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.

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