A Terrible Vengeance

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importance = March 2008
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"A Terrible Vengeance" (Russian: Страшная месть) is a Gothic horror story by Nikolai Gogol. It was published in the second volume of his first short story collection, "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka", in 1832.

The short story is written in the "ornate and agitated style" characteristic to Gogol, sometimes skirting purple prose, and was a great influence on the rhythmic prose of the modernist novelist Andrei Bely.

The tale opens with an evening party at a suburb of Kiev. Two of the guests are the Cossack Danilo Burulbash and his wife, Katerina. During the party, a Cossack who has been dancing well and caught everyone’s attention turns into a sorcerer at the sight of the exorcising icons.

After this, Danilo, his wife, and a few fellow Cossacks are on a small boat on the Dnieper discussing the sorcerer. As they pass a graveyard, corpses come out of the ground, each more terrifying than the previous, each screaming "I am stifling".

In the next scene, Danilo's wife is having dreams that the sorcerer at the party wants to marry her. His wife’s father, who had just returned from abroad after 21 years of absence, does not seem to her husband a true Cossack, lying about drinking mead, not eating pork and otherwise not acting properly. They engage in a sword battle in his home, eventually going to guns. Danilo misses her father, but her father strikes him in the arm and he takes a pistol he has shot well almost his entire life to fire back. Katerina stops the fight and asks them to forgive one another, which her father only agrees to for her sake.

The following night Danilo and his friend come across a castle nearby, and creep up to one of the windows that a strange light is issuing from. Through the window, he sees Katerina’s father calling up spells and her soul appears in a blue haze. The sorcerer seems to be commanding her to marry him as she sleeps and Danilo is horrified at discovering that Katerina's father is a wizard. Back home, his wife recounts to him a strange incestous dream, which coincides with the events Danilo witnessed in the castle. She begins to realize who her father really is, calling him the Antichrist.

The Cossacks capture the wizard and chain him in the cellar, and he tries to get his daughter to free him, out of pity, for the chains don’t bind him but the walls do, as they were built by a starets (Orthodox monk) (though Danilo is unaware of the fact). She lets him out and then curses herself for doing so.

In the next scene, a group of Poles, organized by the wizard, come to take Danilo’s land but they are struck down by him and his fellow Cossacks one by one. However, at the end of the battle he is shot by the sorcerer from behind a tree and dies, leaving only his child with Katerina, but the child is murdered by the sorcerer.

Katerina grows mad due to her having set the sorcerer free and her husband’s consequent death, and then one day a traveler comes to her house that seems to rouse her back to sanity. However, when he states that Danilo once said to him that he should marry her should he die, Katerina recognizes it is the sorcerer and tries to stab him, but he kills her instead when he gets hold of the knife, fleeing afterwards on horseback.

After the famous impressionist description of the Dnieper (one of the most celebrated pages in Russian literature), a great miracle happens: both the Crimea and the Carpathians become visible from Kiev. In the Carpathians, the wizard sees a great knight (bogatyr) and grows mad from seeing him everywhere. He pleads to a starets at the Kiev Monastery of the Caves to help him, but he will not for the sorcerer is already damned. The latter kills the monk.

Eventually, the giant knight catches up with the sorcerer and casts him into an abyss where corpses await to eternally gnaw on his body. The largest of the corpses is a man named Petro, he murdered his brother out of jealousy and was thrown into the abyss for punishment, given by his brother and agreed to by God. The knight appears to be the spirit of Petro's brother.