Homo Monstrosus
Taras Bulba, by Nicolai Gogol. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
They burned him at the stake, bound to a great tree in iron chains. The flames lapped at his feet, glowing into his old face that was scarred and leathered with battle, brightening the silver of his fierce mustache....
Out of the reddened shadows that fell over him like a mantle his lips could be seen curling in a smile, contemptuous and arrogant, and he turned his eyes toward the Dnyeper where the boats of his brothers were pulling away under a rain of lead.
“Farewell, comrades,” he shouted to them; “remember me, and come hither again next spring to make merry!”
And then he turned to the Lyakhs against whom he had waged war and who knew him as the raven of the steppe.
The fire had risen above the faggots and the great tree was burning. Out of the flames came the voice of the hero....
“A Tzar shall arise from the Russian soil and there shall not be a Power in the world which shall not submit to him.”
Thus died Taras Bulba, kazak.
In this day when a man’s skin is his most greedily guarded possession and the lisping of pale, pretty words his greatest glory, Taras Bulba comes charging into America, a figure in need. On his black horse he comes, his scalp lock flying in the wind, his sword waving in great circles above his head, his body leaning over the shining neck of his steed and his voice ringing with the battle whoop of the kazak.
He is the eternal warrior, the plundering hero, the lusty knight of battle, a devil of a man with boiling blood in his veins and the savage joy of life in his heart.
Taras and his two sons, Andrii and Ostap, go thundering up and down the Russian steppe with the savage avalanche of the Zaporozhe. They fight and carouse and their deeds are mighty—mightier than the deeds of which Homer sang and the performances which Walter Scott sketched. Beside Taras Ivanhoe pales into tin puppet, Ulysses into a lady’s man.
What a book!
If you know Gogol through his Dead Souls, the “humorous” classic of Russia, you will read in amazement his Taras Bulba. It is Rabelais with a sword. Through its pages ring the shouts of battle and Gargantuan manhood—Homo Monstrosus....
Once or twice the pale face of a woman peeps out of them and Gogol kicks it back into place with his kazak boot.
“Do you want fire, Ostap? Do you want mad blood in your heart? Come ride with me over the steppe to the tents of the Zaporozhe....”
When I closed the book with its red shouts still ringing in my ears—with old Taras still burning against the great tree and the magic steppe stretching before me—I thought of the baby-ribbon bards and the querulous quibblers of American letters—and smiled....
Come on, Bulba, there is still blood in America that has not dried, there are still hearts that have not been transformed into pink doilies.
Welcome! You can’t shout too loud for me, you can’t swagger too much. The soul of you that left your burning body laughed and roared its way into heaven....
Gorky at His Best and Worst
Chelkash, and Other Stories, by Maxim Gorky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Maxim Gorky is the poorest and most uneven of the Russian writers. He is—or was—a pioneer. He came wailing from lonely roads where the vagrom man sleeps beneath the stars and wonders what there is to life. And his dull, bitter plaints with ferocity as their leit motif soon sounded over the world. When the majority of Russian genius was struggling to “go to the people” Gorky had the advantage of coming from the people.
Alfred Knopf’s collection of Gorky tales under the title of Chelkash is Gorky at his best and worst. I find in it some of his best tales abominably written, studded with crass “gems” of philosophy, broken up with unnecessary moralizings. For instance, his Twenty-Six of Us and One Other. In this Gorky writes of his immortal bakeshop. As a youth Gorky spent his days in a bakeshop. Time and again he has painted it, in other stories better than in this one. But in this instance the bakeshop is only a background; usually it is the main theme. Tanya, a little girl, stops every morning to say “Hello” to the twenty-six bakers. They give her little cakes. She is the only “ray of sweetness” in their lives. They look upon her as a daughter, a shrine. And Tanya it is who alone awakens in them for a few moments each day something approaching fineness. Along comes a terrible dandy, a ladies’ man. He seduces every lady he sets his cap for; it is his boast. The bakers like him: he is a “gentleman” and very democratic. But one day when he is boasting the head baker grows excited and mentions “Tanya.” The dandy boasts he will seduce her. An argument follows. After a month the dandy succeeds. The bakers witness the girl’s “undoing.” When she comes out of the dandy’s room, smiling, happy, they gather around her, spit at her, revile and abuse her. No names they can think of are bad enough. They fall into a frenzy of vituperation. But they do not strike her. Realizing dully that a “god” has died, they go back to work.
Chelkash, the first tale in the book, is Gorky on his “home ground”—the vagrom man, the pirate, the road thief. He paints him with a careful brush and a sureness of his subject. In The Steppe he does the same. A Rolling Stone, and Chums, the last the best story in the volume, are also variations of the vagrom man theme—the underdog. But it is in stories like One Autumn Night, Comrades, The Green Kitten, and Her Lover that Gorky reveals his greatest genius and his greatest weakness. He can feel them, imagine them, see them, but for some reason he cannot write them. One Autumn Night might have been one of the world’s strongest classics.
All the tales in the volume are the work of the “first” Gorky—the bitter one, the melodramatic, outraged Gorky. They are on a whole not as good as the collection of stories written during that same period and translated in a volume called Orloff and His Wife. Gorky still lives and he has learned how to write. His later tales, composed in Italy by the “second” Gorky, the consumptive, contemplative, clear-seeing Gorky, are mature, almost mellow. But they are no longer distinctive. Anyone could have written them, anyone with a bit of genius and a great deal of time on his hands. But the Chelkash tales and the tales in Orloff and His Wife—these no one but Gorky has written, and although they are inferior in workmanship to the products of Chekhov and Andreyev the American reader will find them perhaps more interesting.