Synopsis
Book by Gogol Nikolai
Extrait
1
“Turn around and let me look at you! What a sight! What are you wearing there, a priest’s cassock or something? Is that how you run around at that academy of yours?”
These were the words with which old Bulba greeted his two sons, who, having completed their studies at the Seminary in Kiev, had come home to their father. The sons had just dismounted from their horses. They were robust young men, with the sullen look one sees in all Seminary students recently released. Their strong, healthy faces were covered with a first down that had not yet been touched by a razor. Embarrassed by the way their father welcomed them, they stared sullenly at the ground.
“Wait, wait! Let me get a good look at you!” Bulba continued, turning them around. “What are these long tunics you’re wearing, if you can even call them that? I’ve never seen the like! Take a few steps—I swear they’ll get caught between your legs, and you’ll go flying!”
“Don’t make fun of us, Papa!” the older of the boys finally said.
“Look how high and mighty he is! And why, pray, shouldn’t I make fun of you?”
“Because, well . . . even though you’re my papa, if you make fun of me, then by God I’ll thrash you!”
“Ha! You damn son of a you-know-what! Your own father?” Taras Bulba shouted, staggering back in surprise.
“Yes, even though you’re my father. Insult me, and I don’t care who you are!”
“So how do you want to fight, with your fists?”
“Any way you want!”
“Well then, show me your fists!” Taras Bulba said, pulling up his sleeves. “I’d like to see what kind of man you are with your fists!”
Father and son, instead of greeting each other after their long separation, began throwing punches at each other’s stomach and chest, stepping back to glare at each other and then attacking again.
“Neighbors, villagers!” shouted the boys’ pale, gaunt mother, who was standing on the threshold and had not had a chance to embrace her beloved children. “The old man’s gone mad! His mind’s unhinged! The boys come home, we haven’t seen them for over a year, and what does he do? Fly at them with his fists!”
“He fights well, this one!” Bulba gasped, stopping for a moment. “By God, he fights well!” he continued, catching his breath. “So well that I’d have done better not to test him. He’ll make a good Cossack, this one! I welcome you, my son! Let us kiss!”
And father and son kissed.
“Well done, my boy! You can get the better of any man if you go at him the way you went at me! Show mercy to no one. But I still think you’re wearing the oddest clothes I’ve ever seen! What’s this string hanging there? And you,” he shouted, turning to his younger son. “You Grand Padishah, why are you standing there with your arms dangling?* You son of a dog, aren’t you going to punch me too?”
* Padishah = “Great Emperor.” The title of the sultan of Turkey.
“What will he think of next?” the mother gasped, throwing her arms around the boy. “He wants his own flesh and blood to raise a hand to him! That’s all we need! The boy is young, has had a long journey, and must be exhausted!” (The boy was nearly twenty and well over six feet tall.) “He has to rest and eat a bite of food, and the old fool wants to fight him!”
“You’re a milksop, I see!” Bulba said. “Don’t listen to your mother, my boy! She’s a woman, she knows nothing! What do you need sweetness for? An open field and a good horse, that’s all the sweetness you need! You see this saber? This saber is your mother! They’ve been filling your heads with filth, that’s what they’ve been doing! The Seminary, and all those little books and primers and philosophy and the devil knows what else—I spit on it all!” And Bulba slipped in a word that cannot appear in print. “What I ought to do is send you this very week to Zaporozhe.* That’s where you will find some real learning. There you’ll get some schooling. There you’ll really learn something!”
“The boys are only staying home a week?” the distraught mother gasped, her eyes filling with tears. “The poor boys won’t even have a chance to enjoy themselves a little. They won’t have a chance to get to know their own home, and I won’t be able to get my fill of looking at them!”
“Enough! Enough whining, old woman! Cossacks aren’t Cossacks so they can hobnob with women! Given half a chance you’d hide them under your skirt and sit on them like a hen. Off with you, quick, and get the table ready! Lay out everything we have! No need for fritters and poppyseed cakes, or any other delicate little morsels; just bring out some mutton and some goat, and the forty-year-old mead. And some good vodka, none of that fancy liquor with raisins and other little knickknacks in it! I want my vodka so clear and frothing that it hisses and whirls like it’s possessed!”
* A settlement on the Dnieper in Ukraine, where the Zaporozhian Cossacks had their base camp, the Sech.
Bulba led his sons into the front room. Two pretty maids wearing
coin necklaces, who had been busy cleaning, dropped everything and ran. They were evidently frightened by the arrival of the young masters, who never let anyone alone, or else they simply wanted to stick to their girlish ways, squealing and bolting whenever they saw a man, lifting their sleeves to their faces, hiding them in shame. The front room was furnished in the taste of those difficult, warring times, when battles and skirmishes broke out because of the union with Poland. Living traces of those days are found only in the songs and folk epics sung in the Ukraine by old, bearded, blind men quietly strumming their banduras, surrounded by a crowd.* Everything was clean and brightly painted. On the walls hung sabers, whips, bird traps, fishnets, muskets, an intricately carved gunpowder horn, a golden bridle, and a hobble with silver pendants. The windows were small, with round, dim panes such as are now found only in old churches, and through which one could only see if one raised the movable panels. Red drapes hung by the windows and doors. On shelves in the corners stood pots, bottles, flasks of blue and green glass, ornate silver goblets, and gilded cups of every handicraft—Venetian, Turkish, Circassian—that had made their way into Bulba’s front room by many paths and through many hands, as was not unusual for those swashbuckling times. Birch benches ran along the walls in all the rooms. Beneath the icons in the prayer corner stood a massive table, and near it a stove with many ledges and protuberances, surrounded by warm benches. The stove was covered with bright multicolored tiles. All this was very familiar to the two young men, who in the past had walked home every year during the holidays because they did not yet have horses, and because it was not customary to allow students of the Seminary to ride. The only Cossack tradition they had kept was the long forelock, the chub, which seasoned Cossacks tugged at in jest.‡ Now that
* A bandura is a lutelike instrument used by Ukrainian bards to accompany sung ballads and epics.
† Circassia is a region in the northern Caucasus.
‡ Ukrainian Cossacks shaved their heads, leaving only a forelock, known as chub.
they had finished their studies, Bulba had sent them a pair of young stallions from his own herd.
To celebrate his sons’ arrival, Bulba called in all the Cossack captains and anyone from his regiment who was within reach. And when his old comrade Captain Dimitro Tovkach came with two officers, Bulba immediately presented his sons to them.
“Here—see what fine boys these are! I’ll be sending them to the Sech soon.”
The guests congratulated Bulba and the two young men, assuring them that it was a good idea, that there was no better schooling for young men than the Zaporozhian Sech.
“Well, my brothers, seat yourselves at the table wherever you like!” Bulba shouted, and turned to his sons. “First we shall down some vodka! God’s blessings upon you, and good health to the two of you! To you, Ostap, and to you, Andri! May God grant that success always follow you in battle, whether you fight heathen, Turk, or Tatar fiend. And if the damn Poles start plotting against our religion, then may you thrash them too! Come, hand me your cup! Good vodka, no? So how does one say ‘vodka’ in Latin? Ha! Well, my son, those Romans were fools—they didn’t even know there was such a thing as vodka! What was that fellow’s name again, the one who wrote little Latin ditties? I’m not much of a lettered man, so it’s not coming to me right now. Wasn’t it Horace, or something?”
“Ha, that’s my father for you!” Ostap, the older of the two boys, thought. “There’s nothing the old scoundrel doesn’t know, and yet he pretends not to.”
“It would surprise me if the Archimandrite at the Seminary let you have so much as a whiff of vodka,” Taras continued.* “And I trust you were given robust birch-wood and fresh cherry-wood whippings across your backs and your other Cossack parts! And perhaps the cleverer you got the more you got to taste the cat-o’-nine-tails. And
* Archimandrite: the head of a Russian Orthodox monastery or group of monasteries.
not only on Saturdays, I’m sure, but on Wednesdays and Thursdays too!”
“There is no reason to remember what was, Papa,” Ostap answered coolly. “What was is now past and gone!”
“I’d like to see them try something now!” Andri said. “I’d like to see someone so much as try to touch us. Let some Tatar dog cross my path, and I’ll teach him what a Cossack saber is!”
“Well spoken, my son! By God, well spoken indeed! When the time comes I will ride out by your side, by God I will! Why the devil should I sit around here? So I can sow buckwheat? So I can run the household, tend the sheep and pigs, and help the old woman with her sewing and needlework? To the devil with her! I’m a Cossack and will have none of this! So what if there’s no war, I’ll ride with you to Zaporozhe for some fun, by God I will!”
Old Bulba became increasingly heated, and finally burst into a rage. Then he stood up from the table, composed himself, and stamped his foot.
“We will leave tomorrow! There is no point in dawdling! What enemy can we expect to dig up here? What do we need this house for? What do we need all these pots for?” He began pounding the pots and bottles with his fist and hurling them across the room. His poor wife, used to her husband’s outbursts, looked on sadly from where she sat on the bench. She did not dare open her mouth, but when she heard his decision, so dreadful to her, she could not restrain her tears. She looked at her sons, from whom she was in danger of being parted so soon, and no one can describe the mute power of the sadness that trembled in her eyes and on her lips, which were convulsively pressed together.
Bulba was an uncommonly stubborn man. He was a character who could only have sprung forth from the harsh fifteenth century in that half-nomadic corner of Europe, when the whole of primitive Russia’s south, abandoned by its princes, was laid waste and left in ruins by the relentless onslaught of the Mongol marauders; it was a time when man, turned out of house and home, became dauntless, when he settled in charred ruins in the face of terrible neighbors and never- ending danger, learning to look them in the eye and unlearning that fear exists in the world; when the flames of war gripped the ancient peaceful Slavic spirit, and Cossackry—that wide, raging sweep of Russian character—was introduced, and when the Cossacks, no one knew their number, struck root along the rivers, at crossings, and on embankments. And when the Turkish Sultan asked how many Cossacks there were, he was told, “Who knows! They are scattered over the whole of our steppes. Behind every weed you’ll find a Cossack and his steed!” It was truly an extraordinary phenomenon of Russian power, arising from the national heart of fiery poverty. Instead of the former sovereign principalities consisting of small towns of hunters and trappers, instead of minor princes quarreling and trading with these towns, in their place menacing Cossack settlements and strongholds grew, linked by their shared danger and their hatred of the infidel marauders. We know from our history books how the Cossacks’ endless skirmishes and restless life saved Europe from the unstoppable infidel attacks that threatened to overthrow her.
The Polish kings who replaced the appanage princes found themselves lords of these wide lands. Far off and weak though they were, these kings understood the importance of the Cossacks and the advantages to be gained from the Cossack life of warring and defending. The Polish kings encouraged and flattered the Cossacks, and un- der their distant rule the Hetmans, chosen from among the Cossacks themselves, transformed their homesteads and huts into military bastions. Theirs was not a disciplined and organized army—there were none in that era. But in the case of war and a call to arms, within eight days and not a day more every Cossack presented himself in full armor on his horse, receiving only a single gold ducat in payment from the king, and within two weeks an army came together the like of which no recruiting force could have gathered. When the campaign ended, the warriors returned to their meadows and fields by the Dnieper crossings, fished, traded, brewed beer, and were free Cossacks. Foreigners of the time were astounded by the truly unusual capabilities of the Cossack. There was no craft he was not master of. He could distill vodka, harness a cart, and grind gunpowder; he was adept at blacksmithing and metalwork; and on top of all that, he could feast recklessly, drink, and carouse as only a Russian can.
Besides the registered Cossacks, who felt bound to present themselves in times of war, it was also possible in case of great urgency to gather crowds of eager volunteers. A Cossack captain had only to stroll through a market or across a village square and shout at the top of his voice, “Hey, you beer brewers! Enough of your brewing and lolling around on stove benches and feeding the flies with your fat carcasses! Ride out in quest of a knight’s glory and honor! You plowmen, buckwheat sowers, shepherds, and women-chasers! Enough following the plow, sloshing through the mud in your yellow boots, and crawling to women beneath the covers, squandering your knightly strength! It’s time to get yourself some Cossack glory!” And these words were like sparks falling onto dry wood. The plowman threw down his plow, the beer brewer pushed over his tubs and smashed his barrels, craftsmen and store owners sent to the devil all their crafts, all their stores, and all the pots in their houses. Anyone and everyone climbed onto his horse. In a word, the Russian character assumed a broad and powerful sweep.
Taras was one of the true old commanders. He was made for the alarms of war, and stood out for the rough straightforwardness of his temper. In those days the influence of Poland had already begun to have an effect on the Russian nobility. Many had adopted Polish customs, flaunting great pomp, keeping astonishing numbers of servants, falcons, huntsmen, feasts, and palaces. Taras did not crave these splendors. He loved the simple life of the Cossack, and quarreled with comrades who were drawn to the Warsaw faction, accusing them of being lackeys of the Polish noblemen. He was eternally restless. He saw himself as the lawful protector of the Russian Orthodox faith. He was quick to enter villages whenever the people complained of oppression by the landlords and the raising of chimney taxes. He and his Cossacks carried out reprisals. Taras lived by the rule that he was always ready to unsheathe his saber in three circumstances: when commissars did not show full respect to Cossack e...
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