Taras Bulba

Taras Bulba is a romanticized historical novel by Nikolai Gogol. It tells the story of an old Zaporozhian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap. Taras’ sons studied at the Kiev Academy and return home. The three men set out on an epic journey to Zaporizhian Sich located in Ukraine, where they join other Cossacks and go to war against Poland. Taras Bulba is Gogol’s longest short story. The work is non-fictional 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 by... some scholars to be a bit exaggerated. 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. Taras Bulba’s two sons, Ostap and Andriy, return home from an Orthodox seminary in Kiev. Ostap is the more adventurous, whereas Andriy has deeply romantic feelings of an introvert. While in Kiev, he fell in love with a young Polish noble girl, the daughter of the Governor of Dubno, but after a few meetings, he stopped seeing her when her family returned home.
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