Taras Bulba cover art

Taras Bulba

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About this listen

Taras Bulba is a romanticized historical novella by Nikolai Gogol. It describes the life of an old Zaporozhian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap. The sons study at the Kiev Academy and then return home, whereupon the three men set out on a journey to the Zaporizhian Sich (the Zaporizhian Cossack headquarters, located in southern Ukraine), where they join other Cossacks and go to war against Poland

Public Domain (P)2022 Bookstream GmbH Classics Russia
All stars
Most relevant
As with so many readings, especially the more obscure ones, nobody was listening to the reader during recording and so, many words are not pronounced properly. (Not the reader's fault. Even great actors don't know every word -- that's why we have directors.) But this gets silly.. "Ardour" was pronounced with the second syllable as "oo" as in "booze". "Carouse" became phonetically "car ooze". "Gabardine" was pronounced wrong, and don't get me started on the Russian/Ukrainian words. A key character, "Andrei" is pronounced "Andree" when it should be "andray". The Roman author Cicero becomes phonetically "siss- air-o" instead of "sissurro". I lost count of the number of awkward pronunciations, which are so many you feel you are being insulted by Audible. We pay good money for these books, and they can't even be bothered to have a reasonably literate person listen in to see if there are any errors during recording.
Top top it all, the book, despite being a novella really at 4h 41 minutes, is divided in 133 "chapters" of about 2 to 3 minutes each with no pause or announcement of the chapter division. The story pauses and the reader announces each of the real chapters, as in a print edition, correctly, but these bear no relation to the elapsed minutes and seconds on the counter on the app. One is not told, either, if this is the 1835 or the heavily rewritten 1842 edition.
In many other audible presentations, of which I have heard a lot over the last few years, the chapter divisions are made and numbered by Audible regardless of the chapter divisions in the published work. So, you get "chapter 27" in the Audible version, say, when it's really "Part three, chapter 2" in the proper version. If by some chance you lose your place, this makes it murder to find it again later.
I think it is extremely disappointing and disrespectful to the listener to be so sloppy in the production of these stories. They take proper care when reading a big item, like War and Peace (I mean the mistakes are less common), but in the short stories or less popular authors, it seems they don't care how it comes out. The only reason it gets two stars instead of one is that even this awful rendition can't bury the genius of Gogol.

mispronunciation ruins it

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