Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/16

10 Kamaritzkaya (also known as Kamarnitzkaya, or Kamarynskaya, from the word, komár, a mousquito or gnat. Whether the region derived its appellation from the fact that it was mousquito-ridden, or because of the stinging powers of its inhabitants, I am unable to state). During this epoch, the district in question was teeming with the germs of many important historical events, and offered a favourable field for the development of the foolhardy, dissolute scapegrace of a peasant who acquired the name of the region and became immortalised with it in the most famous of Russian folk-songs, whose air was first arranged for orchestra by Glinka, the father of modern Russian secular Music, and to whom, in great measure, it is indebted for its present world-wide fame.

The Ukraina of that day may be said to have extended to the Caucasus (Kavkaz) on the east, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov on the south, and into present Poland and Galicia on the west—in fact, it occupied the region which the present-day "Ukrainians" (a political, semi-German-Austrian party into whose quarrels and aspirations I cannot enter) would like to see erected into a separate kingdom, alien to Russia. The Kamarynskaya District became the property of Moscow in 1508, having previously, for a long time, belonged to Lithuania; and for many years it was