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A Wild Cossack Rides Into a Cultural Battle - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/world/europe/13cossacks.html?_r=1

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Central Partnership Bogdan Stupka, a Ukrainian actor, in "Taras Bulba," a film based on Nikolai Gogol’s novel about a 15th-century Cossack. By ELLEN BARRY Published: April 12, 2009 SIGN IN TO E-MAIL

MOSCOW — Russia’s latest action hero galloped onto movie PRINT

screens here this month, slicing up Polish noblemen like so many SINGLE PAGE MOST POPULAR

cabbages. REPRINTS E-MAILED BLOGGED SEARCHED

SHARE 1. Big City: $80,000 for a Year Off? She’ll Take It! Taras Bulba, the 15th-century 2. With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King? Related Cossack immortalized in Nikolai 3. Longer Unemployment for Those 45 and Older Times Topics: Gogol’s novel by that name, disdains 4. Paul Krugman: Tea Parties Forever Ukraine | Russia | Nikolai Gogol peace talks as “womanish” and awes 5. America’s Outback: Southern Utah his men with speeches about the 6. Frank Rich: Awake and Sing! Russian soul. When Polish soldiers finally burn him at the stake, he 7. Thomas L. Friedman: (No) Drill, Baby, Drill roars out his faith in the Russian czar even as flames lick at his mustache. 8. Music: Bring Out Your Dead 9. ‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without A lush $20 million film adaptation of the book was rolled out at a jam-packed premiere Newspapers in Moscow on April 1, complete with rows of faux Cossacks on horseback. Vladimir V. 10. In Rescue of Captain, Navy Kills 3 Pirates Bortko’s movie, financed in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture, is a work of sword- Go to Complete List » 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.” nytimes.com/movies

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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are certain ideas that unite us and must be shown. For regular people in Ukraine, this Diamond in the rough film will be understood.” Also in Movies: Geeks gone wild The tension between Russia and Ukraine, which grew during a winter standoff over Video: racing in "Fast and Furious" Remember the summer of 1987 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. ADVERTISEMENTS On April 1, Gogol’s birthday, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin hailed him as “an Some promise you the world. We outstanding Russian writer.” Meanwhile, at a ceremony at Gogol’s birthplace, President deliver. Subscribe today to The Viktor A. Yushchenko of Ukraine declared him unambiguously Ukrainian. Times. Read the complete New York edition of The Times on computer, just as it “I think all the arguments about where he belongs are pointless and even humiliating to appears in print.

some extent,” Mr. Yushchenko said, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news service. “He Get Times Reader Free. A Digital no doubt belongs in Ukraine. Gogol wrote in Russian, but he thought and felt in Newspaper That Reads Like The Real Thing. Ukrainian.”

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 Gogol’s 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 Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” and Mikhail Bulgakov’s “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 Ads by Google what's this?

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“Russian history is short of heroes, and they are borrowing others’,” sniped Oleg Small PR Firm-Big Results Big Firm Alumni at Affordable Rates NYC boutique with global Tyagnibok, the leader of the nationalist Freedom Party. Writing for the Unian news network agency, Ksenia Lesiv asked, “Israelis and Palestinians — are they also one people?” And www.bridgeny.com Volodymyr Voytenko, a prominent Ukrainian film critic, said long stretches of Mr. Bortko’s film “resemble leaflets for Putin.”

“It’s a very imperial film, that’s what I’d like to say,” said Mr. Voytenko, who founded the film journal Kino-Kolo. “Everything else follows from that fact.”

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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 Next Article in World (26 of 26) » of the New York edition.

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A Wild Cossack Rides Into a Cultural Battle Next Article in World (26 of 26) » Published: April 12, 2009 Breaking News Alerts by E-Mail SIGN IN TO E-MAIL (Page 2 of 2) Sign up to be notified when important news breaks. PRINT Privacy Policy Top Ukrainian officials did not attend the opening in Kiev on April SINGLE PAGE

2. But viewers who emerged from the first showing said they found REPRINTS

Mr. Bortko’s message of pan-Slavic unity deeply moving. Yulia SHARE 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.

“We should join Russia,” he said. Related “We’re closer to them than we are to Times Topics: the Amerikozy,” a mildly derogatory term for Americans. Ukraine | Russia | Nikolai Gogol 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 Moscow’s Kinoteatr Oktyabr, which seats 3,000, the audience applauded at Bulba’s “Russian soul” speech, and then again when the Cossacks MOST POPULAR thundered through western Ukraine, holding torches, to drive out the Poles. Among E-MAILED BLOGGED SEARCHED

those who felt exaltation was an ultranationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. 1. Big City: $80,000 for a Year Off? She’ll Take It! 2. With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King? “It’s better than a hundred books and a hundred lessons,” he told Vesti-TV after the 3. Longer Unemployment for Those 45 and Older premiere. “Everyone who sees the film will understand that Russians and Ukrainians 4. Paul Krugman: Tea Parties Forever are one people — and that the enemy is from the West.” 5. America’s Outback: Southern Utah 6. Frank Rich: Awake and Sing! Mr. Bortko, in an interview, said the state-owned Rossiya television channel had 7. Thomas L. Friedman: (No) Drill, Baby, Drill commissioned him to make “Taras Bulba” because the conflict with Kiev made it 8. Music: Bring Out Your Dead “politically topical.” He shrugged off the suggestion that Ukrainians might view the film 9. ‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without as divisive, noting that he spent the first 30 years of his life in Ukraine. Newspapers 10. In Rescue of Captain, Navy Kills 3 Pirates “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 Go to Complete List » drops of mercury are near each other, they will unite. You’ve seen this. Exactly in the same way, our two peoples are united.”

Anyway, he said: “I just filmed Gogol. I didn’t make up a single phrase.” nytimes.com/realestate 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 Gogol’s 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 What you get for... $180,000 cultivation of patriotism, which our government focuses on now, is a token and part of Also in Real Estate: our filmmaking industry. One hope: history will show that such filmmaking does not Housing slump hits Manhattan The sudden charm of public school live long. It will fall into irrelevance, when times change. And Gogol — hooray! — will Co-op fees go through the roof remain.”

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