Taras Bulba

Taras Bulba (Russian: «Тарас Бульба», romanized: 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 the 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 twentieth-century critic Victor Erlich [ru] described the 1842 text as a "paragon of civic virtue and a force of patriotic edification", contrasting it with the rhetoric of the 1835 version with its "distinctly Cossack jingoism".