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-flowing river. And it is not without humour, a calm,
detached humour, which, as the critic Bolinsky puts it, is not there
merely "because Gogol has a tendency to see the comic in everything,
but because it is true to life."