Nikolai Gogol
Taras Bulba: A Tale of the Cossacks
1916 · 296 pages
- Author
- Nikolai Gogol
- Edition
- Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood, with an introduction; second printing, April 1916
- Published
- New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1916
- Pages
- 296
- File
- DjVu, 3.6 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
Reading on an iPhone or iPad?
4.2 on the App Store4.2 · Read offline, with bookmarks and Read Aloud.
About the book
Taras Bulba is Nikolai Gogol’s historical tale of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. It first appeared in his collection Mirgorod in 1835, and Gogol later reworked and lengthened it into the twelve-chapter version of 1842 that is usually read today. The old colonel Taras Bulba takes his two sons, fresh from the academy in Kiev, to the Cossack camp on the Dnieper, and the three are drawn into a war against Poland. The younger son, Andrii, falls in love with a Polish noblewoman and goes over to the enemy, and the story moves to its famous and terrible end.
Written in a heroic, almost epic style, with sweeping descriptions of the steppe and of battle, the tale has been read as a celebration of Cossack freedom and comradeship and is one of Gogol’s best-loved works.
Isabel F. Hapgood, an American translator of Tolstoy, Gogol and other Russian writers, contributes a long introduction on the Ukraine and the Zaporozhian Cossacks, with a short account of Gogol’s life.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
Isabel F. Hapgood’s translation as published in New York by Alfred A. Knopf in 1916; the verso of the title page reads ‘Copyright, 1915, by Isabel F. Hapgood’ and ‘Second printing, April, 1916’. Hapgood’s introduction, signed and dated New York, 9 August 1915, is followed by the twelve chapters of the tale. The scan has a searchable text layer; the text has been proofread on Wikisource.
How to read it
- The book opens right in your browser, on a phone or a computer: nothing to install, no sign-up.
- Search works across the whole book.
- In the reader you can jump between chapters, zoom, switch to a night page and save the book as a PDF.
Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.