inging with mud, and
appearing an image of terror to the Tatar...."

Little by little the community grew and with its growing it began to
assume a general character. The beginning of the sixteenth century found
whole villages settled with families, enjoying the protection of the
Cossacks, who exacted certain obligations, chiefly military, so that
these settlements bore a military character. The sword and the plough
were friends which fraternised at every settler's. On the other hand,
Gogol tells us, the gay bachelors began to make depredations across the
border to sweep down on Tatars' wives and their daughters and to marry
them. "Owing to this co-mingling, their facial features, so different
from one another's, received a common impress, tending towards the
Asiatic. And so there came into being a nation in faith and place
belonging to Europe; on the other hand, in ways of life, customs, and
dress quite Asiatic. It was a nation in which the world's two extremes
came in contact; European caution and Asiatic indifference, niavete and
cunning, an intense activity and the greatest laziness and indulgence,
an aspiration to development and perfection, and again a desire to
appear indifferent to perfection."

All of Ukraine took on its colour from the Cossack, and if I have drawn
largely on Gogol's own account of the origins of this race, it was
because it seemed to me that Gogol's emphasis on the heroic rather than
on the historical--Gogol is generally discounted as an historian--would
give the reader a proper approach to the mood in which he created "Taras
Bulba," the finest epic in Russian literature. Gogol never wrote either
his history of Little Russia or his universal history. Apart from
several brief studies, not always reliable, the net result of his many
years' application to his scholarly projects was this brief epic
in prose, Homeric in mood. The sense of intense living, "living
dangerously"--to use a phrase of Nietzsche's, the recognition of courage
as the greatest of all virtues--the God in man, inspired Gogol, living
in an age which tended toward grey tedium, with admiration for his more
fortunate forefathers, who lived in "a poetic time, when everything was
won with the sword, when every one in his turn strove to be an active
being and not a spectator." Into this short work he poured all his love
of the heroic, all his romanticism, all his poetry, all his joy. Its
abundance of life bears one along like a fast-f