Project Gutenberg's Taras Bulba and Other Tales, by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

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Title: Taras Bulba and Other Tales

Author: Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Commentator: John Cournos

Posting Date: September 15, 2008 [EBook #1197]
Release Date: February, 1998

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TARAS BULBA AND OTHER TALES ***

Produced by John Bickers

TARAS BULBA AND OTHER TALES

By Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Introduction by John Cournos

Contents:

Taras Bulba
St. John's Eve
The Cloak
How the Two Ivans Quarrelled
The Mysterious Portrait
The Calash

INTRODUCTION

Russian literature, so full of enigmas, contains no greater creative
mystery than Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol (1809-1852), who has done for
the Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian
poetry. Before these two men came Russian literature can hardly have
been said to exist. It was pompous and effete with pseudo-classicism;
foreign influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there
was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them
the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the debris
which made for sterility and erected in their stead a new structure out
of living Russian words. The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul
and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was
it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with
Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into
an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into
its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.

More than that. The nomad and romantic in him, troubled and restless
with Ukrainian myth, legend, and song, impressed upon Russian
literature, faced with the realities of modern life, a spirit titanic
and in clash with its material, and produced in the mastery of this
every-day material, commonly called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense
with beauty. A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian
critic's observation about Gogol: