"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.

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In his new book The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, human paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall argues that a long tradition of "human exceptionalism" in paleoanthropology has distorted the picture of human evolution. Drawing partly on his own career—from young scientist in awe of his elders to crotchety elder statesman—Tattersall offers an idiosyncratic look at the competitive world of paleoanthropology, beginning with Charles Darwin 150 years ago, and continuing through the Leakey dynasty in Africa, and concluding with the latest astonishing findings in the Caucasus. The book's title refers to the 1856 discovery of a clearly very old skull cap in Germany's Neander Valley. The possessor had a brain as large as a modern human, but a heavy low braincase with a prominent brow ridge. Scientists tried hard to explain away the inconvenient possibility that this was not actually our direct relative. One extreme interpretation suggested that the preserved leg bones were curved by both rickets, and by a life on horseback. The pain of the unfortunate individual's affliction had caused him to chronically furrow his brow in agony, leading to the excessive development of bone above the eye sockets. The subsequent history of human evolutionary studies is full of similarly fanciful interpretations. With tact and humor, Tattersall concludes that we are not the perfected products of natural processes, but instead the result of substantial doses of random happenstance.

In this volume you will find 27 illustrated with a uniquely Slavonic flavour. In this volume you will find stories like “The Story Of Unlucky Daniel”, “The Vampire And St Michael”, “The Tsar And The Angel”, “The Story Of Ivan And The Daughter Of The Sun”, “The Straw Ox”, “The Golden Slipper”, “The Iron Wolf”, “The Story of the Wind” and many more, most not heard in the west for many a year. This volume of stories has been selected from a Slavonic dialect extraordinarily rich in folk-tales. The original language was Ruthenian, the language of the Ukrainian Steppe, and of the Cossacks. This was the first translation ever made from Ruthenian into English. Until Ukrainian independence the language was rigorously repressed by the Soviet Government, and has since been a foundation from which modern Ukrainian has been developed. It possesses a noble literature, numerous folk-songs and a copious collection of justly admired folk-tales, many of them of great antiquity, which are regarded, both in Russia and Poland, as quite unique of their kind. Because of this, these stories have a distinctly Slavic flavour for the Cossacks are a proud race of predominantly East Slavic-speaking people mainly located in Southern Russia and in South-Eastern Ukraine usually sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper, Don, Terek and Ural river basins. They played an important role in the historical and cultural development of Ukraine. So, we invite you to download this collection of Cossack culture, sit back and enjoy these stories before you embark on reading them to a younger audience. YESTERDAY’S BOOKS for TODAYS CHARITIES 10% of the net profit from the sale of this book will be donated to charities. ================ KEYWORDS/TAGS: folklore, fairy, tales, stories, myths, legends, fables, Cossack, Ukraine, Ruthenian, Slavic, Dniepr, Don, Terek, Ural, tsar of the forest, story of the wind, voices at the window, story of little tsar novishny, false sister, faithful beasts, vampire and st Michael, story of tremsin, bird zhar, nastasia, lovely maid of the sea, serpent-wife, story of unlucky Daniel, sparrow and the bush, old dog, fox and the cat, straw ox, golden slipper, iron wolf, three brothers, tsar and the angel, story of ivan, daughter of the sun, the cat, the cock, the fox, serpent tsarevich, two wives, origin of the mole, two princes, ungrateful children, old father, went to school again, ivan the fool, st. peter’s fife, magic egg, forty-first brother, unlucky days, wondrous story, ivan golik, serpents

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule. Consequently, he has been memorialized in the Ukraine as a God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington. But in this campaign, the massacre of thousands of Jews perceived as Polish intermediaries was the collateral damage, and in order to secure the tentative independence, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Moscow, ultimately ceding the territory to the Russian tsar. So, was he a liberator or a villain? This volume examines drastically different narratives, from Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, and Polish literature, that have sought to animate, deify, and vilify the seventeenth-century Cossack. Khmelnytsky's legacy, either as nation builder or as antagonist, has inhibited inter-ethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history and, as we see in recent conflicts, continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity.