The protagonist is traveling to the Caucasus and thinks about his past and future. His Acia (1858) contains many Romantic elements and there too the protagonist falls in love with a lively dark-eyed girl.Īnd in Tolstoy’s Cossacks (1863) too: it starts more or less the same. Especially the striking nature scenes resound even more beautifully in Turgenev’s work. Turgenev most definitely took inspiration from Taras Bulba. Just like Gogol, Dostoevsky was fascinated by the excesses of human existence. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880) there is a rather painful scene that appears in Taras Bulba too: an emaciated woman with a infant clutched to her dried out breasts. He was a huge fan of his work and found him very inspiring. Gogol talks about the unspoiled Steppe, ‘upon which were sprinkled millions of different flowers’, and ‘the air was filled with the notes of a thousand different birds’, and more of this.ĭostoevsky apparently said once that every Russian writer came from underneath Gogol’s Overcoat. Why didn’t they just all escape through that tunnel?! The love story is not at all plausible. Together the go through the tunnel into the city, where indeed the people are dying in the streets. She wakes up the youngest son to tell him that his sweetheart is among the starving in the city. A Polish servant girl escapes through a secret tunnel from the city that has been besieged by the Cossacks. The Cossacks are so violent that they would make the average Isis soldier look away. Historically it’s incorrect and the centuries are mixed up. The youngest walks over to the other side for the sake of a Polish girl and for that his father kills him, while the oldest gets tortured to death by the Polish in front of his father. The hero of the story, Taras Bulba, is a Cossack headman, who in order to complete his sons’ education, takes them to fight against the catholic Poles.
The story is full of Ukrainian words, folklore and Cossack customs.
When everything to do with Little Russia, as Ukraine was called back then, became hugely popular there, he cleverly wrote Taras Bulba. Gogol was an Ukrainian with Cossack blood running through his veins living in Saint Petersburg. The industrial revolution sparked an interest in all things pure, natural, past and authentic. Lermontov and Pushkin are the most famous writers of this period. Romanticism was the main literary movement in Russia from the end of the eighteenth century until halfway into the nineteenth century.
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