Tag: Ukraine

Life’s Moments and Self Creation in Lispector’s Agua Viva

It’s a question I generally leave to those philosophers whom I haven’t yet read: what is life? I always leap ahead, asking myself and the world what I must do with my life or how to live. Yet is it not foolish to skip over that fundamental questioning? If we don’t know what life is, we can hardly know properly how to live it.

Clarice Lispector is the next stop on my unofficial tour of the literature produced by authors that are not Ukrainian but belong, in a better world, in part to the land of today’s Ukraine. She was born in that country in 1920, but swiftly emigrated with her family to escape ongoing pogroms to Brazil, where she is considered one of that country’s greatest authors. She wrote in Portuguese, and in Agua Viva, she tried to work out what life is.

This is a strange book. As with W.G. Sebald, whose Vertigo I recently finished but which doesn’t get a blog post, Agua Viva is one of those works which is not entirely a novel, but not quite anything else either. It is an aphoristic work, made up of short reflections, many only a few sentences long, some connected to one another and some disconnected. And they all aim to work out what life is.

Moments

“I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.” Life, for our narrator, is a moment. A thing that passes. But a thing that we can, and should, grab onto. Lispector’s language is lush, and it is linguistically that she attempts to depict this moment. A huge array of images creates cumulatively this impression of the instant passing by. “The next instant, do I make it? or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath. And with the flair of the bullfighter in the ring.”

At times, the narrator is full of enthusiasm. There’s a kind of ecstatic exclamation that seems reminiscent of Whitman, together with an enthusiasm for movement and travel. “May whoever comes along with me come along: the journey is long, it is tough, but lived,” is very like the Whitman of Song of Myself’s section 46, for example. Lispector also has an affinity with Rilke, in that the entire book is an attempt to “live the questions”, as Rilke suggests to the questioner in Letters to a Young Poet. “I find no answer: I am,” She writes.

However, there’s a certain anxiety here too, which Rilke and Whitman are (largely) immune to. This is not the buoyant self-sustaining grandiosity of Whitman – Lispector’s narrator knows that her utterances, though they float in the air, need to be heard. She cannot live alone. “I write to you because I don’t understand myself.” Self-doubt appears in other guises too. In the questions, in the repetitions of what does not to be repeated, such as how “I am myself”. This is not bad writing, but rather anxiety expressed indirectly on the page. This anxiety belying the confidence gives the narrator kinship with the person that Whitman, after years of study, became for me – a self-creating figure whose assertions are designed to hide the sadness and loneliness at the core of his being.

Yet throughout, there is a distinctly feminine angle to Agua Viva that it would be remiss to ignore. Her Whitmanian exclamations are tinged with a sense of her own limitations, specifically as a woman. Where Whitman, in Song of Myself, attempts to identify and praise everything – every profession, every life – Lispector’s narrator here comes up against the limits of a much more bounded existence. The moments she attempts to pour light onto are simple, average. Having coffee outside, having a smoke. The flowers she has in the room. Or the light playing on a tap:

“In this instant-now I’m enveloped by a wandering diffuse desire for marvelling and millions of reflections of the sun in the water that runs from the faucet onto the lawn of a garden…”

This praising of existence is a praising of the existence that is available to her, which is why it appears so undefined to a reader. She lives in her mind, on the page, in words. But not, it seems, in the world. Because she cannot, simply put.

We might also make out the hazy edges of a plot, of a reality lying beyond the experience of individual moments. The narrator seems to deny this: “Do I not have a plot to my life? For I am unexpectedly fragmentary. I am piecemeal. My story is living.” But there is a failure, a broken relationship. The narrator addresses an absent man at certain points of doubt. “But what can I do if you are not touched by my defects, whereas I loved yours. My candour was crushed underfoot by you. You didn’t love me, only I know that. I was alone. Yours alone. I write to no one and a riff is being made that doesn’t exist. I unglued myself from me.”

Creation

And this thread is what lets us construct a hidden narrative for the story of Agua Viva, of a reaction against a life that somewhere went wrong. Our narrator is not a writer, not primarily, but rather a painter. Her writing is not her natural medium, but the style is like a painting in that it attempts to capture the blur of experience in the way that someone like Monet could or Renoir could. She had a relationship, but it has ended. She makes veiled references to “he” as a topic she will discuss – but she never manages to get that far.

Her confidence has been hurt by her rejection. And so she has turned to writing. The narrator’s introspective, aphoristic language is tentative, it is testing the waters of language’s possibility. And it is also an act of creation. All writing creates, but here we have something different from the sentences of realist novelists, who try to build up characters on the page. The impression given by phrases like “this writing I’m attempting is a way of thrashing myself free” is of a real person, trying to gain a reality that their immediate reality does not allow them. The impression of the voice here is much more intimate, human, and emotionally affecting.

In the task of freeing herself from the world, the narrator relies on writing. She also relies upon a conscious reaction against rationality, which no doubt for her represents an aspect of men that is hateful to her. “I have the mysticism of the darkness of a remote past,” she says. She also talks of her “witching ceremonies.” Through these tropes unclaimed by men, and through the blessing of her reality through its description, the narrator attempts to live a free life in the mind, and build a new life beyond the failure of the relationship to the “he”.

A State of Grace

In spite of the moments of doubt, the narrator succeeds and slips away at the book’s end into something like a state of grace where every moment is blessed. But as with everything mystical in fiction, the success of Agua Viva’s portrayal of its narrator’s ecstasy depends upon our sympathy and our willingness to give ourselves over to the strength of the exclamations and images. “That is living: the joy of the it”. Do we believe in her, or do we doubt her, as we might do Whitman?

I cannot say for sure what I think in my own case. Lispector’s language is very beautiful and full of striking images, but I found it all too abstract for my tastes. There was a disbalance between experience and underlying reality that I disliked, so that I almost have to look down on the narrator. If this is a book of philosophy, rather than fiction, and it perhaps is – arguing by images about the importance of each moment – then it immediately encounters the problem that such arguments are not particularly unconvincing to a cruel and logical mind, such as my own.

Whitman was not wrong when he exclaimed that “Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.” The problem is that, with a few exceptions, literature is not the damp of the night. Those kind of arguments require the reader to get up and go outside. Just like Lispector’s work will succeed or fail based on whether we can look at a mirror or a faucet in the same way again after we’ve read it.

Anyway, Agua Viva is a lovely little book, and my first Lispector. I’m sure I’ll read more of her later, but for now I won’t be sad to return to the earth and the concrete and the conflict of the world outside.

The Ghosts in Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary

I am haunted by the ghosts of lost worlds. In a sense, this is what all literature is about – taking us into the past or into another world altogether and making it real to us so that we can live in it and love it. But I do not mean that sense of lost worlds here. What I mean is the desolation, the empty space where a world once was. The world of religions in which most of us can no longer believe, or countries or spaces that no longer exist, like the Habsburg Monarchy or the Soviet Union, function in my life like ghosts. Driven by curiosity, I want to know them, but at the same time, they come to me, often against my wishes, like obsessions, to torture my mind. They gather me into conflicted mourning for what was lost.

Ukraine is a land of ghosts, and one of the greatest horrors of Russia’s invasion is that it promises the creation of more ghosts and more hauntings. When I awoke on the 24th of February last year and saw the first fires on Ukrainian soil, I was overwhelmed in a way that I didn’t think possible of myself with visions of emptiness. Empty houses, empty villages, emptied worlds.

Babel’s Ukraine

Many worlds have been lost in Ukraine. At least two of them we see in the work of Isaac Babel. The Soviet writer, a Jew from Odessa on the Ukrainian coast, described a world of gangsters and crime that seems more appropriate to America than anywhere this side of the Atlantic, in his Odessa Tales. But today I am writing about another world, the world of today’s West Ukraine, a land that at the time was the site of one of the Soviet Union’s first wars – in fact, a war before the Union really had that name at all – the Soviet-Polish War of 1919-1921.

Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, a short story cycle that is the most brilliant I have ever read, is his main work of the period. (You can read my translation of one story here). But even though it is written with plenty of cunning, and was successfully published in the USSR, it is still a work of evasiveness. Babel also kept a writer’s diary of the period, the 1920 Diary, and here he is much less equivocal about what he saw and what he experienced. Here, for readers, there is the terrible horror and curiosity of a world that is being annihilated before our eyes, a world that will be finished off some twenty years later with the invasion of the lands by German troops and later population transfers organised by Stalin.

Contested Identities – Babel and the Land

The 1920 Diary is a text about identity. In the contested land of today’s West Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus live Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Czechs. They speak languages ranging from German to Yiddish, Polish to Ukrainian and Russian, and practice a hodgepodge of faiths including traditional Catholicism, the Uniate faith, Eastern Orthodoxy, and of course Judaism. From town-to-town identity shifts in a way that seems scarcely believable today. But beyond this, there is Babel himself. We can read the diary, like we read the Red Army Cavalry Stories, as a site of struggle between Babel’s understandings of himself. In fact, due to its personal nature, the 1920 Diary is perhaps even better for this than the stories are.

But first, who was Babel? An Odessan Jew of course. Raised in Odessa – then the most cosmopolitan city of the Russian Empire – and briefly in Nikolaev (Mykolaiv), he was educated in Kiev (Kyiv), moved to Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) where he met Gorky, who helped him establish himself as a writer. He seems to have been fluent in at least Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and French. He wrote a little, and used to joke that he was “the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence.” Silent or not, he managed to fall under the suspicion of the authorities and was executed under false charges by the authorities in 1940. Babel had several opportunities to emigrate from the Soviet Union, but he did not take them. Like Andrei Platonov, one element of Babel’s fascination to me lies in his attitude towards the USSR, mixing the love of its hopes and criticism of its realities.

Babel wrote primarily in Russian, but we know that some of his first stories were written in French. Like Nabokov, or Taras Shevchenko in Ukrainian literature, he was at ease not just reading, but even writing in multiple languages. The 1920 Diary is written in Russian (as was Shevchenko’s personal journal), but it is peppered with other languages, including the ever-popular refrain from the poor Ukrainians he meets: “nemae” – we have nothing left to give.

Was Babel a Jew, a Russian or perhaps even a Ukrainian, or rather a Soviet and a Communist? The 1920 Diary is a place where we can begin asking these questions.

If he refers to himself occasionally as Russian, there are certainly moments when he seems more comfortable with the Ukrainian cultural space. “Ha, what a gloomy life these Russians lead! Where is the Ukrainian mirth?” he asks at one point. His main allegiance, however, seems to be to Odessa and to the Jews. “An old Jew – I love talking with our people – they understand me,” he remarks, even as at other times he lapses into a more critical voice towards the “Yids”. He notes every town and city where he encounters the Jews and he notes the injustices of the rampaging armies towards them, from rapes to being forced to cook on the Sabbath. Besides this, it is Odessa that he longs for. “We spoke about Tiflis, fruit, sun. I think about Odessa, my soul is torn.” Whenever a character has some association with the city Babel seems to brighten.

Revolution and the Vanguard

The Red Army are in Poland to spread Communism. In the early days after 1917, it seemed as though the workers’ revolt could truly become international, and military might would help to spread it. At the time of the diary Babel is certainly a supporter of the Revolution – after all, he was accompanying the army as a propagandist – but we also see increasing uncertainties come into his voice as the war goes on and he sees what the Revolution means in practice. As he asks at one point, “We are the vanguard, but of what?” He believes that the poverty and rank destitution of many of the people he encounters can be improved under Soviet systems – “I am exasperated, I can’t contain my indignation: the dirt, the apathy, the hopelessness of Russian life are unbearable, the Revolution will do some good work here.” But he discovers that his understanding of the Revolution is not shared with the soldiers themselves.

The cavalry are predominantly Cossacks, in Babel’s case from the Kuban region in today’s Russia. At the time, before the Holodomor and related policies, the land was populated mostly by ethnic Ukrainians, and the Cossacks go around singing Ukrainian songs. “What kind of men are our Cossacks?” Babel asks of the people who are bringing Communism to the West. “Many-layered: rag-looting, bravado, professionalism, revolutionary ideals, savage cruelty. We are the vanguard, but of what? The population is waiting for liberators, the Jews for freedom—but who arrives? The Kuban Cossacks. . . .”

Babel wants to see the Revolution as progress. Marxism, after all, envisions the world as tending towards Communism and peace and prosperity for all. But he realises instead that history is much more cyclical than this. A few posts ago I wrote about Gogol’s novella of Cossack violence, Taras Bulba. There the Cossacks go on a rampage throughout Ukraine and Poland, murdering Jews and Catholics and everyone else. Babel sees much the same in his own day.

“An ancient church, the graves of Polish officers in the churchyard, fresh burial mounds, ten days old, white birch crosses, all this is terrible, the house of the Catholic priest has been destroyed, I find ancient books, precious Latin manuscripts. The priest, Tuzynkiewicz, I find a photograph of him, he is short and fat, he worked here for forty-five years, he lived in one place, a scholar, the assortment of books, many of them in Latin, editions of 1860, that was when Tuzynkiewicz lived.”

Babel meticulously notes each pogrom, each act of violence against the Jews.

“The Zhitomir pogrom carried out by the Poles, and then, of course, by the Cossacks.

After our vanguard units appeared, the Poles entered the town for three days, Jewish pogrom, cut off beards, they always do, rounded up forty-five Jews in the market, took them to the slaughterhouses, torture, they cut out tongues, wailing over the whole town square.”

“the same old story, the Jews have been plundered, their perplexity, they looked to the Soviet regime as saviors, then suddenly yells, whips, Yids. I am surrounded by a whole circle, I tell them about Wilson’s note, about the armies of labor, the Jews listen, sly and commiserating smiles,”

The betrayal of the Jews by the Soviets is something Babel is obviously upset by. He tries to console those he meets with words of the Revolution, but it becomes increasingly inauthentic as the diary goes on: “The husband: Will there be freedom to trade, to buy a few things and then sell them right away, no speculating? I tell him yes, there will, everything will be for the better— my usual system—in Russia wondrous things are happening: express trains, free food for children, theaters, the International.”

What is happening in the war is a repetition of the violence that had come again and again to the people of the region:

“The Jewish cemetery outside Malin, centuries old, the stones have toppled, almost all the same shape, oval at the top, the cemetery is overgrown with weeds, it saw Khmelnitsky, now Budyonny, the unfortunate Jewish population, everything repeats itself, once again the same story of Poles, Cossacks, Jews is repeating itself with striking exactness, what is new is Communism.”

Communism with the Cossacks? No, “they are simply an instrument the party is not above using.” Instead, Babel comes to see the war as violence and hate. “About the atamans, there had been many there, they got themselves machine guns, fought against Shkuro and Mamontov, merged into the Red Army, a heroic epic. This is not a Marxist Revolution, it is a Cossack uprising that wants to win all and lose nothing. Apanasenko’s hatred for the rich, an unquenchable hatred of the intelligentsia.” The Cossacks care nothing for the Revolution, and certainly nothing for the people Babel records them raping, butchering, and stealing from. But the Poles, too, are little better. The Jews time and again recount the double pogrom, as first the Poles, then the Ukrainian Cossacks, torture them. At one point we get a brief glimpse of the ghost of a better world, then see the present that has replaced it:

“I won’t forget this shtetl, covered courtyards, long, narrow, stinking, everything 100-200 years old, the townsfolk more robust than in other places, the main thing is the architecture, the white and watery blue little houses, the little backstreets, the synagogues, the peasant women. Life is almost back on track again. People had led a good life here— respected Jewry, rich Ukrainians, market fairs on Sundays, a specialized class of Russian artisans: tanners trading with Austria, contraband.

The Jews here are less fanatical, better dressed, heartier, they even seem more cheerful, the very old men in long coats, the old women, everything exudes the old days, tradition, the shtetl is saturated in the bloody history of the Polish Jewish ghetto. Hatred for the Poles is unanimous. They looted, tortured, scorched the pharmacists body with white-hot iron pokers, needles under his nails, tore out his hair, all because a Polish officer had been shot at—sheer idiocy! The Poles have gone out of their minds, they are destroying themselves.”

Loss

It is extraordinary that in a region where blood had only just dried from the First World War, people are so willing to spill it again. Babel notes that “more and more often we come across trenches from the last war, barbed wire everywhere, enough for fences for the next ten years, destroyed villages.” Rather than rebuilding, in poverty, the people are turning against each other. Even within the Red Army, as the war (which they ultimately lost) goes steadily worse, antisemitism increases: “Down with the Yids, save Russia!” As one soldier yells.

The Revolution, Babel realises, is not doing what it is supposed to. “I mourn the fate of the Revolution.” But an army cannot bring a revolution. Instead, “we are destroying, moving forward like a whirlwind, like lava, hated by all, life is being shattered to pieces, I am at a huge, never-ending service for the dead.” It is not Communism that they bring, but ghosts and fresh graves.

To read the 1920 Diary is to be surrounded by these ghosts. There is the Polish estate that the Cossacks loot, where Babel finds the books the owners in their hurry to leave were unable to take: “Extremely precious books in a chest, they didn’t have time to take them along: the constitution approved by the Sejm at the beginning of the eighteenth century, old folios from the times of Nicholas I, the Polish code of laws, precious bindings, Polish manuscripts of the sixteenth century, the writings of monks, old French novels.”

Babel, this most wonderful writer, lives and breathes culture. His joy at the Jewish celebrations, at the old churches and synagogues, is palpable. He sits and talks to a priest about the differences between Catholics and Uniates. He is curious about these differences, about all the peoples in the area. And as a “Russian” and a Jew, he has access to more areas than most.

The End of the Story

Yet Babel is out of place. In some twenty years this world, already aflame, will be ruined completely. The Ukrainian UPA, now celebrated as national heroes in that country, will collaborate with the occupying Nazi German government to slaughter as many as 100’000 men, women and children, Poles and Jews and any Ukrainians who dared intermarry or believe in Soviet ideals, in an act of terrible ethnic cleansing. The Poles retaliated with just as much force, to the delight of the occupying German forces who could leave the resistance to wear itself out on self-slaughter. As for the Jews, caught in the middle, they were systematically murdered even if they escaped the UPA and the Poles. A bit further East, Babel’s Odessa, with about 30% of its population Jewish, was more or less emptied of them and began a precipitous decline similar to that of Trieste, which I wrote about last year. Finally, Stalinist population transfers made West Ukraine unrecognisable, shunting Ukrainians and Poles and other ethnicities around so that the multiethnic, multicultural, world of the diary became just a dream. Lviv, today that most “Ukrainian” of cities, only became ethnically Ukrainian in this period. Before it, Lwów was mostly a home for Poles and Jews.

I came away from the 1920 Diary just so desperately sad. There was a world here, and human savagery ruined it. I despise the nationalists who have destroyed culture here and elsewhere, whether they be Ukrainian or Russian, British or German or French, they are all my enemies. Babel, the Jew from Odessa, writing in Russian, multilingual and ever curious, was a hero of literature and his time. This land, which has only recently become Ukraine, gave birth to some of the most extraordinary literary figures the world has known – Schulz, Babel, Gogol, Shevchenko, Bulgakov, Lispector – to name just a few of them. But as for the ghosts of writers stranded in today’s quite understandably nationalistic Ukraine but did not write in that language or belong to that culture, who now will tend to their graves? With a world of mixed language, mixed culture, mixed identity, safeguarding heritage can only be a communal, collective effort, and matters of culture must not be left in the hands of the nationalists, who cannot even successfully look after their own.  

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.