In response the Cossack brotherhoods emerged, with their apotheosis of “comradeship.” Private, material life came to be considered shameful. Russian communism may be better understood less as an import from Central European intellectuals than as a reflection of Russia’s own inherent psychologial tendencies. (According to the Russian intellectual Nicolas Berdyaev, Bolshevism was the Eastern Orthodox form of Marxism, in that it was a faith imbued with the idea of “totality.”)

For the Dnieper Cossacks in Taras Bulba, violence is a way of life, an expression of joy and belief, unlinked to any strategic or tactical necessity. Warfare in the novel is nearly continuous. As one Cossack declares, “as we all know, a young man cannot make do without war.” In such a world any notion of a rational “balance of power” with the Catholic Poles or the Islamic Tatars is not a pragmatic goal but a corrupting and effeminate conceit. Those outside the marrow of Orthodoxy exist only to be annihilated, or to be converted en masse to the faith.

Because the intervals between fighting are rare, they are also precious, and are given over to “spellbinding”—that is, to prolonged drunken orgies. “Stores were ransacked,” Gogol writes, “of mead, vodka, and beer, and the storekeepers were glad to escape with their lives.” Hearing stories of Catholic victories to the west, and of Jewish collusion in those victories, the Cossacks take murderous revenge on local Jews, whom they toss into the river.

Gogol’s Cossacks represent the ultimate crowd-pack, fueled by the crude belief systems and symbolism that sustain what the national security analyst Ralph Peters has called “euphorias of hatred.” Peters notes that although individual people are equally capable of love and hate, crowds are incomparably better at hatred. Individuals within a crowd are able to take part in cathartic violence without having to accept responsibility for it. The crowd that cheered in Ramallah in October 2000 as two Israeli soldiers were tortured and defenestrated is a classic example of this.

Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Nobel laureate who devoted a career to the study of crowds, has written, “The crowd needs a direction.… Its constant fear of disintegration means that it will accept any goal.” There’s no reasoning with a crowd, in other words: against the absolute faith of a Cossack horde, for example, the urban civilization of the Poles is nothing. This kind of faith, Gogol writes, is “insurmountable and ferocious, like a rock rising from the depths of a stormy ocean, fashioned from a single unshatterable mass of stone.”

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The raw, even delusional, passion at the heart of such faith has played a frightful role in human affairs. One need look no further than the devastation brought about in twentieth-century Europe by the crowd-pack to understand the destructive power that this passion can unleash. And yet, ironically, meeting the challenge of the crowd-pack—indeed, even surviving as a society—requires a willingness to tap into the same dangerously elemental energies of raw passion. Channeled effectively, these energies can also become the wellspring of liberal patriotism, heroism, and romance.

This kind of passion remains robust in the United States—a firm conclusion one can draw from our post–9/11 stocktaking. Foreigners often find Americans as a group more than a little hard to take, put off by the overt nationalism, the deep religiosity, the proud vulgarity, the searing public debate, the unashamed sentimentality, the battered but defiant idealism. These are precisely the qualities that are disappearing in Europe. Traumatized by world war and absolutist political ideology, Western Europe’s political elites have been working for decades to neutralize passion altogether. Europe’s intellectuals and politicians have become increasingly effete, bureaucratic, and defeatist; their foreign policies, to the extent that they even exist, amount to a form of regulatory compromise, guaranteed to pursue the path of least resistance. Europe, if it seeks to avoid decline, will have to relearn the lesson of Gogol and the ancient Greeks: that rational argument alone will never fully overcome those who simply and passionately believe.

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ROBERT D. KAPLAN is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of nine books on travel and foreign affairs, including Balkan Ghosts, Eastward to Tartary, The Ends of the Earth, and The Coming Anarchy. His tenth book, Mediterranean Winter, will be published by Random House next year. He lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Peter Constantine

“That splendid epic worthy of Homer … that colossal portrait in a small frame,” wrote the Russian critic Belinsky about Taras Bulba when it first appeared in 1835. Published initially in the form of a long story when Gogol was twenty-six, it was one of his most successful early works. He then went on to develop it over the next six years into the more mature and complex novel published in 1842, the version used for this translation.

Gogol had burst onto the Russian literary scene in 1831 with a volume of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near the Dikanka River, a second volume of which appeared a year later. In January 1835, he published a two-volume collection of stories, Arabeski, followed in March of the same year by another two-volume story collection, Mirgorod, in which the first version of Taras Bulba appeared.

These early works reflect Gogol’s deep interest in his native Ukraine, with its rich folklore and Cossack traditions. The stories, mainly folk-inspired tales mixing naturalism and fantasy, focus almost exclusively on Ukrainian themes, the natural beauty of the steppes, and the historic struggles of its people. Gogol’s father, Vasily Afanasevich Gogol, had written plays in Ukrainian, which at the time was considered a substandard dialect of Russian, and Nikolai inherited his father’s passion for the Ukrainian language and culture, and worked on a Ukrainian-Russian dictionary as well as gathering Ukrainian proverbs and sayings. Though his prose was affected by the Ukrainian language, particularly in the speech of his characters, Gogol always wrote in Russian.

Taras Bulba is Gogol’s only completed historical work, an epic in prose that combines influences from Ukrainian ballads, Russian folk epics, the romances of Sir Walter Scott, and Homer’s Iliad. Gogol took the Cossack way of life, with its traditions and warrior pride, and gave it an epic cast. Scott was a particularly important model, as Gogol could empathize with his quest to preserve Scotland’s ballads and tales and to re-create its heroic sagas, and he found Scott’s formula for historical fiction useful for re-creating the untamed Ukrainian past.

In the final version of Taras Bulba, Gogol emphasized Russian as opposed to Ukrainian patriotism, turning the wild Cossacks of the past into chivalric crusaders for the Russian Orthodox faith against the Polish Catholics who were striving to subjugate the Ukraine. The novel also presents a stark picture of the Cossacks’ brutality toward the Jews.