Stories in Motion: Hohol, Dykanka, and the Literary World of Spirit of the Dance
On Halloween, it seems especially fitting to wander for a little while through the wonderfully strange village of Dykanka, described in Evenings on a Farm Near Dykanka, the fantastical collection that Mykola Hohol — better known to many English-language readers as Nikolai Gogol — published in two volumes in 1831 and 1832. In these stories, village life, romance, comedy, folklore, and the supernatural exist comfortably side by side.
For my ensemble, Spirit of the Dance Ukrainian Folk Ballet, literature has increasingly become one of the ways I explore Ukrainian culture through choreography. Folk dance can tell us much about a people through movement, music, costume, and regional tradition. Literature gives us another doorway: characters, relationships, humor, imagination, and the stories Ukrainians have carried with them across generations.
Among the works that grew from that interest is Tales from Dykanka, an original choreographic work inspired by Hohol’s Ukrainian literary world.
When Characters Step Out of Their Stories
At the center of Tales from Dykanka are three characters who would never actually meet on the printed page.
There is Oksana from The Night Before Christmas — beautiful, spirited, self-assured, and fully aware of the effect she has on those around her. Hohol gives her dark eyes, expressive features, an enchanting smile, and a delightfully spirited temperament.
Then there is Hanna from May Night. She brings a different energy: warm, sincere, romantic, and open-hearted, shaped by a gentler and more lyrical world of moonlight, cherry trees, quiet water, and young love.
And into their midst comes Taras Bulba.
Taras belongs to a very different world. His story appears in Hohol’s later collection Myrhorod (1835), rather than Evenings on a Farm Near Dykanka. He is one of Hohol’s great Kozak figures — forceful, direct, larger than life, and deeply rooted in the old Kozak way.
In Tales from Dykanka, I imagined him doing something considerably less expected — passing through.
That impossibility is part of the fun.
Rather than retelling a single Hohol story literally, the choreography imagines what might happen if these recognizable figures stepped outside the boundaries of their own narratives and encountered one another.
For a few minutes, Taras Bulba is simply a traveler who has found himself in a particularly lively Ukrainian village.
And Dykanka is an excellent place to get lost.
Hohol’s Extraordinary Village
Hohol’s Dykanka is at once familiar and fantastic.
Young people court one another. Parents interfere. Neighbors gossip. Villagers sing, celebrate, boast, quarrel, and fall in love.
And meanwhile, witches fly overhead, chorty meddle in human affairs, rusalky emerge from moonlit waters, and an impossible flower may lead the way to buried treasure.
Reality and fantasy continually brush against one another.
That is part of what makes these stories so appealing theatrically.
The supernatural is not necessarily hidden away in some distant enchanted realm. It may be just beyond the fence, sitting on the roof, flying across the moon, or waiting at the edge of the water.
And frequently, it is funny.
A World Made for Dance
That quality gave me the starting point for Tales from Dykanka.
The work is playful. Character matters. Personalities meet, collide, flirt, boast, challenge one another, and respond through movement.
Oksana brings confidence, charm, and playfulness. Hanna brings something more poetic and sincere, touched by the freshness of a spring night. Into their midst comes Taras Bulba with all the weight and swagger of the Kozak tradition.
The resulting encounter is deliberately whimsical: not Hohol illustrated scene by scene, but a choreographic visit to his Ukrainian imagination.
Look a Little Closer
For the illustration accompanying this article, I imagined the world surrounding our Tales from Dykanka trio and allowed some of Hohol’s other characters, objects, and stories to quietly wander into the landscape.
Some are easy to find.
Across the moon flies Solokha, Oksana’s mother from The Night Before Christmas — charming, sociable, flirtatious, clever, and someone who just happens to be a witch.
Hohol’s Solokha is no gloomy storybook crone. She enjoys attention, knows how to manage her admirers, and seems perfectly comfortable moving between ordinary village life and the supernatural.
Nearby lurks the chort — the folkloric devil of The Night Before Christmas — small, dark, troublesome, and considerably less successful in his schemes than he imagines himself to be.
And somewhere in the village is a very special pair of slippers — an object anyone familiar with Oksana’s challenge to Vakula may recognize.
Other clues lead us into different evenings around Dykanka.
At the water’s edge are the rusalky — mysterious female water spirits of Ukrainian and Slavic folklore — recalling the moonlit supernatural world of May Night. They belong to that uneasy place in Hohol where beauty, longing, and the supernatural meet.
Among the vegetation glows an impossible flowering fern.
That clue leads to St. John’s Eve, where the legendary blossom promises the discovery of hidden treasure — although in Hohol’s world, supernatural treasure is rarely offered without a cost.
Look closely nearby and you may even find a few glints of it.
And draped almost innocently over a fence is a piece of red clothing.
That belongs to The Fair at Sorochyntsi, where the rumor of a chort searching for his missing red garment spreads through the fair and becomes more fantastic with every telling.
Literature as Living Cultural Material
What draws me back to literary sources is not simply the story itself, but the human relationships inside it — love, pride, longing, loyalty, jealousy, fear, humor, and the choices people make when those emotions collide.
Those psychological and emotional truths can reach beyond a particular time, place, or heritage. An audience does not need to know every literary reference in order to recognize longing, vanity, tenderness, courage, or loss. Those experiences are universal.
That is where choreography becomes especially interesting to me.
I am interested in what a story might become when its emotional world is expressed through movement.
That interest extends beyond Hohol. Ukrainian literature has continued to find its way into the repertoire of Spirit of the Dance. Lesia Ukrainka’s dramatic worlds have led me through Forest Song, Cassandra, and Stone Host. Through Guest Artist Iryna Tkachenko, we also welcomed a variation from Lileya, the beloved Ukrainian ballet inspired by Taras Shevchenko’s poetry, into our permanent repertoire.
Looking ahead to 2027, I am developing a new suite of choreographic miniatures inspired by Ivan Franko’s Lys Mykyta — a wonderfully colorful world of wit, trickery, animals, satire, and larger-than-life personalities that seems almost to demand movement.
In that sense, literature gives Spirit of the Dance another way to approach Ukrainian culture: not only by preserving stories, but by allowing their characters, relationships, and emotions to live again onstage — and to resonate with audiences regardless of heritage.
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