Taras Bulba

Two old sons, Ostap and Andriy, come to the old Cossack colonel Taras Bulba after graduating from the Kiev Academy (Kiev from 1569 to 1654 is part of Poland). Two dozen young men, healthy and strong, whose faces had not yet been touched by a razor, were embarrassed by the meeting with their father, who had been joking at their clothes by recent seminarians.

On the occasion of the arrival of his sons, Taras Bulba convenes all the centurions and the entire regimental rank and announces his decision to send Ostap and Andriy to the Sich, because there is no better science for the young Cossack, like the Zaporizhzhya Sich . At the sight of the young strength of the sons, the military spirit of Taras himself flares up, and he decides to go with them to introduce them to all his old comrades. Mother sits over the sleeping children all night, wishing the night lasts as long as possible. In the morning, after the blessing, the mother, desperate from grief, can hardly be torn off from the children and taken to a hut.

Three riders ride silently. Old Taras recalls his exuberant life, a tear is frozen in his eyes, his gray-haired head is curious. Ostap, having a harsh and hard character, although hardened over the years of training in a bursa, retained his natural kindness and was touched by the tears of his poor mother. This alone confuses him and makes him lower his head thoughtfully. Andriy is also very upset by his farewell to his mother and his family home, but his thoughts are occupied with the memories of the beautiful Polish girl that he met just before leaving Kiev. Then Andriy managed to get into the bedroom to the beauty through the chimney pipe, knocking on the door forced the Polish girl to hide the young Cossack under the bed. Tatar, the maid of the panel, as soon as the anxiety passed, brought Andria to the garden, where he barely escaped from the awakened courtyard. Once again he saw the beautiful Pole in the church, she soon left - and now, with his eyes down in the mane of his horse, Andriy is thinking about it.

After a long journey, Sich meets Taras with his sons with his wild life - a sign of Zaporizhzhya will. Cossacks do not like to spend time on military exercises, collecting abusive experience only in the heat of battle. Ostap and Andriy rush with all the fervor of the young men into this wild sea. But old Taras does not like an idle life - he does not want to prepare his sons for such an activity. Having met with all his companions, he comes up with how to raise the Cossacks on a campaign, so as not to waste the Cossack’s distance on a continuous feast and drunken fun. He persuades the Cossacks to re-elect the one who keeps peace with the enemies of the Cossacks. The new koshova, under the pressure of the most warlike Cossacks, especially Taras, is trying to find a justification for a profitable trip to Turkey, but under the influence of the Cossacks who arrived from Ukraine and spoke about the oppression of Polish lords and Jewish tenants over the Ukrainian people, the army unanimously decides to go to Poland, to avenge all the evil and shame of the Orthodox faith. Thus, the war takes on a national liberation character.

And soon the entire Polish south-west becomes the prey of fear, running ahead of hearing: "Cossacks! Cossacks appeared! ”In one month the young Cossacks matured in the battles, and old Taras is pleased to see that both of his sons are among the first. The Cossack army is trying to take the city of Dubno , where there are many treasuries and wealthy inhabitants, but they are met with desperate resistance by the garrison and residents. Cossacks besiege the city and wait for the famine to begin in it. From nothing to do, the Cossacks devastate the surroundings, burn out defenseless villages and uncleaned bread. Young people, especially the sons of Taras, do not like such a life. Old Bulba calms them, promising in a short time hot fights. One of the dark nights, Andria wakes up from sleep a Tatar, a servant of that same Polish girl, with whom Andriy is in love. Tatarka whispers that the little girl is in the city, she saw Andria from the city rampart and asks him to come to her or at least pass a piece of bread for her dying mother. Andriy loads the bags with bread as much as he can carry, and the Tatar leads him into the city along the underground passage. Having met with his beloved, he renounces his father and brother, comrades and fatherland: “The motherland is what our soul is looking for, which is sweetest for it all. My homeland is you. ” Andriy stays with a little panel to protect her until her last breath from her former companions.

Polish troops, sent as reinforcements to the besieged, pass by drunken Cossacks into the city, interrupting many by sleeping, many captivating. This event toughens the Cossacks, deciding to continue the siege to the end. Taras, looking for the missing son, receives terrible confirmation of Andriy's betrayal.

The Poles make sorties, but the Cossacks are still successfully repulsing them. From Sich comes the news that, in the absence of the main force, the Tatars attacked the remaining Cossacks and captured them, capturing the treasury. The Cossack army near Dubna is divided in two - half goes to the revenue of the treasury and comrades, half remains to continue the siege. Taras, leading a siege army, makes a passionate speech in the glory of the partnership.

The Poles learn about the weakening of the enemy and come out of the city for a decisive battle. Among them is Andrius. Taras Bulba orders the Cossacks to lure him to the forest and there, meeting with Andriy face to face, he kills his son, who, before his death, pronounces one word - the name of the beautiful little lady. Reinforcements arrive at the Poles, and they defeat the Cossacks. Ostap is captured, wounded Taras, saving from the chase, is brought to Sich.

Having recovered from his wounds, Taras persuades Yankel to smuggle him to Warsaw in order to try to buy Ostap there. Taras is present at the terrible execution of his son in the city square. Not a single moan escapes under torture from Ostap’s chest, only before death he cries out: “Old man! where are you! Do you hear? ”-“ I hear! ”Taras answers over the crowd. They rush to catch him, but Taras has already caught a trace.

One hundred and twenty thousand Cossacks, including the Taras Bulba regiment, are marching against the Poles. Even the Cossacks themselves notice the excessive ferocity and cruelty of Taras in relation to the enemy. So he takes revenge for the death of his son. The defeated Polish hetman Nikolai Pototsky swore an oath not to inflict any further offense on the Cossack army. Only Colonel Bulba does not agree to such a world, assuring his comrades that forgiven Poles will not keep their word. And he takes his regiment away. His prediction comes true - having gathered strength, the Poles treacherously attack the Cossacks and defeat them.

Taras walks all over Poland with his regiment, continuing to avenge the death of Ostap and his comrades, ruthlessly destroying all life.

Five regiments, led by that same Potocki, finally overtake the regiment of Taras, who had taken a rest in an old decaying fortress on the banks of the Dniester. The battle lasts four days. The surviving Cossacks make their way, but the old chieftain stops to look for his cradle in the grass, and his healers overtake him. Taras is tied to the oak tree with iron chains, nailed hands and laid a fire under it. Before his death, Taras manages to shout to his comrades so that they go down to the canyons, which he sees from above, and leave the pursuit along the river. At the last terrible minute, the old chieftain predicts the unification of the Russian lands, the death of their enemies and the victory of the Orthodox faith.

Cossacks go away from the chase, together row with oars and talk about their chieftain.

Gogol’s work on Taras Bulba was preceded by a thorough, in-depth study of historical sources. Among them are “Description of Ukraine” by Boplan , “The History of the Cossacks of Zaporizhzhya” by Prince Semyon Ivanovich Myshetsky , handwritten lists of Ukrainian annals - Samovidts , Samuel Velichko , Grigory Grabyanka , etc. helping the artist to comprehend the spirit of folk life, characters, psychology of people. Among the sources that helped Gogol in his work on Taras Bulba was one more important one: Ukrainian folk songs , especially historical songs and thoughts.

Taras Bulba has a large and complex creative history. It was first printed in 1835 in the collection "Mirgorod". In 1842, in the second volume of Gogol's Works, the novel “Taras Bulba” was published in a new, radically redone edition. Work on this work continued with interruptions for nine years: from 1833 to 1842. Between the first and second editions of Taras Bulba, a number of intermediate editions of some chapters were written. Due to this, the second edition is more complete than the 1835 edition, despite some of Gogol’s claims due to many significant inconsistent corrections and changes to the original text during editing and correspondence.

The original manuscript of Taras Bulba, prepared by Gogol for the second edition, was found in the sixties of the 19th century. among the gifts of Count Kushelev-Bezborodko to the Nizhyn Lyceum . This is the so-called Nezhin manuscript, completely written by hand of Nikolai Gogol, who made many changes in the fifth, sixth, seventh chapters, revised the eighth and tenth chapters.

Due to the fact that Count Kushelev-Bezborodko bought this original manuscript from the Prokopovich family in 1858, it became possible to see the work in the form that suited the author himself. However, in subsequent editions of Taras Bulba was reprinted not from the original manuscript, but from the 1842 edition, with only minor corrections. The first attempt to bring together and unite the original Gogol manuscripts, the clerical copies that differ from them, and the 1842 edition were made in the Complete Works of Gogol ^[2] .

A number of significant changes and significant additions were made to the version for the publication of Works (1842), compared with the original of 1835. In general, the 1842 version is more censored, partly by the author himself, partly by the publisher, sometimes in violation of the original style of the original version of the work. At the same time, this version is more complete, and the historical and everyday background of the story is significantly enriched - a more detailed description of the emergence of the Cossacks , the Zaporozhye army, the laws and customs of the Sich is given. The compressed story of the siege of Dubno is replaced by a detailed epic depiction of the battles and heroic deeds of the Cossacks. In the second edition, Andriy’s love experiences are given more fully and the tragedy of his position, caused by treason, is more deeply revealed.

Rethinking undergone the image of Taras Bulba. The place in the first edition, which states that Taras “was a great hunter before raids and riots,” was replaced in the second by the following: “Restless, forever he considered himself the legal defender of Orthodoxy. I entered the villages on my own, where they only complained about the harassment of tenants and the increase in new duties from the smoke. ” The appeals to the comradely solidarity in the fight against enemies and the greatness of the Russian people, enclosed in the second edition of the mouth of Taras, finally finalize the heroic image of the fighter for national freedom ^[3] .

Revision 1835, part I:

Revision 1842, part I:

The original author's version of the revised manuscript was transferred by the author to N. Ya. Prokopovich for the preparation of the 1842 edition, but differs from the latter. After Prokopovich’s death, the manuscript was acquired, among other Gogol’s manuscripts, by Count G. A. Kushelev-Bezborodko and donated by him to the Nezhinsky Lyceum of Prince Bezborodko ^[6] ; in 1934 the manuscript was transferred from the library of the Nezhinsky Pedagogical Institute to the manuscript department of the Library of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev.

Neither the 1842 edition nor the 1855 edition can be used as the basis for the development of the canonical text of the story, since they are clogged with extraneous editorial corrections. The published text of the story ^{[7] is} based on the text prepared for publication by Gogol himself in 1842, that is, the text of the autograph; the missing places were taken from the clerical copy where they corresponded with the corrected copy of Mirgorod (in several cases the text was taken from Mirgorod unchanged and can thus be checked directly from the publication of Mirgorod). Only in a few cases does the text depart from the manuscript, correcting the alleged clerical errors or filling in the gaps. According to the general principles of the publication, neither the amendments made by N. Ya. Prokopovich on behalf of Gogol in the 1842 edition, nor the later (1851-1852) corrections of Gogol himself, made in the proofreading on the text of the 1842 edition, are introduced into the main text, since Gogolev’s division corrections from Negogol’s cannot be made in this text with full confidence and consistency ^[8] .

Along with the general approval that critics met with Gogol's story, some aspects of the work were found unsuccessful. So, Gogol was repeatedly blamed for the unhistorical nature of the story, the excessive heroization of the Cossacks, and the lack of a historical context, as noted by Mikhail Grabovsky , Vasily Gippius , Maxim Gorky and others ^[9] . Critics believed that this could be explained by the fact that the writer did not have enough reliable information about the history of Ukraine. Gogol studied the history of his native land with great attention, but he gathered information not only from rather scanty chronicles, but also from folk legends, legends, and also frankly mythological sources, such as “ History of the Rus ”, from which they got descriptions of atrocities of the gentry, the outrage of Jews and valor of the Cossacks ^[8] . The story was especially displeased among the Polish intelligentsia. The Poles were outraged that the Polish nation was represented in Taras Bulba as aggressive, bloodthirsty and brutal. Mikhail Grabovsky, who had a good attitude to Gogol himself, as well as many other Polish critics and writers, such as Andrzej Kempinski, Michal Barmut, spoke out negatively about Taras Bulba. In Poland, there was a strong opinion of the story as anti-Polish, and partly such judgments were transferred to Gogol himself ^[9] .

Anti-Semitism

The story was also criticized for anti-Semitism by some politicians, religious thinkers, and literary scholars. The leader of right-wing Zionism, Vladimir Zhabotinsky, in the article “Russian Weasel” evaluated the scene of the Jewish pogrom in the novel “Taras Bulba”: “None of the great literature knows anything like this by cruelty. It can’t even be called hatred, or sympathy for the Cossack massacre of the Jews: it’s worse, it’s some kind of carefree, clear fun, not clouded even by the half-sense that the funny legs tearing in the air are the legs of living people, some amazingly solid, indecomposable contempt for the lower race, not condescending to enmity ” ^[10] . As the literary critic Arkady Gornfeld noted, the Jews are depicted by Gogol as petty thieves, traitors and ruthless extortion, devoid of any human features. In his opinion, the images of Gogol are “captured by the ordinary anti-Semitism of the era”; Gogol’s anti-Semitism does not come from the realities of life, but from the established and traditional theological ideas of “the unknown world of Jewry”; the images of the Jews are stereotyped and represent a pure caricature ^[11] . According to the thinker and historian Georgy Fedotov , “Gogol gave a jubilant description of the Jewish pogrom in Taras Bulba,” which testifies to the “known failures of his moral feeling, but also to the strength of the national or chauvinistic tradition that stood behind him” ^[12] .

The critic and literary critic D.I. Zaslavsky held a slightly different point of view. In the article “Jews in Russian Literature,” he also supports Jabotinsky’s reproach for anti-Semitism in Russian literature, including Pushkin , Gogol, Lermontov , Turgenev , Nekrasov , Dostoevsky , Leo Tolstoy , Saltykov-Shchedrin , Leskov , Chekhov in the list of anti-Semitic writers. But at the same time he finds justification for Gogol’s anti-Semitism as follows: “However, there is no doubt that in the dramatic struggle of the Ukrainian people in the 17th century for their homeland, the Jews did not find any understanding of this struggle, nor sympathy for it. It was not their fault, this was their misfortune. ” “The Jews of Taras Bulba are caricatured. But caricature is not a lie. ... The talent of Jewish adaptability is vividly and accurately described in Gogol's poem. And this, of course, does not flatter our pride, but we must admit that some historical features of ours are evil and aptly captured by the Russian writer ” ^[13] .

Poetization of Violence

Philologist Elena Ivanitskaya sees in the actions of Taras Bulba “the poetry of blood and death” and even “ideological terrorism” ^[14] . Teacher Grigory Yakovlev, claiming that Gogol’s tale praises “violence, warfare, exorbitant cruelty, medieval sadism, aggressive nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, requiring the extermination of the Gentiles, unfettered drunkenness, cultivated people, unjustified rudeness even” , raises the question of whether it is necessary to study this work in high school ^[15] .

Professor of the philological faculty of Moscow State University Vladimir Voropaev claims that Gogol’s position does not coincide with the character of the person on whose behalf the story is told, and believes that admiration for the atrocities of the Cossacks was alien to Gogol, citing the following fragment: “Cossacks of black-browed foot-cares, white-breasted, fair-haired girls did not respect ; at the very altars they could not be saved: Taras lit them together with the altars. Not only snow-white hands rose from the fiery flame to heaven, accompanied by miserable cries, from which the dampest earth would move and the steppe grass would drop from the pity of the valley. But cruel Cossacks did not heed anything and, raising their babies with spears from the streets, they threw them into the flames ”. Summing up, Vladimir Voropaev concludes: “It is unlikely that there will be at least one reader who would see approval in these author’s words” ^[16] .

Epos

The critic Mikhail Edelstein differentiates the author’s personal sympathies and the laws of the heroic epic : “The heroic epic requires a black and white palette - emphasizing the superhuman merits of one side and the complete insignificance of the other. Therefore, both Poles and Jews - yes, in fact, everything except the Cossacks - in the Gogol story are not people, but rather, some human-like mannequins that exist to demonstrate the heroism of the main character and his soldiers (like the Tatars in epics about Ilya Muromets or the Moors in " Songs of Roland "). The epic and ethical principles do not contradict each other - the first one completely excludes the very possibility of the second manifesting itself ” ^[17] .

In chronological order:

• " Taras Bulba " (1909) - the first experience of film adaptation of the novel, a Russian silent film by Alexander Drankov
• “ ” (1924) is a German film based on the story ^[18] Starring D. Duvan-Tartsov.
• " Taras Boulba " (1936, French. Tarass Boulba ) - French film, shot by Russian director Alexei Granovsky ^[19] Starring Harry Bohr .
• “ ” (1938) - English film ^[20] Starring Harry Bohr.
• " Taras Bulba " (1962, English Taras Bulba ) - the most famous foreign film adaptation, an American film starring Yul Brinner ^[21]
• “Taras Bulba, il cosacco” (1963) - Italian film ^[22] Starring Vladimir Medar.
• “ Taras Bulba ” (1987, Czech. Taras Bulba ) - Czech television movie ^[23]
• “The ” (2009) - Ukrainian television low-budget feature film based on the novel; premiered March 29, 2009. ^[24] Starring Mikhail Golubovich .
• “ Taras Bulba ” (2009) is a Russian feature film based on the novel, shot by Vladimir Bortko in 2007 ^[25] . Starring Bogdan Stupka .
• “ Vir is the hero of the people ” (2010) is an Indian historical thriller based on a novel.

• Taras Bulba is an opera by the Russian composer N. Ya. Afanasyev , created around 1860 (not performed).
• “ Taras Bulba ” by V. Kashperov (first production in 1887 at the Bolshoi Theater ) ^[26]
• " Taras Bulba " is an opera based on the story, created in 1890 by the Ukrainian composer N. V. Lysenko .
• " Taras Bulba " is an opera based on the story, created in 1895 by the Argentine composer Arturo Berutti .
• “ Taras Bulba (Rhapsody) ” - a rhapsody for the orchestra based on the novel, created in 1915 - 1918 by Czech composer Leoš Janáček .
• “ Taras Bulba ” - ballet by V.P. Solovyov-Sedy
• The Siege of Dubno by P. Sokalsky
• opera by V. Küner (1880 - Mariinsky Theater)
• opera S. Trailin (1914 in Moscow)
• Opera A. Bertutti (libretto by G. Bodio, premiere - Turin , March 9, 1895)
• Opera M. Russo (Paris, 1919)
• ballet of R. M. Glier ( 1951 - 1952 )
• “ The Legend of Taras ” is a light opera by the Ukrainian composer A. Kolomiytsev , written in 2012. The premiere took place at the Poltava Academic Ukrainian Music and Drama Theater. N.V. Gogol July 29, 2012.

• English translation
• May 15, 2010 a monument to Taras Bulba was unveiled in Zaporozhye on the island of Khortitsa
• http://www.aratta-ukraine.com/text_ua.php?id=1115
• Taras Bulba at the Rodovod . Tree of ancestors and descendants
• Leos Janacek Taras Bulba. Symphony Orchestra of Spanish Radio and Television. Andresa Orozco-Estrada, conductor.