Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/20

14 them. Moscow was too far away, and powerless to protect them. So, with keen instinct for politics and for self-preservation, the lowest classes, brigands, fugitive serfs and peasants—the "thews and sinews" of the Ukraina—flocked to the standard of the Bandit of Tushino, robbing and murdering all who opposed or did not join them,— which meant, chiefly, the landed gentry and the citizens of the towns. The women, in particular, the Bárynya and báryshnya—wives and daughters of the gentry—were compelled to marry these scoundrels. All these things, naturally, inspired such terror in the landed gentry of the Ukraina that they deserted their estates and fled to Moscow.

It Is this last phase of the story which "Bárynya-Sudárynya" depicts—the situation of the "Lady-Madam-Lady" (to give it another version)—in the refrain of the songs. Thus, evidently, it sets forth one side of the story, while the "Kamarynskaya" depicts the other, or the morals and manners of that particular Ukraina as a whole, the actors in both songs being identical. Probably the author of these ballads, with their free, untrammelled form and ancient "Kamarynskaya nakedness"—was, like their hero, a composite—the entire population of the Kamarynskaya Ukraina.

The tradition did not die out. The gentry did