"Owing to this co-mingling, their facial features, so different from one another's, received a common impress, tending towards the Asiatic.

And so there came into being a nation in faith and place belonging to Europe; on the other hand, in ways of life, customs, and dress quite Asiatic.

It was a nation in which the world's two extremes came in contact; European caution and Asiatic indifference, niavete and cunning, an intense activity and the greatest laziness and indulgence, an aspiration to development and perfection, and again a desire to appear indifferent to perfection." All of Ukraine took on its colour from the Cossack, and if I have drawn largely on Gogol's own account of the origins of this race, it was because it seemed to me that Gogol's emphasis on the heroic rather than on the historical--Gogol is generally discounted as an historian--would give the reader a proper approach to the mood in which he created "Taras Bulba," the finest epic in Russian literature.

Gogol never wrote either his history of Little Russia or his universal history.

Apart from several brief studies, not always reliable, the net result of his many years' application to his scholarly projects was this brief epic in prose, Homeric in mood.