Taras Bulba

Taras Bulba
	Illustration for the novel by Pyotr Sokolov, 1861
Author	Nikolai Gogol
Language	Russian
Genre	Historical novel, novella
Publication date	1835 (1st as part of a collection)

Taras Bulba (Russian: «Тарас Бульба»; Tarás Búl'ba) is a romanticized historical novella set in the first half of the 17th century, written by Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852). It features elderly Zaporozhian Cossack Taras Bulba and his sons Andriy and Ostap. The sons study at the Kiev Academy and then return home, whereupon the three men set out on a journey to the Zaporizhian Sich (the Zaporizhian Cossack headquarters, located in southern Ukraine) where they join other Cossacks and go to war against Poland.

The story was initially published in 1835 as part of the Mirgorod collection of short stories, but a much expanded version appeared in 1842 with some differences in the storyline. The 1842 text has been described by Victor Erlich [ru] as a "paragon of civic virtue and a force of patriotic edification", contrasting the rhetoric of the 1835 version with its "distinctly Cossack jingoism".^[1]

^ Quoted in: Yoon, Saera (2005). "Transformation of a Ukrainian Cossack into a Russian Warrior: Gogol's 1842 "Taras Bulba"". The Slavic and East European Journal. 49 (3): 430–444. doi:10.2307/20058302. ISSN 0037-6752. JSTOR 20058302. [...] Victor Erlich briefly comments on the distinctions between the first and second versions, saying that only the second redaction forges an image of the Cossack as 'a paragon of civic virtue and a source of patriotic edification' for Soviet children, while the rhetoric of the first version is 'distinctly Cossack jingoism' [...].

[1] Quoted in: Yoon, Saera (2005). "Transformation of a Ukrainian Cossack into a Russian Warrior: Gogol's 1842 "Taras Bulba"". The Slavic and East European Journal. 49 (3): 430–444. doi:10.2307/20058302. ISSN 0037-6752. JSTOR 20058302. [...] Victor Erlich briefly comments on the distinctions between the first and second versions, saying that only the second redaction forges an image of the Cossack as 'a paragon of civic virtue and a source of patriotic edification' for Soviet children, while the rhetoric of the first version is 'distinctly Cossack jingoism' [...].

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