The Cossacks’ Iliad piqued my interest in Taras Bulba, an early Russian novel (from 1842) described by its author, Gogol, as an epic poem (even though it is entirely in prose):
Take the wild history of the Cossacks in the Ukraine. Add the birth of nationalism and the drawing in of the principalities around Moscow to form a modern country. Include Eastern Orthodoxy’s long struggle against the Catholic Poles and the Ottoman Muslims. Don’t forget a love story in which a son betrays his father and his people for the sake of a beautiful daughter of the enemy. Mix in a big dollop of anti-Semitism and alternating moments of unselfconscious joy in the midst of battle and unselfconscious moroseness at night around the campfire. Finally, douse the whole thing in huge buckets of vodka, and the result can have only one name. Russia.