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Admission to the Sech has one requirement, the correct answers to questions by the head Cossack, the Ataman, in a short “initiation ceremony”: The education he seeks most for his sons, however, is with the Cossacks: In first living with Cossacks at what is called the Zaporozhian Sech, and then in battle, where young Cossack warriors are truly formed.Ĭossacks don’t like to train and so outside of battle they spend their time carousing and feasting at the Sech. “Ha, that’s my father for you! … There’s nothing the old scoundrel doesn’t know, and yet he pretends not to.”Īnd while he disparages the learning his two sons acquire at seminary in Kiev-he spiritedly tells his sons, “I spit on it all!” -he still sends them to seminary for an education before he sends them to be educated as Cossack warriors. Later, and a subject of the novel, they took up the fight against the Polish, who had taken control of their land.īulba seems to be an uneducated man, but he can refer to the Roman poet Horace, leading his eldest son, Ostrap, to say: “… when the flames of war gripped the ancient peaceful Slavic spirit, and Cossackry-that wide, ranging sweep of Russian character-was introduced ….” *ĭuring these tumultuous times, Gogol tells us, Cossacks, and men like Bulba, took up the fight against non-Christian invaders and so saved Europe from them. His character, therefore, has been formed by the turmoil of Russia in the fifteenth century:

Bulba, Gogol tells us, is a man of his age. He also is always ready to take up the defense of Christendom against the Turks, or Tatars.īulba is a more complicated character than has been depicted in films of the novel.

A Cossock, he is ready to fight whenever anyone fails to respect a Cossock elder and his ancestral laws or the Russian Orthodox faith. Unlike many men today, whether real or imagined, Taras Bulba, the character who gives his name to Nikolai Gogol’s novel Taras Bulba, knows exactly who he is and what he is supposed to do with his life.īulba, who “saw himself as the lawful protector of the Russian Orthodox faith,” lives by a simple rule.