Cossack Tales

Cossack Tales

A historical sketch placed before a work of fiction must seem, to many, a very inconsistent thing, and yet the title of the present volume, "COSSACK TALES," obliges the translator to give a short account of this sometime warlike race. Such an account is the more wanted, as not only in England, but in all Europe, the notion exists that the Cossacks were something like a Deus ex machin, emerging from space at the moment requisite to put a stop to the triumphs if Napoleon I., to drive back to their respective homes the motley array of the twenty nations he brought into Russia, to pitch their tents in the Champs lyses, to put all things right in Paris, and then to vanish once more into space, where, for more than four centuries, Europe had never so much as perceived their existence. The invasion of the Tartars in the middle of the thirteenth century took place when Russia was torn asunder by two kindred and yet hostile branches of the house of Rurick: the younger branch had settled in the northern (at the present time the middle) part of the country; the elder, after many struggles and reverses, had succeeded in regaining its inheritance, the ancient metropolis Kieff, and the whole of the southern principalities. Both branches bore a revengeful remembrance of their mutual feuds, and while the elder viewed with jealousy the gradual rise of the northern princes, the latter envied the firm grasp with which the southern princes clutched their long disputed sway. Hence it came that, when hordes of Tartars overran the northern principalities, the princes of the South lent no ear to the entreaties of their northern brethren for help. Hence, also, the reason of these latter remaining inert and submissive to their recent conquerors, the Tartars, when those conquerors laid waste the fertile territories which extended along the south of Russia. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 58409
Author: Gogol, Nikolai Vasilevich
Release Date: Dec 4, 2018
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Tolstoj, Jurij V., 1824-1878