Taras Bulba

2003 Modern Library Edition

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Gogol, Nikolai Vasil’evich, 1809–1852.
[Taras Bul’ba. English]
Taras Bulba / Nikolai Gogol; translated by Peter Constantine, with an introduction by Robert D. Kaplan.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-273-5
I. Constantine, Peter, 1963– II. Kaplan, Robert D., 1952– III. Title.
PG3333 .T3 2003
891.73′3—dc21 2002032595

Modern Library website address: www.BookishMall.com

v3.1

NIKOLAI V. GOGOL

Nikolai Gogol, whose imaginative, satiric work ushered in the naturalist movement in Russian literature, was born in the Ukrainian town of Sorochintsy on April 1, 1809 (March 19 by the Russian calendar), into a family of ancient and noble Cossack lineage. His father was a minor official, amateur playwright, and gentleman farmer who presided over Vassilyevka, an estate of some three thousand acres where Gogol grew up in an atmosphere of relative affluence and parental indulgence. In 1821, at the age of twelve, Gogol left Vassilyevka and entered the School of Higher Studies at Nezhin; there he developed an unbridled passion for theater and poetry. After he graduated in 1828, he attempted to find work as an actor but also published Hans Kuechelgärten (1829), an epic poem that received only negative reviews. He secured a post with a government ministry in St. Petersburg and began writing a series of folktales set in his native Ukraine.

The appearance of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka in 1831 brought Gogol immediate acclaim. “I have finished reading Evenings,” wrote Alexander Pushkin to a friend. “An astounding book! Here is fun for you, authentic fun of the frankest kind without anything maudlin or prim about it. And moreover—what poetry, what delicacy of sentiment in certain passages! All this is so unusual in our literature that I am still unable to get over it.”

Gogol’s association with Pushkin soon inspired two of his greatest works: the play The Inspector General and Dead Souls. A comedy of mistaken identity that is a satiric indictment of Russian bureaucracy, The Inspector General set all of Russia laughing when it was staged in 1836. “Everyone has got his due, and I most of all,” Tsar Nicholas I reportedly remarked. “The Inspector General happened to be the greatest play ever written in Russian (and never surpassed since),” judged Vladimir Nabokov. “The play begins with a blinding flash of lightning and ends in thunderclap. In fact it is wholly placed in the tense gap between the flash and the crash.… Gogol’s play is poetry in action.”

Stung by criticism of The Inspector General, Gogol moved to Italy in 1836, and except for two brief visits home he remained abroad for twelve years. Much of this time was devoted to writing Dead Souls. Published in 1842, the novel revolves around Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a mystifying swindler who travels through provincial Russia trafficking in “souls”—serfs who, despite being dead, could still be bought and sold.

The same year marked the appearance of Gogol’s famous short story “The Overcoat,” in which a buffoonish clerk is robbed of a symbolic garment that represents all his hopes and dreams. “We all came from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’ ” said Dostoevsky in acknowledgment of Russian literature’s vast debt to Gogol. And Vladimir Nabokov noted: “When, as in his immortal ‘The Overcoat,’ Gogol really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.” But Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends (1847), a reactionary work reflecting the writer’s growing religious and moral fanaticism, virtually ended his career.

Gogol spent his final years struggling in vain to finish the second part of Dead Souls: a sequel in which he intended to depict Chichikov’s moral conversion. The effort helped propel him into insanity, and he burned the final version of the manuscript shortly before his death in Moscow, following weeks of fasting, on the morning of March 4, 1852 (February 21 by the Russian calendar). Commenting on the crowd at Gogol’s funeral, a passerby asked: “Who is this man who has so many relatives at his funeral?” A mourner replied: “This is Nikolai Gogol, and all of Russia is his relative.”

Cover

Title Page

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

INTRODUCTION
Euphorias of Hatred:The Grim Lessons of a Novel by Gogol
by Robert D. Kaplan

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
by Peter Constantine

MAP OF THE UKRAINE
IN THE LATE 17TH CENTURY

TARAS BULBA

About the Translator