“Cossak Tales” by the Ukraine-born writer Nicolai Gogol is a collection of folklore and legends about the lives and deeds of cossacks, the Ukrainian rebel formation that existed between the 14th and 18th centuries. The book was written less than a century after the Russian Empress Catherine the Great destroyed the last cossack formation. In those times, the people's memory kept the stories about bigger-than-life and mystical adventures of the folk heroes, which laid the basis for Gogol's book.
