At length, a cause of war against the Tartars is cooked up and their city besieged. One night, Andríi, the younger son of Taras Bulba, is awakened by the gliding of a woman’s figure near his sleeping quarters. She proves to be the servant of a beautiful Tartar maiden, the daughter of the Governor of the beleaguered city, who with all the other inhabitants is dying of starvation. Andríi gathers some provisions and follows the old woman by a secret underground passage into the city, where he meets the young beauty, who had previously enchanted him with a single glance while he was on the march from his home to the Cossack camp. For the sake of her love he renounces his own people and fights tremendously against them in the subsequent battle. During the mêlée he meets his father, who slays him with a single blow and scarcely regrets the death of his traitorous son. Ostap is captured and carried away to a distant city. Knowing that his son is to be executed with torture, old Taras Bulba arises from his bed of many wounds and, after a long journey, makes his way to the foot of the scaffold in the public square. The boy suffers terribly, but is brave to the end. But when they took him to the last deadly tortures, it seemed as though his strength were failing. He turned his eyes about. Oh, God! all strangers, all unknown faces! If only some of his relatives were present at his death! He would not have cared to hear the sobs and anguish of his feeble mother, or the unreasoning cries of a wife, tearing her hair and beating her white breast; he would have liked to see the strong man who could refresh him with a wise word, and cheer his end. And his strength failed him, and he cried in the weakness of his soul, “Father, where are you? Do you hear all?” “I hear!” rang through the universal silence, and all that million of people shuddered in concert. Force is its prime quality--physical, mental, religious. “In this story,” writes Professor Phelps, “the old Cossacks, centuries dead, have a genuine resurrection of the body. They appear before us in all their amazing vitality, their love of fighting, of eating and drinking, their intense patriotism, and their blazing devotion to their religious faith. Never was a book more plainly inspired by passion for race and native land. It is one tremendous shout of joy”--which even tragedy cannot silence. Gogol was a stylist of no mean order, as “Taras Bulba” well demonstrates. It is full of Homeric passages, whose pungent vigor even survives translation. And for sheer beauty what can surpass this, the opening passage of “Night in May”?