"Taras Bulba" is a brilliant story by the great Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, revealing for a thinking person such an abyss of relationships and feelings that all modern literature taken together cannot boast of.
In short…
The dramatic events of the story begin with a description of the arrival of the sons of the Cossack colonel Taras Bulba home after graduating from the Kyiv bursa (academy). By the way, readers often have a question about how many sons Taras Bulba had. The answer is given by Gogol from the very first lines of the story: Bulba had two sons - the elder Ostap and the younger Andriy.
Immediately after the meeting between the father and the children, a serious brawl breaks out, which is stopped by the kind and painful mother Ostap and Andria. Gogol immediately plunges his reader into the old world of the patriarchal structure of the family, when the father leads the family, but the way he does this is determined by the mother. And how many sons Taras Bulba has is not so important, because the only woman in this house has enough love and tenderness for everyone.
And a mother's love can work wonders
Unfortunately, in the case of Taras Bulba and his sons, the miracle of motherly love turned out to be bitter. She dearly loved the youngest - Andriy, and her husband, more than his sons, loved his homeland and a certain ghost of freedom, which a person who fights for his independence with another person has been chasing for all ages.
Maybe because the mother loved the youngest, and the father - the eldest, and the question arises of how many sons Taras Bulba had: two or one? Be that as it may, the mother's love taught Andrii to love. Only not homeland and freedom, as his father wanted, but a young Polish lady. He didn't want to go where his father and older brother were leading him, he just wanted to live and love.
And what's next?
It's hard to imagine the feelings of a father who is forced to kill his son according to some invented moral laws. Bulba kills Andriy, and from that moment on, his whole life focuses on his eldest son. Father's love is a much more powerful force than mother's love. But even she is not able to save a person from death.
So it turns out that, striving for freedom, we excommunicate ourselves or our neighbor from life in general. This is what happened to Bulba. Before his eyes, the eldest son is executed. This episode of the story is filled with such drama that the heart shrinks.
It doesn't matter how many sons Taras Bulba had. It is important to understand what Gogol wanted to say. But it seems that we will not fully understand this.
