Taras Bulba

Taras Bulba 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 as a "paragon of civic virtue and a force of patriotic edification", contrasting the rhetoric of the 1835 version with its "distinctly Cossack jingoism". Inspiration The character of Taras Bulba, the main hero of this novel, is a composite of several historical personalities. It might be based on the real family history of an ancestor of Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, Cossack Ataman Okhrim Makukha from Starodub, who killed his son Nazar for switching to the Polish side during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay's uncle, Grigory Illich Miklouho-Maclay, studied together with Gogol in Nizhyn Gymnasium (officially Prince Bezborodko's Gymnasium of Higher Learning, today Nizhyn Gogol State University) and probably told the family legend to Gogol. Another possible inspiration was the hero of the folk song "The deeds of Sava Chaly", published by Mykhailo Maksymovych, about Cossack captain Sava Chaly (executed in 1741 after serving as a colonel in the private army of a Polish noble), whose killing was ordered by his own father for betraying the Ukrainian cause. Plot