Taras Bulba, and Other Tales

Gogol's masterpiece of Cossack fury follows Taras Bulba, a legendary warrior who greets his two sons not with embraces but with fists, testing their strength the only way a true Cossack father knows how. The old man despises their Polish education, their books and refinement. He wants blood, glory, and the open steppe. When war erupts between the Cossacks and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, father and sons ride into carnage together, but the story veers into tragedy that Gogol handles with startling brutality. The other tales in this collection pulse with the same wild energy: ghost stories from the Ukrainian night, surreal comedies of small-town petty officials, folklore that chills and delights. Gogol wrote these in his twenties, and you feel it: the sheer exuberance, the grotesque humor, the darkness that lurks beneath the folk humor. This is nineteenth-century Russia at its most raw and alive.