Kaplan

The ancient Greeks, it has been said, were too reasonable to ignore the intoxicating power of the unreasonable. They worshiped Dionysus, the god of excess and ecstasy, and they admired tragedy—an art form that shows how human feelings are far too intense and varied to fit into the gray, narrow strictures of rational self-interest. Explosions of passion—romantic and destructive, cruel and self-sacrificing, among nations as among individuals—not only are to be expected but are central to the human spirit. Tragedy, as the classicist Edith Hamilton once observed, is the beauty of intolerable truths.

The signal error of the American elite after the end of the Cold War was its trust in rationalism, which, it was assumed, would eventually propel the world’s peoples toward societies based on individual rights, united by American-style capitalism and technology. Recent explanations for terrorism have likewise been excessively rational. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the United States, many commentators and academics asserted that terrorism stemmed from poverty. Then, looking more closely, they said it stemmed from rising expectations and perceived inequalities. True enough: economic development often leads to upheaval and insurrection, as urban migration and the rise of the middle class unleash all manner of ambitions and yearnings. But even if poverty and perceived inequality were to vanish, and the rough places in the road of development were made plain, depraved outrages would continue. The more advanced a civilization, the more cerebral and subtly conformist it is likely to be—and, consequently, the more extreme the pent-up frustration that becomes the source of spectacular violence.

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If realism is to be truly realistic, it must acknowledge the romantic and heroic impulses in human beings, in all their healthy and perverse forms. Few writers do this as economically as Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol did in Taras Bulba. This short novel is a story of the Dnieper Cossacks. It takes place in a hazy past, sometime between the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when the Ukrainians are struggling for independence from Poland even as a threat persists from the Turks. It is a work that the critic John Cournos likens to a Homeric epic, “filled with as much Dionysian hate and heroism as the Iliad.” The work has a Kiplingesque gusto, too, that makes it a pleasure to read, but central to its theme is an unredemptive, darkly evil violence that is far beyond anything Kipling ever touched on. We need more works like Taras Bulba, to better understand the emotional wellsprings of the threat we face today in places like the Middle East and Central Asia.

Gogol gave his best years to the story—he finished the initial version in 1835 and the final version a decade later. According to David Magarshack, one of Gogol’s translators, Taras Bulba is the work that, with its romantic evocation of galloping Cossacks, created the myth of the “Russian soul.” But Gogol was no dreamy idealist: in Taras Bulba he writes of a “grim era in which man, living a blood-drenched life of military campaigns, tempered his soul by stifling his humanity.”

Gogol was a Russian nationalist but he saw the real, primordial Russia in the Ukraine (a word meaning “Borderland”), whose unremitting and unimpeded steppes—lacking natural boundaries and drained by few navigable rivers—had made its colliding peoples war-like. Although Gogol used the words “Russian,” “Ukrainian,” and “Cossack” to denote specific identities, he also recognized that these identities greatly overlapped (as local identities still do). His account mirrors the conflicts, the confusions, and the nuances of our own era. 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.

In Gogol’s account, the absence of natural boundaries leaves the Ukrainian steppes open to invaders from all sides. It also makes political frontiers artificial. Compare Central Asia today: a seething tableland of calcified regimes and nationalities inside false borders. Ethnic Tajiks dominate the great cities of Uzbekistan. Ethnic Uzbeks comprise a quarter of the population of Tajikistan. The great divisions in Gogol’s Taras Bulba are those of civilizations: the Eastern Orthodox Dnieper Cossacks are pitted against the Catholic Poles and the Muslim Turks and Tatars. This is a world so coarse, and so unreceptive to enlightenment, that freedom means only the freedom to express oneself through a stultifying yet energizing group identity—a sad commonplace in many parts of the world today, where dictatorships are crumbling and real democracy is weak or nonexistent. In such places, a fury burns that is beyond the cultivated bourgeois imagination. Gogol communicates this fury brilliantly.

Taras Bulba, a Dnieper Cossack, is an old regular army colonel. He is a man, in Gogol’s words, “made for the alarms of war [who] stood out for the rough straightforwardness of his temper.” Taras abuses his wife, who he fears will soften the character of his two sons. His worst nightmare is that his sons will never experience violence: he doesn’t care if they die young and horribly, so long as they prove themselves capable of cruelty against an enemy.

Gogol explains that a fearsome character like Taras could only be forged out of the chaos that had engulfed southern Russia, “abandoned by its princes [and] laid waste and left in ruins by the relentless … Mongol marauders.” A treeless landscape of charred villages stretched for hundreds of miles. Deprived of security—indeed, of any real government—and surrounded by predatory neighbors, men became cruel and fearless.