These witches of Gogol, so bold and novel in their conception, put me in mind of a painting of the Spanish school, attributed to Murillo. This canvas, which I saw several years ago in a private gallery, is a Temptation of St. Anthony, interpreted in an unlooked-for way. A young man of thirty years, whose features are those of the painter himself, with sunburned face and passionate eyes, bends towards his mistress, a lovely girl with piquant charm, sal y pimienta, who is leaning on his shoulder, while her mouth is arched at the corners of the lips in a smile of irresistible seduction.
In these tales of Gogol, the marvellous abounds. But it abounds equally in the life of these Malo-Russians whom the author has wished to depict for us. The supernatural affrights and charms them. If the legends of the Ukraïna are lugubrious, yet they never weary of hearing them told. The young girl who at the first sound of the serenade lifts the latch, steals out from the door, and joins the love-stricken bandura-player, desires no other entertainment on the border of the pond which in the uncanny lights of the night reflects in its waters the willows and the maples:[13] “Tell me it, my handsome Cossack,” she says, laying her cheek to his face and kissing him: “No? Then it is plain that thou dost not love me, that thou hast some other young girl. Speak! I shall not be afraid. My sleep will not be broken by it. On the contrary, I shall not be able to go to sleep at all if thou dost not tell me this story. I shall be thinking of something else. I shall believe—come, Lyévko, tell it.” They are right who say that the Devil haunts the brain of young girls to keep their curiosity awake.
Lyévko, however, yields, and unfolds the old legend. It is the story of the daughter of the sotnik (captain of a hundred Cossacks). The sotnik had a daughter white as snow. He was old, and one day he brought home a second wife, young and handsome, white and rose; but she looked at her stepdaughter in such a strange way that she cried out under her gaze. The young wife was a witch, as was seen immediately. The very night of the wedding, a black cat enters the young girl’s room, and tries to choke her with his iron claws. She snatches a sabre down from the wall, she strikes at the animal, and cuts off his paw. He disappears with a yell. When the stepmother was seen again, her hand was covered with bandages. Five days later the father drove his daughter from the house, and in grief she drowned herself in the pond. Since then the drowned girl has been waiting for the sorceress, to beat her with the green rushes of the pond; but up to the present time the stepmother has succeeded in escaping from all her traps. ‘She is very wily,’ says the poor Undine. ‘I feel that she is here. I suffer from her presence. Because of her, I cannot swim freely like a fish. I go to the bottom like a key. Find her for me.’
Lyévko the singer hears the drowned girl thus speaking to him in a dream. But this dream is a reality; for when he wakes, Lyévko, who has tracked and caught the stepmother in the circle of the young shadows, finds in his hand the reward of the Queen of the Lake. It is a letter containing an order for the marriage between Lyévko and Hanna, his fiancée. The order is given by the district commissioner, to Hanna’s father, who has hitherto shown himself recalcitrant. “I shall not tell any one the miracle which has been performed this night,” murmurs the happy bridegroom. “To thee alone will I confide it, Hanna; thou alone wilt believe me, and together we will pray for the soul of the poor drowned girl.”
IV.
In this collection of “Evenings at the Farm” figures the heroic story of a great character, the life of the atamán Taras Bulba. Gogol afterwards turned this epopée into prose, but the after-touches did not change the character of the early composition. The hero of “Taras Bulba” is one of those Zaparog Cossacks who played such an important part in the history of Poland, and later in the history of Russia. After the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Zaporozhtsui, who formed a military republic, or, if the term is preferred, an association of cavalry bandits, became the terror of the neighboring peoples. They had on an island in the Dniépr a permanent camp, the Setch, where, even in times of peace, young Cossacks came to perfect themselves in the noble game of war. Women were rigorously excluded from the Setch. The men were quartered in divisions, or kurénui; each kurén had its chief, an atamán (hetman); the entire camp was commanded by a supreme chief, the atamán-kotchevóï.
The romance of “Taras Bulba” opens in the most original fashion.[14] The two sons of the Cossack Taras are just back from the divinity school, to which they will not return. The father, a vigorous Zaporozhets, who has grown gray in harness, receives them with sarcastic observations about their long robes. It is a sort of test like that which Don Diego gives his sons in the “Romancero.” The eldest of Bulba’s sons, Ostap (Eustace), behaves like Rodriguez. “Though thou art my father, I swear to thee, if thou continuest to laugh at me, I will give thee a drubbing.”
After an exchange of well-directed blows on either side, Taras kisses effusively his son whose courage and strength he has just experienced; he rudely rallies Andriï (Andrew), the younger, on his gentleness: “Thou art a puppy so far as I can judge. Don’t listen to they mother’s words: she is a woman; she knows naught. What need have ye of being coddled? A good prairie, a good horse, that’s all the delicacies that ye need. See this sabre: behold your mother, lads!”
The poor woman is not at the end of her trials. Taras announces his immediate departure with his sons: she protests amid tears and lamentations; the Cossack ill-uses her, and cuts short her complaints. The two sons spend in their father’s house just time enough to give the narrator a chance to describe this interior so characteristic and brilliantly colored. On the wall hang all the exquisite ornaments in which barbarous man delights,—sabres, whips, inlaid arms, reins worked in gold wire, silver-nailed clogs. On the dressers are the products of civilization brought from different corners of the world,—masterpieces of Florentine engravers, of Venetian glass-blowers, of Oriental goldsmiths; and in contrast with all this treasure, the fruit of pillage, piles of wood, the stove made of the enamelled bricks loved by the Ukraïne peasant, and the “holy images” in hieratic posture, these Lares indispensable at every Malo-Russian fireside.
The old Bulba has declared at table, before all the sotniks of his polk[15] who were present in the village, that he should be off next day. The mother spends the night in tears, crouching by her children’s bedside, gazing upon them with a look full of anguish like the swallow of the steppe on her nest. She still hopes that when he wakes, Bulba will have forgotten what he vowed in the exaltation of the bowl.