“Taras Bulba” is the ingenious story of the great Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, revealing to the thinking person such an abyss of relationships and feelings that all modern literature combined cannot boast.
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 Kiev Bursa (Academy). By the way, often the readers 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 eldest Ostap and the younger Andriy.
Immediately after the meeting, a serious brawl ensues between the father and children, which is stopped by the kind and painful mother of Ostap and Andria. Gogol immediately immerses his reader in the old world of the patriarchal structure of the family when his father leads the family, but the way he does it determines 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 mother’s love can work miracles
Unfortunately, in the case of Taras Bulba and his sons, the miracle of maternal love turned out to be bitter. She dearly loved the youngest - Andria, and her husband more than his sons loved his homeland and a certain specter of freedom, which a man has been chasing after all ages, fighting for his independence with another person.
Maybe because the mother loved the youngest, and the father loved the older, and the question arises of how many sons Taras Bulba had: two or one? Be that as it may, the mother’s love taught Andria to love. Only not the motherland and freedom, as his father wanted him, but the young Polish panel. He did not want to go where his father and elder brother led, he just wanted to live and love.
So what's next?
It is difficult to imagine the feelings of a father who is forced to kill his son by someone invented the laws of morality. Bulba kills Andria, and from that moment his whole life focuses on his eldest son. Father's love is a much more powerful force than maternal love. But even she is not able to save a person from death.
It turns out that, striving for freedom, we excommunicate ourselves or our neighbor from life in general. So it happened with Bulba. The eldest son is executed before his eyes. This episode of the story is filled with such drama that the heart contracts.
It does not matter how many sons Taras Bulba had. It is important to understand what Gogol wanted to say. But, it seems, we will not understand this to the end.