--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah, I know the basis of Taras Bulba. And
> Khmelniki,
> whosoever liberation of whoever he may or may not
> have
> promoted, it was so far from including the Jews that
> his ghost haunted by grandmother's memory. His
> pogroms
> were awesomely awful even by the standards of the
> times, really worthy of the Einsatzgruppen, though
> without the technological efficiency. The Ukrainians
> can have him as a national hero. It helps explain
> why
> my Jewish friends fled Kiev and Odessa even to the
> present day.
>
I know. The event is sometimes refered to as the First Holocaust (the United States has a roughly comparable figure on its currency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US20-front.jpg ). But my point was only that he was a revolutionary (rather, as Woj correctly pointed out, insurgency) leader who was not an intellectual. IIRC he was a border guard.
A film adaptation of Taras Bulba is currently being done. I wonder how they will pull that off. The book is an open glorification of religious and ethnic hatred. If you took out the murder and hatred of Jews and Catholics, there would be like 10% of the book left. Hard to imagine that the same guy who wrote Taras Bulba also wrote The Nose.
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