More On Gogol

By Daniel Larison • April 15, 2009, 5:42 PM

No discussion of the Taras Bulba/Gogol controversy would be complete if Cathy Young didn’t add her predictable two cents:

Yet in creating their propaganda vehicle, the makers of “Taras Bulba” were arguably more unfaithful to the source than those maligned Ukrainian translators. While Gogol admires his Cossacks as warriors for God and country, he unflinchingly portrays their less pleasant traits. They are addicted to warfare for its own sake, ever seeking a pretext to unleash violence on the hated Muslims, Catholics and Jews. They loot and kill; avenging fallen brothers-in-arms, they torch churches and burn women and infants. Not so in the movie, where the Poles commit graphically shown atrocities while the Cossacks, a Russian reviewer quipped, strictly follow the Geneva Convention. Bulba even gets a respectable motive for his anti-Polish crusade: In a pure invention of the filmmakers’, Polish soldiers burn his farm and butcher his wife.

Of course, this is a convention of popular film-making, which Young inevitably attributes to propagandistic motive. In Braveheart, which Englishmen everywhere find obnoxious in its unfair portrayal of their ancestors, Mel Gibson portrayed William Wallace as an inoffensive fellow who was merely avenging the wrongful execution of his wife, rather than telling the true story of Wallace, the brigand who quarreled with local officials and killed them over a catch of fish. Hardly anyone pretends that Braveheart is a faithful representation of the history of Scotland, and viewers can be similarly skeptical of Taras Bulba‘s literal fidelity to Gogol’s story, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the either is a bad or unworthy film, much less that it can be dismissed as simple propaganda.

In other words, the creators of Taras Bulba engaged in poetic license, which hardly anyone finds even remotely objectionable when it is done in adaptations of other historic, legendary or fictional characters, but which is obviously a heinous act when it serves to portray a Cossack or a Russian in a relatively favorable way. Ideologies do come and go, and happily Gogol and his work have outlasted several of them, and one can only hope that they will continue to do so long after fashionable Western anti-Russianism, Ukrainian nationalism and Putinism are all long dead.

13 Responses to More On Gogol

Mark Moore says:

April 15, 2009 at 6:36 pm

OT — Front Porchy type post at:

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/04/12/not-a-bug-an-undocumented-feature-the-case-for-anti-modernism-part-i/

Formulating a Future: The Case for Anti-Modernism, Part I

Sharon April 12th, 2009

One of the best things about life is the strange bedfellows you find in it. It makes for one heck of a slumber party.

I was thinking about this recently, because I happened to follow out the links that people have been putting in to my posts one afternoon when I had time to kill, just out of curiosity. I do this periodically, but Iâ€™d never done so systematically, or sat down to really sort through them. And the juxtaposition, say of the black women survivalists with the urban Catholic distributist nuns, the anarchist social critics and the right wing ones, the Belizian Mennonites, the Mormon food storage people, the Pagan Fiber artists, the Baptist farmers, the socialist Baptist farmers, and the guy who occasionally sticks my pieces in with his essays on South African poetry made for a truly engaging collage. And it got me asking – what do all of us have in common? …
SidRoman says:

April 15, 2009 at 7:31 pm

How quaint of Daniel Larison to equate morally “Ukrainian nationalism” with “Putinism” as opposed to “Russian nationalism” at the end of his piece. My parents were from Ukraine and, because of Soviet Russian repression, Ukrainians lived through a genocidal famine in the thirties killing some seven million, as documented by Conquest, and were refused entry into Soviet Russia but left to die with their families for fear of spreading evil Ukrainian Petliurite influences into Russia. The Ukrainian language, its churches, and culture became systematically repressed (as under the tsars) up until the collapse of the Union. I assume Larison would call any attempt to fortify this language and culture as “Ukrainian nationalist” and worthy of the same opprobrium as Putinism. Ukraine’s president Yushchenko suffers a poison attempt on his life with the culprits hiding in Putin’s Russia, while Putin’s Chekist Russia issues stamps commemmorating the heads of the Soviet O.G.P.U. during the Ukrainian famine. Yushchenko, despite his faults, is a religious man; Putin K.G.B. immorality personified. Ukraine is a democracy with peaceful changes in government, while Russians, ever craving the Strong Hand have never had one peaceful, democratic change in government in history. In Ukraine journalists live. In Russia they die. Thank God that only Russia could produce a madman with such popular approval as Vladimir (I’ll radiate the Baltics) Zhirinovsky whom we are told loved the artistic license taken with the Russian Gogol movie. Yes, great point Daniel, let us do hope that such a stupid idea as Ukrainian nationalism does vanish down the drain despite the millions who perished defending or nourishing it. Better for Ukraine to become a Chekist Russian-dominated authoritarian kleptocracy than for it to join the West or attempt democracy.
appletree says:

April 15, 2009 at 9:30 pm

As an American whoâ€™s lived in Kiev for the better part of the last decade, and whoâ€™s married into a Kiev family, I came across Danielâ€™s posts about Gogol/Bulba and thought Iâ€™d add my comments.

In his comments to Danielâ€™s last Bulba post, Ottovbvs wrote: â€œUkraine, Georgia, the Crimeaâ€¦ are as Russian as Tolstoy.â€ This is a ludicrous statement. One sorta wants to take it on, but doing so would be like taking a scalpel to a wad of cotton candy, or fighting with fog.

Daniel wrote in a comment to the last post: â€œThat said, whatâ€™s done is done, and I donâ€™t see any benefit coming from trying to reincorporate [Ukraine] into Russia.â€ Kiev heaves a sigh of relief on this April morning as Daniel renders his verdict, but in fact the idea that Ukraine is going to be â€œreincorporatedâ€ into Russia has no reality, no one here even worries about that. (Iâ€™ve found that this is the sort of thing that non-Slavic Orthodox converts Iâ€™ve met like to talk about when theyâ€™re not intoning about â€œHoly Mother Russiaâ€ — sort of a compensatory mechanism for not completely fitting in.) Ukraine wonâ€™t be reincorporated for this reason: even those Ukrainians, and Ukrainian leaders, and Ukrainian oligarchs, whom idiot Western news reports reductively describe as â€œpro-Russianâ€ donâ€™t want reincorporation. Yep: Ukrainians really do have a serious affinity for Russia, and they mostly donâ€™t give a damn about the U.S. or â€œthe West,â€ but that said, they donâ€™t want Moscow rule. (This is whatâ€™s known as â€œtwo (slightly) contradictory ideas existing at the same time.â€)

Itâ€™s true, Russia could probably take Ukraine over militarily tomorrow, but why bother? Then all the Kremlin would do is alienate that huge mass of Ukrainians (the majority, Iâ€™d say) who have serious pro-Russian affinities. All the Kremlin has to do is wait until Yushchenko, with his 4% approval rating, leaves the scene. Then someone who knows the score (probably Tymoshenko in the short term; the Russians like Tymoshenko) will take over, the moronic talk about NATO and Ukraine being â€œa European countryâ€ will end, and thatâ€™s that.

It was also funny to see Daniel write this: â€œAsking whether Gogol would have identified himself with Russia or Ukraine is to ask a question that would not really have meant very much to Gogol himself, because it is a question that would not have had political or, for that matter, cultural relevance in the mid-19th century.â€ Does Daniel mean it had NO political or cutural relevance? None? Zero? Zed? Null set? Thatâ€™s a profoundly anti-intellectual, anti-thought statement. Back in the grad school people loved to call that sort of comment â€œtotalizatingâ€ or â€œan imposition of closureâ€ and theyâ€™d laugh at you for making it. Itâ€™s just not intellectually defensible. Danielâ€™s generally better than this.
Daniel Larison says:

April 15, 2009 at 10:05 pm

This is absurd overreaction, which is what I would expect from a nationalist. I find the distortions of Gogol’s work by both ideologies to be stupid. I don’t equate Ukrainian nationalism and Putinism in any other context, but I find both to be obnoxious in the context of this rivalry over who “owns” Gogol.

If you had read my earlier post on this subject, you would see that I have no sympathy with the campaign to make Gogol’s work into a vehicle for Russian nationalism or Pan-Slavic claims. You would also see in the comments on that post that I understand Ukrainian attitudes about the Holodomor and I also say that Ukrainian independence is a reality that shouldn’t be undone. In the past, I have written about the importance of recognizing the Holodomor despite Russian complaints to the contrary. I don’t pretend that Yushchenko, a criminal oligarch, is some sort of martyr for democracy, because he isn’t, and I would never embarrass myself by talking about the supposed religious piety of other foreign heads of state. Putin goes to church, too–does that make him a religious man? Let’s not insult one another’s intelligence.

I don’t see how we have any real disagreement, or at least we wouldn’t if you would stick to the issue at hand rather than rant about how much you dislike Putin.
Charlie says:

April 15, 2009 at 11:01 pm

I don’t dispute that “hardly anyone finds [it] even remotely objectionable” when Mel Gibson mangles the historical record in his movies. But I’ve thought for a while that Braveheart and (especially) The Patriot are problematic. I understand why Englishmen might object to Gibson’s work as anti-English, but I’m more troubled by the ways in which it tries to be pro-Scottish and pro-American.

In The Patriot it’s not enough to go to war against a distant monarch in the name of self-government, in opposition to taxation-without-representation, etc. Maybe those abstract principles wouldn’t have allowed the audience to feel good about enjoying the ensuing bloodbath, so the movie makes the American War of Independence a blood feud between Gibson’s South Carolina planter and an English cavalry officer who [SPOILERS AHEAD] shoots Gibson’s young son, burns down Gibson’s farm, dragoons Gibson’s free black plantation employees (!) into the British Army, burns down a church with the townspeople inside, kills another of Gibson’s sons, etc. The church-burning incident has no basis in the history of the Revolutionary War–it was based on an atrocity committed by the SS in France.

I don’t have a problem with taking some dramatic license to give Gibson a hiss-able enemy to defeat in a Revolutionary War epic. But the effect in this case is to impart the lesson that the British weren’t just the enemy, or even just an enemy fighting for the wrong cause, but were hideous monsters trying to strangle the hopes and dreams of the blameless colonists. So the British behave, not as the British actually did in the actual war, but as the Nazis behaved in occupied Europe. And the Americans (at least the Americans who don’t choose to collaborate with the evil British) aren’t flawed in any way–the hero even happens to be the rare South Carolina plantation owner who employed free blacks instead of owning slaves.

There’s an extremism and a moralism in this sort of thing that’s genuinely troubling. It helps create a narrative of the United States as a perpetual underdog that is constantly in conflict, not with other nations that have their own interests and concerns, but with an endless series of Nazi-like enemies.

The actual plot of Braveheart, obviously, has nothing to do with the United States. But I think it resonates with US audiences for the same reason–the blameless hero who just wants “freedom” against a maniac who condones the rape and murder of women, throws his son’s lover out of a window, gleefully oversees battles in which his own infantrymen are felled by his own archers, etc.

I know I sound like a humorless stick-in-the-mud. I actually LIKE Braveheart. And, again, I don’t begrudge Gibson his right to make the English a bit more unpleasant than they actually were in the name of making a rousing entertainment instead of a depressing meditation on the pitiless violence and endemic brutality of medieval Britain. But, at a certain point, all of this adds up to a coherent message that history is the story of Americans and their distant ancestors (either by blood, in the case of the Scots, or by “shared values” in the case of the execreble 300) facing off against pure evil and triumphing without making (or even considering) any moral compromises or committing any objectionable acts.

I agree with you that this doesn’t add up to “propaganda”, but it’s not in a totally different universe from propaganda.
ottovbvs says:

April 16, 2009 at 6:12 am

Gibson’s movies all have an anti English spin. It’s a species of Strine inferiority complex also observable in Murdoch that both have turned into a useful source of income. Murdoch with his attacks on the British royal family and Gibson with his English as the bad guys. In his Gallipoli movie brave Aussie kids are ordered to their deaths by arrogant British officers; in Braveheart Scottish freedom fighter Bruce is destroyed by brutal English King Edward I (who does get the best line in the movie though); in The Patriot another arrogant but rather effective Brit officer burns down churches with women and children inside. I almost expected one of those Roman centurions in his torture epic to be wearing an old Etonian tie. Both of them in their US incarnations feed off that enormous gullilibility that exists in our society and it’s insatiable appetite for self aggrandizing myths that it can transfer to itself.
SidRoman says:

April 16, 2009 at 9:08 am

Point taken Mr. Larison. I wouldn’t describe myself as a nationalist. Indeed my parents were always adamant that they were liberal Ukrainian patriots as opposed to nationalists, because of everything associated with the latter. My verbosity on Putinism, however, came from having read your earlier posts and the readers’ comments thereafter, and hence my choice of responding, if you like, in this initial post.
On Yushchenko, however, I dispute your description of him as a criminal oligarch. Had he been one, he would have long ago physically destroyed opposition to him as criminal oligarchs do. He could have become a Lukashenko, but he didn’t. Character does count in a leader, moral or immoral. Putin praises Stalinism, Yushchenko doesn’t. A K.G.B. officer attending an imperial church that was thoroughly compromised under the Soviet Union counts for nothing, as you alluded.
JJM says:

April 16, 2009 at 9:11 am

Daniel, I’d like to hear how you can reconcile your belief in the primacy of localism and agrarianism with your belief that Ukraine’s independence is no good for any involved,
Daniel Larison says:

April 16, 2009 at 10:25 am

The Ukraine in its current dimensions is an administrative creation of past empires, most recently the Soviet. An independent Ukraine that contains millions of Russians and Russian-speakers in the east is as arbitrarily constructed a centralized state as any, which is one reason why the main opposition frames itself as a regional, decentralizing party. Concentrated power in Kiev is against the interests of the population in the east. If we were going to have independent states set up in this territory, it would make much more sense ideally to have a number of much smaller states rather than regions vying for influence in a central capital and creating the possibility of more destructive violent conflict. I tend to be skeptical of modern nationalisms in general and especially those that have sprung up relatively recently, and I am generally wary of endorsing the principle of self-determination given its role in unleashing round after round of bloodshed in the last century. I am not a big fan of the idea of Kurdish independence, either, because of the potential destabilizing effects that could have throughout the Near East. That doesn’t mean that I think the status quo is ideal, but I do think that nationalist independence movements tend to lead to a lot of violent upheaval and, of course, they can lead to the ruin and devastation of the people trying to establish their own state.

As a practical matter, Ukrainian independence creates a number of serious problems and flashpoints for future conflict. Ukraine is economically intertwined with its larger neighbor, so its real independence is restricted by this, but it does not receive as many of the benefits of this relationship as it would if it had stayed united to Russia. It is suffering financially in the wake of the crisis in a way that would not necessarily be the case if it were part of Russia. In a world of centralized nation-states, independence creates a lot of disadvantages for people living in Ukraine. Of course, I accept that there are things more important than economic benefits, so I don’t expect that Ukraine will cease to be independent and I don’t argue that Ukraine should cease to be independent. Viewed from the outside, though, as a matter of geopolitics and international stability, Ukrainian independence is potentially very dangerous and has many of the makings of being a flashpoint similar to Bosnia in the early 20th century.

The recent war in Georgia should also remind us that smaller separatist movements often have great power patrons that seek to exploit them for their own ends, and this tends to put the populations of the separatist regions and the state they are trying to break away from in the crossfire of violent conflict. I don’t think Russia will be as heavy-handed in the event that Crimean separatists make a bid for their own independence, in part because Ukraine is much larger and more powerful than Georgia, but the issue of possible Crimean separatism and the potential for Russian intervention on behalf of the Crimeans would never even exist had Ukraine not become independent.
SidRoman says:

April 16, 2009 at 11:39 am

I believe Daniel Larison is putting the cart in front of the horse. Ukraine is not suffering financially because it does not belong to Russia. Ukraine is suffering financially because Russia is governed by a K.G.B. oligarchy which feels free to use energy as a political weapon for blackmail. There is no “rule of law” so to speak in Putin’s Russia as the governing ideology is “Chekism” as some have called it, after the secret police. Had Russia become a liberal democracy after the Soviet Union, none of this would have happened. Ukraine and Poland used to be bitter enemies. Both are now democracies which know how to deal with any disagreements responsibly. The fault is Russia’s, not Ukraine’s.
As for arbitrary borders, Russia long ago annexed and Russified Ukrainian ethnolinguistic territory such as the Kuban. Ukrainians remarkably kept a common culture and language in spite of being occupied by numerous empires throughout their history. Since the 11th Century, Subcarpathia had no contact with other Ukrainians as it fell under Ottoman and Hungarian rule. As soon as the 20th century presented itself, after a thousand years separation, they felt kinship with all the rest of Ukraine and without coercion proclaimed Ukrainian independence in 1938, a fact which frightened Stalin to no end as the late Adam Ulam noted in his seminal Expansion and Coexistence.
As for flashpoints, the Russian Orthodox Church and language have free reign in Ukraine. Guess what about Russia? There, despite the fact that millions of ethnic Ukrainians reside there, by law they cannot establish any Ukrainian Catholic or Ukrainian Orthodox Churches.
As for Daniel deigning to speak for Eastern Ukraine, I can assure you that most Eastern Ukrainian moms do not want their sons conscripted into the brutal Russian army and sent to lose their lives in Chechnya serving Russian imperialism.
Daniel Larison says:

April 16, 2009 at 11:49 am

“Ukraine is suffering financially because Russia is governed by a K.G.B. oligarchy which feels free to use energy as a political weapon for blackmail.”

Slightly less subsidized Russian energy (i.e., gas is no longer as dirt cheap for Ukrainians as it used to be) is not why Ukraine needs an IMF bailout, nor is it why Tymoshenko is trying desperately to get budget measures passed to qualify for IMF aid. Blaming Russian-Ukrainian energy disputes for Ukraine’s financial mess is not credible. There are a lot of central and eastern European states that depend on Russia for energy that are having financial woes, but dependence on Russian energy is not the cause of those woes. Hungary isn’t going broke because it gets gas from the east; it’s going broke because of the ripple effects of bank collapses and economic contraction.

Who said people in eastern Ukraine want their sons to be conscipted into the Russian army? I assume quite a lot of people living in *Russia* don’t want their sons conscripted into the Russian army. Who is talking about conscription here? This is, or was supposed to be, a post on literature. Did anyone deny that Russian borders have been arbitrarily drawn and established by force in the past? What are you talking about?
SidRoman says:

April 16, 2009 at 12:12 pm

Hi Daniel. Yes it’s a post on literature and you have a new post so over and out. I merely jumped in on Ukrainian independence because JJM asked for clarification with respect to Ukrainian independence, hence the digression. Cheers.
vanya says:

April 23, 2009 at 8:51 am

Daniel’s point – that modern “Ukraine” is an artificial construct – is valid, and a lot of Ukrainian nationalists would do well to keep that in mind. Cities like Odessa and Sevastopol have very little connection, if any, to Ukrainian traditions and culture. Neither for that matter do Donetsk or Lugansk – even though they are on land that is arguably historically “Ukrainian” those cities are basically creations of the industrial drive of the Russian imperial state. Lacking any imperial traditions of its own, and hampered by a legacy of victimhood, Ukraine seems doomed to instability and political turmoil for the foreseeable future.