Taras Bulba for mass culture: Modernization or archaization?

Abstract

The paper deals with the lubok adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s story Taras Bulba by Vlas Doroshevich in 1884. This type of adaptation of a Russian classics demonstrates the growth of popular literature at the end of the 19th century. The author examines the combination of modernizing and archaizing strategies for adapting Gogol’s text for the mass reader. Doroshevich’s Taras Bulba is remarkable for its modernizing context implemented through a number of literary allusions and reminiscences from “high” Russian literature (Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Nekrasov), as well as from European literature (Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Walter Scott, Mayne Reid). A stylized “scholarly” commentary is incorporated into the text by paraphrasing Gogol’s historical information about the Zaporozhian Sich. At the same time we can see archaization in the folklore type introductions and in the metric elements (which also echoes the Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov), three nested stories (which also allude to other Gogol’s works: May Night, or the Drowned Maiden, The Night Before Christmas, A Terrible Vengeance) and three “folk” songs (two of which are also clearly of “literary” origin), a fairy-tale model for the magician’s actions (a sacred pine forest, a flooding lake and a growing wall), supplemented, however, by motifs from literary fairy tales. It is significant that similar strategies were used by Daniil Mordovtsev in the novella Sagaidachnyi (1882), Mikhail Filippov in Ostap (1898), Alexander Derzhavin in his poem Three Pictures (1899), as well as the latest pastiches of Gogol at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21th centuries (Multiprose by Zafar Gareev, 1992, and Stargorod by Petr Aleshkovsky, 1995).