Epic as Device: National and Temporal Identities in Gogol’s and Lysenko’s 'Taras Bulba'

• In Event: Music and Memory II: Style and National Identity

Abstract

Taras Bulba, the eponymous Cossack hero of two deceivingly disparate editions of Gogol’s short novel, is likely the most recognizable Ukrainian literary archetype among general readers. The character’s fame and influence are largely built upon his depiction in numerous adaptations to other media, including visual art, film, theater, dance, and music. This paper examines the adaptation of Gogol’s text in Mykola Lysenko’s national Ukrainian Opera Taras Bulba. The paper addresses Taras Bulba’s significance for Ukrainian national identity, Gogol’s and Lysenko’s varying creative missions as writer and musician, their strongly contrasting relationships with the imperial authorities and one another. The paper particularly emphasizes how Gogol and Lysenko each subtly adopted the thematic, linguistic, and musical features of Ukrainian epic songs (dumy) to create large scale works of artistic and moral complexity that has traditionally been overlooked by literary and musical scholars. The paper posits that Lysenko introduces narrative complexity into the opera via the addition of a traditional Kobzar into the story, thereby blurring the lines between the author (composer), implied author (implied composer), narrator and characters. The epic voices in both Gogol’s and Lysenko’s works facilitate the defamiliarization and elimination of time categories, pulling the past into the future by highlighting the art and artifice upon which categories of temporal identity are built.

Author

• Kathleen Manukyan, U of Pittsburgh