Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba has a complicated history that belies how much its title sounds like a sound effect from a Captain Beefheart record. Originally written in 1935, the historical novella is about a 15th century Cossack who, with his two sons backing his play, wages warfare against Polish nobles in the Ukraine. An early exemplar of the "Russian soul", Taras is what literary scholars would call an "utimate bad ass." He keeps up his battle after both his sons have fallen, and after he's captured, nailed to a tree, and set on fire, he continues to speechify about his devotion to the czar to his dying breath, within ever breaking character for an occasional cry of "Owie! Stingy" or giving in to the temptation to confuse his tormentors by yelling, "The money is buried under the nghhhh!" In the first version of the story, Gogol emphasized Taras's identity as a patriotic Ukranian, but in 1842, Gogol revised the book to make it more of a tribute to Russian nationalism in the time of Nicholas I. (Still, Ukranian translators have continued to change admiring references to Russia in the revised edition to admiring references to the Ukraine, claiming, in the process, to be truer to Gogol's original intentions than the later Gogol was.) An action-packed epic yet also a tightly written literary classic, the story has had obvious appeal to filmmakers. The first movie version was a Russian silent film made in 1908, and there have since been German and British productions and a 1962 Hollywood version starring Yul Brynner, which is best remembered for its score, by Franz Waxman.

As Ellen Barry reports, the latest movie of Taras Bulba, a $20 million Russian production directed by Vladimir V. Bortko (and financed in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture), has been packing 'em in since opening in Moscow on April 1, Gogol's birthday. The movie has been praised for its star performance by the Ukranian actor Bogdan Stupka, which is said to do full justice to what Barry calls "a character who combines the outsize proportions of Paul Bunyan with the speechifying of Henry V." But the movie is "also a salvo in a culture war between Russia and Ukraine’s Western-leaning leadership. The film’s heroes are Ukrainian Cossacks, but they fight an enemy from the West and reserve their dying words for 'the Orthodox Russian land.'”

Bortko, writes Barry, "aimed to show that 'there is no separate Ukraine,' as he put it in an interview, and that 'the Russian people are one.' Filing out of the premiere, audience members said they hoped it would increase pro-Russian feeling in Ukraine." Nice thoughts, but people who stubbornly insist on seeing themselves belonging to a separate culture at odds with yours will tend to be more prickly than flattered when you extend a hand and offer to, as they see it, negate their identity. The movie is part of a larger cultural war going on between Russian and Ukrainian representatives over who has the greater claim to Gogol's legacy. “He no doubt belongs in Ukraine. Gogol wrote in Russian, but he thought and felt in Ukrainian,” President Viktor Yushchenko announced at around the same time that Russian Prime Minister Putin was toasting the birthday bou as "an outstanding Russian writer." The Ukraine tried ro fight back by broadcasting a Ukranian-language Taras Bulba on TV three days before the premiere of the Russian movie, but the Ukrainian film was made on a Troma budget and the contest was judged to be less than a fair fight. With warring claims being made on the basis of nationalism, the question of how faithful the movie is to Gogol is the usual side issue, but one journalist, Yekaterina Barabash, has "noted small alterations that Mr. Bortko made to Gogol’s text, which she said served to transform a wild Cossack into a respectable patriot, suitable for wide distribution." Noted with a shrug, however: “What can we do: exaggeration is one of the tokens of our time. The cultivation of patriotism, which our government focuses on now, is a token and part of our filmmaking industry."