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).

The 1842 text has been described by Victor Erlich [ru] as a "paragon of civic virtue and a force of patriotic edification", contrasting the rhetoric of the 1835 version with its "distinctly Cossack jingoism".

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.

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.

During one of the final battles, he sees Andriy riding in Polish garb from the castle and has his men draw him to the woods, where he takes him off his horse.

During the execution, Ostap does not make a single sound, even while being broken on the wheel, but, disheartened as he nears death, he calls aloud on his father, unaware of his presence.

Potential reasons include a necessity to stay in line with the official tsarist ideology, as well as the author's changing political and aesthetic views (later manifested in Dead Souls and Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends).

[4] In Léon Poliakov's The History of Antisemitism, the author states that "The 'Yankel' from Taras Bulba indeed became the archetypal Jew in Russian literature.

[6] Following the 1830–1831 November Uprising against the Russian imperial rule in the heartland of Poland – partitioned since 1795 – the Polish people became the subject of an official campaign of discrimination by the Tsarist authorities.

The phobia that gripped society gave a new powerful push to the Russian national solidarity movement" – wrote historian Liudmila Gatagova.

[7] It was in this particular context that many of Russia's literary works and popular media of the time became hostile toward the Poles in accordance with the state policy,[7][8] especially after the emergence of the Panslavist ideology, accusing them of betraying the "Slavic family".

[9] According to sociologist and historian Prof. Vilho Harle, Taras Bulba, published only four years after the rebellion, was a part of this anti-Polish propaganda effort.