Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/64

 for preferring the love of a Capulet to the success of the Montagues; the other, Ostap, is taken prisoner, and tortured to death. Taras, in disguise, watches the appalling sufferings of his son; just before his death, Ostap, who had not uttered a word during the prolonged and awful agony, cries out to the hostile sky, like the bitter cry "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" "Father! where are you? do you hear all?" and to the amazement of the boy and his torturers, comes, like a voice from heaven, the shout, "I hear!"

Fearful is the vengeance that Taras Bulba takes on the enemy; fearful is his own death, lashed to a tree, and burned alive by his foes. He dies, merrily roaring defiant taunts at his tormentors. And Gogol himself closes his hero's eyes with the question, "Can any fire, flames, or power be found on earth, which are capable of overpowering Russian strength?"

In its particular class of fiction, "Taras Bulba" has no equal except the Polish trilogy of Sienkiewicz; and Gogol produces the same effect in a small fraction of the space required by the other. This is of course Romanticism rampant, which is one reason why it has not been highly appreciated by the French critics. And it is indeed as contrary to the spirit of Russian fiction as it is to the French spirit of restraint. It stands alone in Russian literature,