e
Crimeans and the Turks had had a literature I am convinced that no
history of an independent nation in Europe would prove so interesting as
that of the Cossacks." Again he complains of the "withered chronicles";
it is only the wealth of his country's song that encourages him to go on
with its history.

Too much a visionary and a poet to be an impartial historian, it is
hardly astonishing to note the judgment he passes on his own work,
during that same year, 1834: "My history of Little Russia's past is an
extraordinarily made thing, and it could not be otherwise." The deeper
he goes into Little Russia's past the more fanatically he dreams of
Little Russia's future. St. Petersburg wearies him, Moscow awakens no
emotion in him, he yearns for Kieff, the mother of Russian cities, which
in his vision he sees becoming "the Russian Athens." Russian history
gives him no pleasure, and he separates it definitely from Ukrainian
history. He is "ready to cast everything aside rather than read Russian
history," he writes to Pushkin. During his seven-year stay in St.
Petersburg (1829-36) Gogol zealously gathered historical material and,
in the words of Professor Kotlyarevsky, "lived in the dream of becoming
the Thucydides of Little Russia." How completely he disassociated
Ukrainia from Northern Russia may be judged by the conspectus of his
lectures written in 1832. He says in it, speaking of the conquest of
Southern Russia in the fourteenth century by Prince Guedimin at the head
of his Lithuanian host, still dressed in the skins of wild beasts, still
worshipping the ancient fire and practising pagan rites: "Then Southern
Russia, under the mighty protection of Lithuanian princes, completely
separated itself from the North. Every bond between them was broken;
two kingdoms were established under a single name--Russia--one under the
Tatar yoke, the other under the same rule with Lithuanians. But actually
they had no relation with one another; different laws, different
customs, different aims, different bonds, and different activities gave
them wholly different characters."

This same Prince Guedimin freed Kieff from the Tatar yoke. This city had
been laid waste by the golden hordes of Ghengis Khan and hidden for a
very long time from the Slavonic chronicler as behind an impenetrable
curtain. A shrewd man, Guedimin appointed a Slavonic prince to rule
over the city and permitted the inhabitants to practise their own
faith, Greek Christia