In the course of reading he became more and more melancholy and finally became completely gloomy.And so the church was left forever, with monsters stuck in the doors and windows, was overgrown with forest trees, roots, rough grass and wild thorns, and no one can now find the way to it. When the priest went in, he stopped short at the sight of this defamation of God's holy place, and dared not serve the requiem on such a spot.

Old Taras will tear the gray hair from his head and curse the day and hour when he begot such a son to shame him. Ukraine will see no more the bravest of the sons who undertook to defend her.

And ruined is the Cossack! He is lost for all the chivalry of the Cossacks! He will see Zaporozhye no more nor his father's farms, nor the church of God.

'Turn around, son! What a funny figure you are! Are those priests' cassocks you are wearing? And do they all go about like that at the academy?' With these words old Bulba greeted his two sons who had been studying at the Kiev college and had come home to their father.

I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called 'old-fashioned,' who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco.

What a dreary world we live in, gentlemen.

Nikolai gogol bulba