Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature COSSACK TALES, BY NICHOLAS GOGOL. TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL RUSSIAN BY GEORGE TOLSTOY. LONDON JAMES BLACKWOOD, PATERNOSTER ROW. INTRODUCTION. 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 machinâ_, 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 Élysées_, 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. Soon afterwards, the trans-Carpathian parts of Russia, _Red Russia_, i.e., Galicia, Lodomeria, &c., ceased to be any longer accounted as forming part of Russia. The marshy tracts of land to the east of Poland, _White Russia_, formed a new and distinct power, Lithuania, soon destined to merge into Poland. The north of Russia, _Great Russia_, had yet two centuries more to endure the yoke of the Tartars. At this time Southern or _Little Russia_, called also _Ukraine_ (i.e., the borders), gave birth to a new race, the _Cossacks_.