Abstract: This article interprets Nikolai Gogol´'s Taras Bulba (1835, 1842) and Aleksandr Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter (1836), two works that engage with the histories of the Zaporizhzhian and Iaik Cossacks respectively, through the visual and affective lens of Il´ia Repin's painting, Zaporizhzhian Cossacks are Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–91). In both texts, humour and clothing function as narrative and visual strategies that reconfigure social hierarchies and modes of perception. Comic effects arise from episodes of travesty — where serious subjects are rendered ludicrous — and from the topos of mundus inversus , in which hierarchies and expectations are inverted. These effects emerge when clothing and identity fall out of alignment, transforming sartorial incongruity into a vehicle of humour and critique. By examining dress as a visual and ideological code, and sartorial and comic practices as defamiliarizing strategies, the article shows how Gogol´ and Pushkin negotiate power, identity, and political as well as interpersonal allegiances while reshaping narrative perspective. It further considers their appropriation of ethnographic and folkloric material alongside Romantic and dandiacal sartorial conventions.
Victoria Ivleva (Fri,) studied this question.