I recently was able to see the new Taras Bulba movie (
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1242457/), and I came away quite impressed, first with it's faithfulness to Gogol's writings, and secondly to some curious "inclusions". Firstly, in a highly unusual move for a Russian movie project, the movie was released not only in the Russian language that it was written in, but in Ukrainian, which I thought to be a very nice nod to the Ukrainian peoples, who, after all, are the descendants of the characters depicted, and in, what I suspect is a bit of a slap, the Polish language. It is not my belief that this movie will be overly popular with the Poles. In another, rather veiled, dig at the Poles, at key points in the movie, usually when the Cossacks were routing the Polish knights, the same background music would play. It was a strikingly familiar tune, and it took me several days to figure out what it was. It turned out to be snippets of the soundtrack of the Polish production of Sienkiewicz's Fire and Sword Trilogy, which championed the Polish version of the Polish invasion of Rus. Pretty clever, although I suspect the dig will not go unnoticed.
Interestingly, the Church scenes in the Cossack Sech were soundtracked with some marvelous Znammeny Chants, all done by Basso Profundos as only Cossack Choirs can do. It literally made my hair stand on end.
Due to it's politically incorrect depiction of Yankel the Jew, I rather doubt that it will ever be released in what remains of the United States, but if anyone is interested, I did pick up a few copies off street vendors before I came home.
Alexandr
