Women should then personify the Opponent in Gogol’s story. This conclusion is indeed suggested in Simon Karlinsky’s study The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, which downplays the theological dimension of “Taras Bul'ba.” However, the Cossack crusade has several ostensible targets, among which women are overshadowed by “the jews” as Christ’s original enemy, and by the Catholic clergy as the figure of the Heretic (compare Taras’s phrases “unclean Catholics” and “Catholic infidels” nechestivye katoliki, 1835:134; katolicheskie nedoverki, 1842:68). In the 1842 text, the advance of the crusading army puts to flight the “multitudes of monks, Jews, and women” (34); whereas the