They soon have the opportunity to fight the Poles, who rule all Ukraine west of the Dnieper River. He rallies them to replace the existing Hetman when the Hetman is reluctant to break the peace treaty.
Taras attempts to rouse the Cossacks to go into battle. They reach the Cossack camp at the Zaporozhian Sich, where there is much merrymaking. Taras Bulba gives his sons the opportunity to go to war. While in Kiev, he fell in love with a young Polish noble girl, the daughter of the Voivode of Kowno, but after a couple of meetings (edging into her house and in church), he stopped seeing her when her family returned home. Ostap is the more adventurous, whereas Andriy has deeply romantic feelings of an introvert. Taras Bulba's two sons, Ostap and Andriy, return home from an Orthodox seminary in Kiev. Another possible inspiration was the hero of the folk song "The deeds of Sava Chaly", published by Mykhaylo Maksymovych, about Cossack captain Sava Chaly (executed in 1741 after serving as a colonel in the private army of a Polish noble), whose killing was ordered by his own father for betraying the Ukrainian cause. Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay's uncle, Grigory Illich Miklouho-Maclay, studied together with Gogol in Nizhyn Gymnasium (officially Prince Bezborodko's Gymnasium of Higher Learning, today Nizhyn Gogol State University) and probably told the family legend to Gogol. It might be based on the real family history of an ancestor of Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, Cossack Ataman Okhrim Makukha from Starodub, who killed his son Nazar for switching to the Polish side during the Khmelnytsky Uprising.
The character of Taras Bulba, the main hero of this novel, is a composite of several historical personalities. The 1842 text has been described by Victor Erlich as a "paragon of civic virtue and a force of patriotic edification", contrasting the rhetoric of the 1835 version with its "distinctly Cossack jingoism". The story was initially published in 1835 as part of the Mirgorod collection of short stories, but a much expanded version appeared in 1842 with some differences in the storyline. The sons study at the Kiev Academy and then return home, whereupon the three men set out on a journey to the Zaporizhian Sich (the Zaporizhian Cossack headquarters, located in southern Ukraine) where they join other Cossacks and go to war against Poland. It features elderly Zaporozhian Cossack Taras Bulba and his sons Andriy and Ostap. Taras Bulba ( Russian: «Тарас Бульба» Tarás Búl'ba) is a romanticized historical novella set in the first half of the 17th century, written by Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852).
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