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A Wild Cossack Rides Into a Cultural Battle

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Bogdan Stupka, a Ukrainian actor, in "Taras Bulba," a film based on Nikolai Gogols novel about a 15th-century Cossack.
By ELLEN BARRY
Published: April 12, 2009

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MOSCOW Russias latest action hero galloped onto movie

screens here this month, slicing up Polish noblemen like so many
cabbages.
Taras Bulba, the 15th-century
Cossack immortalized in Nikolai
Related
Gogols novel by that name, disdains
Times Topics:
Ukraine | Russia | Nikolai Gogol
peace talks as womanish and awes
his men with speeches about the
Russian soul. When Polish soldiers finally burn him at the stake, he
roars out his faith in the Russian czar even as flames lick at his mustache.

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A lush $20 million film adaptation of the book was rolled out at a jam-packed premiere
in Moscow on April 1, complete with rows of faux Cossacks on horseback. Vladimir V.
Bortkos movie, financed in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture, is a work of swordrattling patriotism that moved some viewers in Moscow to tears.
It is also a salvo in a culture war between Russia and Ukraines Western-leaning
leadership. The films heroes are Ukrainian Cossacks, but they fight an enemy from the
West and reserve their dying words for the Orthodox Russian land.

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Mr. Bortko 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.
The political elite there will not like it, said Nikolai Varentsov, 28, a lawyer. But there

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4/13/2009 1:06 PM

A Wild Cossack Rides Into a Cultural Battle - NYTimes.com

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are certain ideas that unite us and must be shown. For regular people in Ukraine, this
film will be understood.
The tension between Russia and Ukraine, which grew during a winter standoff over
natural gas payments, has now shifted to the cultural arena. Both countries marked the
200th birthday of Gogol, who was born in Ukraine but wrote in Russian and is
considered central to the Russian literary canon.

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On April 1, Gogols birthday, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin hailed him as an

outstanding Russian writer. Meanwhile, at a ceremony at Gogols birthplace, President
Viktor A. Yushchenko of Ukraine declared him unambiguously Ukrainian.
I think all the arguments about where he belongs are pointless and even humiliating to
some extent, Mr. Yushchenko said, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news service. He
no doubt belongs in Ukraine. Gogol wrote in Russian, but he thought and felt in
Ukrainian.

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There has been a vigorous tug of war over Taras Bulba, a character who combines the
outsize proportions of Paul Bunyan with the speechifying of Henry V.
Gogol himself set the stage for the fight, devoting lyrical passages to praise of Russia
and its people. Ukrainian scholars, translating the book, replaced references to Russia
with Ukraine or other phrases, arguing that it better reflected Gogols original
manuscript, which he expanded and rewrote into the text most readers know.
Three days before the premiere, Ukrainian state television broadcast the first
Ukrainian-language film adaptation, produced hastily on a budget of less than
$500,000.
But there was no way it could compete with the Russian epic, the culmination of three
years of work by Mr. Bortko, who is admired for faithful adaptations of Dostoyevskys
The Idiot and Mikhail Bulgakovs Heart of a Dog. Much of it was filmed by the
Dniepr River in southern Ukraine, where horsemen shrink to black dots on the rippling
steppe. Inside the encampment where Cossacks mustered four centuries ago, a thousand
extras gorge themselves on brandy and war, crimson pants billowing.
At the heart of the film is great Russia. In the opening scene, Bulba, played by the
extraordinary Ukrainian actor Bogdan Stupka, rallies his soldiers with a speech that
was committed to memory by generations of Soviet schoolchildren: No, brothers, to
love as the Russian soul loves is to love not with the mind or anything else, but with all
that God has given, all that is within you.
Bad reviews began coming in from Kiev, Ukraines capital, well before the film opened.
Russian history is short of heroes, and they are borrowing others, sniped Oleg
Tyagnibok, the leader of the nationalist Freedom Party. Writing for the Unian news
agency, Ksenia Lesiv asked, Israelis and Palestinians are they also one people? And
Volodymyr Voytenko, a prominent Ukrainian film critic, said long stretches of Mr.
Bortkos film resemble leaflets for Putin.

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Its a very imperial film, thats what Id like to say, said Mr. Voytenko, who founded
the film journal Kino-Kolo. Everything else follows from that fact.
1

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David Stern contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 13, 2009, on page A6
of the New York edition.

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A Wild Cossack Rides Into a Cultural Battle

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Published: April 12, 2009

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Top Ukrainian officials did not attend the opening in Kiev on April
2. But viewers who emerged from the first showing said they found
Mr. Bortkos message of pan-Slavic unity deeply moving. Yulia
Velichko, 20, a student, hesitated at the idea of rejoining the
Russian fold, saying, We fought so hard for our independence. But
her companion, Valery Skuratov, was convinced.

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We should join Russia, he said.

Were closer to them than we are to
the Amerikozy, a mildly derogatory term for Americans.

Russians showed no such restraint. The premiere inspired

viewers in Krasnodar to shave their heads into Cossack
haircuts, and early this month Russian Fashion Week devoted an afternoon to a
collection called Cossacks in the City.
At the film premiere in Moscows Kinoteatr Oktyabr, which seats 3,000, the audience
applauded at Bulbas Russian soul speech, and then again when the Cossacks
thundered through western Ukraine, holding torches, to drive out the Poles. Among
those who felt exaltation was an ultranationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Its better than a hundred books and a hundred lessons, he told Vesti-TV after the
premiere. Everyone who sees the film will understand that Russians and Ukrainians
are one people and that the enemy is from the West.
Mr. Bortko, in an interview, said the state-owned Rossiya television channel had
commissioned him to make Taras Bulba because the conflict with Kiev made it
politically topical. He shrugged off the suggestion that Ukrainians might view the film
as divisive, noting that he spent the first 30 years of his life in Ukraine.
I have more right to speak about Ukraine than 99 percent of those who say otherwise,
he said. Ukrainians and Russians, he said, are like two drops of mercury. When two
drops of mercury are near each other, they will unite. Youve seen this. Exactly in the
same way, our two peoples are united.
Anyway, he said: I just filmed Gogol. I didnt make up a single phrase.

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But as his blockbuster opened at more than 600 theaters across Russia and Ukraine,
that conversation was just beginning. In Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a newspaper in Moscow
that is often critical of the government, Yekaterina Barabash noted small alterations
that Mr. Bortko made to Gogols text, which she said served to transform a wild Cossack
into a respectable patriot, suitable for wide distribution.

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What can we do: exaggeration is one of the tokens of our time, she wrote. The
cultivation of patriotism, which our government focuses on now, is a token and part of
our filmmaking industry. One hope: history will show that such filmmaking does not
live long. It will fall into irrelevance, when times change. And Gogol hooray! will
remain.
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David Stern contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.

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