Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Edvard Munch, Ivan Shishkin and Ilya Repin. An old Cossack colonel greets his sons home from the seminary by challenging the elder to a fist fight, and takes them both to the Sich to be made into men — where one of them sees a Polish girl. Gogol rewrote the tale seven years later into something harsher and more Russian than the original, and the Ukraine he invented here has been quarreled over ever since. Sixty plates of steppe, field and sea by Kuindzhi, Repin and others carry the wide Ukrainian light that hangs over these tales.