Taras Bulba is a romanticized short historical novel by Nikolai Gogol. It tells the story of an old Ukrainian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap. Taras’ sons studied at the Kyiv Academy and return home. The three men set out on a journey to Zaporizhian Sich located in Ukraine, where they join other Cossacks and go to war against the Polish nobles.

Taras Bulba is Gogol’s longest short story. The work is classical in nature with characters that are not exaggerated or grotesque as was common in Gogol's later work, though his characterizations of Cossacks are said to be a bit exaggerated by some scholars.

This story can be understood in the context of the romantic nationalism movement in literature, which developed around a historical ethnic culture which meets the romantic ideal. It has been cited as the seminal work establishing the concept of the "Russian Soul". The story is rich in adventure and battle scenes as well as touches of Gogol’s characteristic humor.

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol  (31 March [O.S. 19 March] 1809,[1] – 4 March [O.S. 21 February] 1852) was a Ukrainian-born Russian writer.

Although his early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were heavily influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing and identity, he wrote in Russian and his works belong to the tradition of Russian literature; often called the "father of modern Russian realism," he was one of the first Russian authors to criticize his country's way of life. The novels Taras Bul'ba (1835; 1842 and Dead Souls (1842), the play The Inspector-General (1836, 1842), and the short story The Overcoat (1842) are among his best known works.

(From  Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia)

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Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, the Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series, Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18201-1291 is a Portable Document File produced as part of an ongoing student publication project to bring classical works of literature, in English, to free and easy access of those wishing to make use of them.

Cover Design: Jim Manis
Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University
The Pennsylvania State University is an equal opportunity university.

CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION ............................................................ 4
TARAS BULBA.............................................................. 13
ST. JOHN’S EVE ......................................................... 130
THE CLOAK ................................................................ 146
HOW THE TWO IVANS QUARRELLED .................. 176
THE MYSTERIOUS PORTRAIT ................................ 223
THE CALASH .............................................................. 270

Introduction by John Cournos

Russian literature, so full of enigmas, contains no greater creative mystery than Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol (1809- 1852), who has done for the Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian poetry. Before these two men came Russian literature can hardly have been said to exist. It was pompous and effete with pseudoclassicism; foreign influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the debris which made for sterility and erected in their stead a new structure out of living Russian words.

The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.

More than that. The nomad and romantic in him, troubled and restless with Ukrainian myth, legend, and song, impressed upon Russian literature, faced with the realities of modern life, a spirit titanic and in clash with its material, and produced in the mastery of this every-day material, commonly called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense with beauty. A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian critic’s observation about Gogol: “Seldom has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic in life.” But this statement does not cover the whole ground, for it is easy to see in almost all of Gogol’s work his “free Cossack soul” trying to break through the shell of sordid to-day like some ancient demon, essentially Dionysian. So that his works, true though they are to our life, are at once a reproach, a protest, and a challenge, ever calling for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us. And they have all the joy and sadness of the Ukrainian songs he loved so much.

Ukrainian was to Gogol “the language of the soul,” and it was in Ukrainian songs rather than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little contemptuous, that he read the history of his people. Time and again, in his essays and in his letters to friends, he expresses his boundless joy in these songs: “O songs, you are my joy and my life! How I love you. What are the bloodless chronicles I pore over beside those clear, live chronicles! I cannot live without songs; they . . . reveal everything more and more clearly, oh, how clearly, gone-by life and gone-by men. . . . The songs of Little Russia are her everything, her poetry, her history, and her ancestral grave. He who has not penetrated them deeply knows nothing of the past of this blooming region of Russia.” ...

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