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Old Taras Bulba, a fierce Cossack colonel, welcomes his two sons home from the academy in Kiev and takes them straight to the Zaporozhian Sich, the island…
Old Taras Bulba, a fierce Cossack colonel, welcomes his two sons home from the academy in Kiev and takes them straight to the Zaporozhian Sich, the island stronghold of the Cossacks on the Dnieper, to learn the life of warriors. In a war against the Poles, the elder son, Ostap, proves a hero, but the younger, Andriy, falls in love with a Polish noblewoman inside a besieged city and goes over to the enemy, and Taras must face his own son. The volume adds other tales by Gogol.
Context and significance
Nikolai Gogol, born in Ukraine, published the story in 1835 and expanded it in 1842; it is a romantic, violent epic of the seventeenth-century Cossacks, and it also carries the prejudices of its age. Compare Tolstoy's The Cossacks, and read Gogol's Dead Souls.
About the author
Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was born in the Ukrainian countryside and moved to St Petersburg to make his name, where his comic tales of Ukrainian village life won the friendship of Pushkin. His play The Government Inspector, his story The Overcoat and his novel Dead Souls made him the great satirist of Russian life.
He spent years in Rome, became increasingly religious and tormented, and shortly before his death burned most of the second part of Dead Souls. Later Russian writers, Dostoevsky among them, acknowledged their debt to him; read Dostoevsky's Poor Folk to see it.