I’ve been meaning to read my copy of Taras Bulba for a while; now Nikolai Gogol’s romantic nationalist tale has been made into a big-budget movie that is rekindling a cultural war between Russians and Ukranians:
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. Bortko’s movie, financed in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture, is a work of sword-rattling patriotism that moved some viewers in Moscow to tears.It 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.”
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 teaser trailer has me impressed. It is odd to see Polish winged hussars as bad guys though, and it’s odd to see so much — ahem — of the love interest: