the issues that entails. It is impossible to determine what is decent, and if we have a perfectionist bent in our moral judgements, we are likely to find ourselves forever lacking. I wrote a little about this in my piece on Peter Singer and Turgenev.

I have to ask myself whether I myself am decent. Last week I was interviewed by a local news channel about the initiative to help Ukrainian child refugees that my girlfriend and I created. We found that there was very little support being given to the refugees at English schools and filling that gap by providing extra lessons online seemed the moral thing to do, especially since we had experience teaching and could speak the children’s language and thus help those most in need. We even had several volunteer teachers working with us at first, but one by one they dropped off, citing the busyness of their own lives, while my girlfriend and I carry on as best we can, though we ourselves do not lead empty lives either.

I give several hours each week to do a little with various groups and individuals, but it is easy to feel like I am not doing enough. At times, it feels like I am just doing the bare minimum to make my soul sit at ease. It is certainly not a heroic thing we’ve done, just a decent thing. But it does feel at times that there are lots of people who are not entirely interested in doing even that. And that, it seems to me, as it does to Tarrou, is hard to stomach. It is terribly isolating too.  

This question of decency has become particularly relevant in my own life for other reasons as well. What I have in mind is my relationship with my remaining Russian acquaintances. When your country, or rather its armed forces and its civil and military leadership, is committing or ordering things so awful that I find myself resorting to the language of sin and evil just to begin to describe them, the bar for decency seems to be set a bit higher than it is here in the UK, itself not a spotless country by any means. A few times I have been made angry by the lightness with which a few of them live as if the decent thing to do is to suffer. Which it is not. The decent thing is to act, with knowledge, against evil. Suffering alone never ends evil.

One family that I am close to sheltered a family fleeing Mariupol on their way out to Europe. One friend, now in Canada, helps refugees enter that country and settle there. Another, now in Israel, works with an American lawyer to help those fleeing with the immigration process, including persecuted individuals from Russia itself. But many have just emigrated, and how many others still sit in silence in Russia itself, in fear, alone. Is it decent to leave Russia, rather than resist it from within? Or is leaving alone insufficient – does it need to be matched with action taken once one is in exile? These and other questions need to be asked, but more by individuals of themselves, than by us of them. It seems to me a certain truth that there is enough to be known and done by ourselves for us not to gain much, if anything, from attacking others for their moral failings.

In my reading on the question of guilt, my favourite view is that of Karl Jaspers, which I have written about here. But what Camus suggests in The Plague is another important contribution to our considerations of responsibility because it establishes a kind of baseline for our actions through this idea of decency, and through having a clear enemy in the form of all that which dehumanises and destroys the individual. As a novel, I actually found The Plague a little too cold and clinical, and somewhat too formulaic and structured in its approach. But never mind. The novel is sustained by its curious lack of an obvious enemy, and by its philosophical passion. Whether these ideas are too simple, as Tarrou suggests, is not altogether important. As he himself notes, all that matters is that they are true. It seems to me that they are.

Violence and Russian Nationalism in Gogol’s Taras Bulba

Of course, Gogol was a rather odd bird. He had to be, to write such curious little tales as his Nose or Overcoat, which are full of bodies and accessories doing what they aren’t supposed to do, in a city – Saint Petersburg – that seems to have a mind of its own too. But that madness, which most depressingly led him to throw the second part of Dead Souls into the fire, and then try to retrieve it from the flames, and then die, also had its darker side. For Gogol, the most famous writer of Ukrainian heritage, was also a rabid Russian nationalist lunatic who makes even Dostoevsky seem sensible by comparison. In fact, it was for reading the famous response of Nikolai Belinsky, a noted Russian liberal thinker, to Gogol’s miserably moralising hypocritical imperialist codswallop Selected Passages from Correspondence to Friends, that Dostoevsky was sentenced to exile. That, and for being in a terrorist cell. But we digress, however much Gogol would have approved.

I wanted to read Taras Bulba because it seemed the most overtly Ukrainian of Gogol’s works. Unlike the earliest works, it is not designed to sanitise and place in a display cabinet the customs of the Little Russians (as Gogol occasionally refers to them). Rather, by focusing on the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sech, I had expected to find in it a work that would fit just as easily into the hands of Ukrainian nationalists. I was mistaken, badly so. This is a book for our times, but not for either side of the present war. If we read it, we will find it hard not to see it as an accidental statement of the hollowness of (Russian) nationalism, and the wastefulness of war and of martial societies. But unlike Tolstoy’s brilliant anti-war Hadji Murat, it seems Gogol stumbled into this all by accident and was only half aware of what he wrote.

Plot

Taras Bulba tells the story of veteran Cossack Taras Bulba and his two children, Andrii and Ostap. It is an earlier century and the boys have returned home from study in Kiev, to their father and mother. One education has been completed, but now it is time for the real one, the one that will turn them into Cossacks, men who are comfortable only when out on the open plains or by the side of the great Dnieper, free and killing indiscriminately. For that is the one-word answer to what the book is about: violence. Taras takes his sons away from their mother after only one night at home and off they head to Zaporozhe, here a kind of travelling circus of macho manliness and bacchanalian delights.

Immediately Taras is bored. He wants violence. He is disappointed to hear that the Cossacks have agreed to stop attacking the native Tatars and tries to work out whom they can fight instead. Luckily, a rumour spreads that the Polish (the Zaporozhian Sech is nominally part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) in conjunction with the hated Jews are destroying the noble Orthodox faith of the people. Great news. The Cossacks mount up and begin a campaign of destruction and slaughter. All is going well until they begin sieging Dubno. Andrii Bulba, who in Kiev had not just learned his Latin and Greek but had also had a fling with a Polish noble’s wife, and is spotted by her again – she is trapped behind the castle’s walls – and brought into the city through a secret tunnel.

The Cossacks are bored by sitting around, waiting for the people to starve to death. Eventually, fighting breaks out, and Taras uses some of the Cossacks to draw Andrii – now a turncoat – into a forest, where he murders him for betraying his fatherland. Unfortunately, by leaving the battlefield, Taras has abandoned his men, and the battle is lost. He himself is captured but miraculously escapes. He then learns that Ostap is alive but has been taken with the other Cossacks to Warsaw, where he will be executed. With the help of a mistreated Jew, Yankel, Taras gets to Warsaw and witnesses Ostap’s execution,  to then disappear before he being caught again.

Of the Cossacks that remain at the Sech none are left of his former comrades. The new leader wants to sign a peace agreement with the Poles, but Taras has none of it. Taking a band of Cossacks for himself, he goes around the Commonwealth pillaging, before being trapped in a castle on the Dniester river, where he is burned to death by the Poles. So much for the story. The fun, as ever, begins when we get the knife out to begin the dissection.

Violence and Militarism

Some of the most spectacular passages of Taras Bulba concern “the infinite, the free, the sublime steppe” of South Ukraine where the Cossacks are free to roam on horseback and hunt and fish to their hearts’ content. But these are rarities. As a whole, the story is about war and the people who wage it. Andrii and Ostap may have been studying diligently the classics in Kiev, but as soon as they go home it’s time for a better sort of education – “the school of war.” Now, militarised societies have existed for a long time – the archetypal one, of course, is Sparta in Ancient Greece. But the Sech is different for two reasons – first, the emphasis on freedom, and secondly the tension present there.

Discipline is how wars are won. The endless drill of the Prussians and their legendary goosestep was partly what made that marshy state a great power over the course of the 18th century. The Cossacks of Taras Bulba are greedy, raucous, and have no time for order. As things go wrong during the battle at Dubno, many of the little death-vignettes that Gogol gives us show Cossacks becoming vulnerable because they get distracted by little things – here it is an adversary’s armour, ripe for the looting; there it is a desire to desecrate his body. These are not disciplined people.

Secondly, there is this tension, by which I mean a real desire for violence. These people are bloodthirsty. They want a fight. When news comes that the Poles may be converting their people, there is no desire among the Cossacks to actually check this is the case. They want to kill and are glad of the excuse provided. Immediately, they set upon the Jews who help service the Sech, slaughtering them indiscriminately. When besieging the castle at Dubno they get bored because they are not doing enough fighting and seem half-willing to just leave the starving residents alone.

In all of this, there is something elemental about them. At times it is almost funny, as when one Cossack – after starving and besieging Dubno for some time already – declares “first we hit them nicely, now we’ll hit them so much that they won’t carry as much as five of them home again.” But this shouldn’t distract us. When the Cossacks go through the Commonwealth what is the result? “Beaten children, women with breasts cut off, the skinning of all those who were allowed to keep their lives – in a word, it was a heavy price the Cossacks extracted for the Poles’ debt.”

What we see in Taras Bulba is a society that is so set on war, on violence, that it creates the conditions for it, at the cost of all deference to the truth. It is telling that against the marauders are ranged all those who are not part of the Cossack host – the women, the Jews, the Poles. Nothing unites a people like violence done against it. And what is the result, the glory that the Cossacks earn? Death. Repeatedly, for character after character. Taras dies, Ostap dies, Andrii dies, all manner of minor Cossacks die. They spout idiotic drivel about God and the fatherland which all might seem heroic to someone braindead, but we end the book to find a whole lot of dead, and nothing earned for all that suffering.

Religion and Hypocrisy

I have no interest in saying that violence is never justified, but Taras Bulba undermines the validity of its own violence with awesome consistency, and this is nowhere more obvious than in its treatment of religion. The Cossacks follow the Eastern Orthodox faith. Taras himself considers himself “a lawful defender of Orthodoxy”. But in the Sech, what holiness do we find? The whole host is ready to defend their faith “to the last drop of blood, although they did not wish to hear anything about fasting or restraint.” Characters declare that “for faith we’re ready to lay down our lives”. And yet they go about defending their faith against people who, a few doctrinal differences aside, share it, using the most unchristian means.

This irony is possibly deliberate. In chapter 6, when Andrii is smuggled into the city during the siege, he enters through a church, coming face to face with a monk – the exact type of person he had been ravaging the countryside in search of. But he is surprised, all the more so when he hears the prayers: “He prayed for the sending down of a miracle: for the saving of the city and the fortification of a wavering soul, for patience and the removal of temptation”. In short, he is praying for rather familiar things. Then he hears the organ music, and by that point, his defences really are beginning to crumble. He has stepped out of this narrow, macho, male, Cossack society and come into one that seems much fuller, with music, women, and peace instead. And what does he lose? “Moved by compassion,” we can say he loses the active voice. The Cossack loses his freedom and gains a heart.

All of this humanising stands in stark contrast to the description of the Cossacks in the next chapter and morning, who declare they are fighting an “enemy of Christ.” There is more than a little ridiculousness in this. Taras is referred to as “father” by his men, but he commits filicide on Andrii. Though the text has described Andrii as Judas, his death being like the death of “an ear of wheat” also suggests there is something deeply wrong about it. In short, we can say that the faith of the Cossacks, even as Taras himself dies by being burnt at the stake, is not quite a sham, but just an excuse for their violence. These people do not seem heroic as they throw babies into fires, or fight for their faith, because it is obvious that there is no real concern for the faith at all. As with their violence, the Cossacks’ hypocrisy leaves an unpleasant impression upon the modern reader.

National Myths

Still, if we are reading Taras Bulba today, we are interested in the national myth-building it engages in. What does it tell us about Russian nationalism in particular and the place of Ukraine within that? It’s important to remember that in the 1830s and 1840s when Gogol was writing, the annexation of much of what we now think as Ukraine had taken place relatively recently, especially of the south and west where the story takes place. These places needed to be integrated into Russia, and literary culture had some part to play in that.

How does Gogol do it? Well, for one thing, the Cossacks all have “Russian” souls, and live on “Russian land” – this description of the land in particular as Russian is repeated and particularly jarring to the reader of today. “Ukraine” is mentioned, but its people are the Cossacks, and the Cossacks are, after all, Russian. (N.B. The word “Ukrainian”, unlike “Ukraine”, had no real place in either the Russian or Ukrainian language until later. It is absent even from Shevchenko’s works. Until the later 19th century, it was primarily used by the Poles). The reason for this, of course, is because they are Orthodox and in Gogol’s version all speak Russian with only occasional Ukrainianisms for local colour. The Poles, the only other people who could claim control over the Cossacks, are a bunch of church-desecrating heretics who capture, torture and kill a great many proud Cossacks at the end of the story – showing that they cannot be the people to whom the Cossacks should swear their allegiance.

After noting that the Cossacks are practically Russians and that they do not belong to Poland, devalues any notion of independence through the decimation of the Sech. The Cossacks of the story are brave and honourable – for does not Taras go so far as to kill his own son for the sake of his honour? But everyone dies, and the decisions made in the story are poor. Gogol does not say it, but he certainly seems to imply that what the Cossacks lack is an organising force, an empire that could allow them to use their energies productively. Taras’ men die because he focuses on punishing Andrii – his false child – instead of protecting his real children, the people. If only he had a bit of guidance. Certainly, this man can kill, can fight. But wouldn’t things be better for the Cossacks, Gogol seems to ask, if they were engaged in something productive, like the genocide of the Circassians and the conquest of the Caucasus?

The character of Andrii, the traitor, is a complicating factor. Whereas the other Cossacks are motivated only by their desire for violence built upon rickety religious foundations, Andrii has a slightly more complex character. When he meets his old flame in the besieged city, he falls so madly in love that he forswears his own homeland: “Who said that my homeland is Ukraine? Who gave her to me? A homeland is what the soul seeks, what is sweeter than everything else in the world. My homeland is you.” Now, readers, I don’t think this is an unreasonable thought, but that’s just me. Within the story, we must ask what the Sech has done for Andrii. It has shocked him with its justice system, where murderers are buried alive, and thieves are tied to beams to be beaten by passersby. It has gone through the countryside burning, destroying, and killing, for no good reason. When he enters Dubno he sees, for the first time individualised, the consequences of the Cossacks’ actions – all these starving, miserable, mostly innocent people. When the choice is between love and music on the one hand and war on the other, his decision doesn’t seem unreasonable. What differentiates Andrii from the other Cossacks is that he realises there is a choice here.

But Andrii is a traitor, whatever else he is and whatever sense he speaks. (And given he is described as a “schoolboy” caught misbehaving at school when Taras confronts him and does not speak to defend himself, we can say that the scene has been constructed to delegitimise him.) That is what we should understand, at least if we are a Russian or Ukrainian nationalist. He deserved his death. Speaking of Ukrainian nationalists, Taras Bulba is not a good book for them either. Of course, you have the heroic Cossacks, fighting bravely and living enviable lives of freedom. But really, that’s the only positive thing you can take from this book. The women are excluded, and perpetual war and horrible crimes are a delight. And not just the women, by the way. In its description of a mini pogrom at the Sech and its repulsively anti-Semitic characterisation of Yankel (who would do anything for money, and is the one who tells Taras about Andrii’s betrayal) and all the other Jews, and in its demonisation and dehumanisation of the Tatars (like “chased dogs”) and Poles, Taras Bulba depicts the worst hateful and exclusionary tendencies of both Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms.

Conclusion:

Poor Ukraine, to have as its most famous writer a man who would have despised its independent existence. Lucky us, to have a writer like Gogol, who could write the works he did. Gogol, reactionary, religious, nationalistic, insane, was of course an odd one. But he took the ambiguities of his life and heritage and created good and often great literature, as did Kafka and so many others. Ambiguities and conflicts within the writer are what make for works that are worth reading. Taras Bulba is such a book. It is both pro-violence and pro-Russia, while also being undercut by a sense almost of disgust at itself and its hypocrisy, occasionally hinted at by the narrator. It is a more complex book than it seems at first glance, but perhaps not as complex as we would wish.

Unfortunately, to the modern reader, it still makes for uncomfortable reading. Although there are some similarities with Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, especially in the scenes after the siege of Dubno has failed and Taras has lost his sense of balance in the world and feels desperately isolated (as Hadji does in Tbilisi), the tone is completely different here, much less tolerant, much less repulsed by the violence it is forced to describe.

Perhaps the best argument for reading this book is that it and its author are so ambiguous about their identities. In that, you end up getting a far more accurate picture of Ukraine and its people than you might otherwise get. But this is a poor reason, all told. Gogol’s other works are much more thought-provoking. The only ones you get reading this one ar e the thoughts you don’t want to have.  


Update: for those here trying to write essays, there’s a good comment from Vladimir Golstein of Brown which provides some context on the work which I missed.