A Terrible Vengeance (1832) is part of the Dikanka series by Nikolai Gogol. Nikolai Gogol Gogol redirects here. ...

The tale opens with an evening party at a village near Kiev. Two of the guests are the Cossack Danilo Burulbash and his wife, Katerina. During the party, a Cossack who has been dancing well and caught everyone’s attention turns into a sorcerer at the sight of the icons in the room. No one seems to know exactly the story of his past, though a few try to tell it. After this, Danilo, his wife and a few fellow Cossacks, are on a small boat on the Dnieperdiscussing the sorcerer. They pass a graveyard, where some corpses come out of the ground, each screaming “I am stifling,” more terrifying than the previous who calls out. Then the scene disappears just as it came, and the story goes to Danilo’s farm and his story. His wife is having dreams that the sorcerer at the party wants to marry her. His wife’s father, Stetsko, does not seem to her husband a true Cossack, lying about drinking mead, not eating pork and otherwise not acting properly. They engage in a sword battle in his home, eventually going to guns. Danilo misses her father, but her father strikes him in the arm and he takes a pistol he has shot well almost his entire life to fire back. Katerina stops the fight and asks them to forgive one another, which Stetsko only agrees to for her sake. Then, Danilo and his friend come across a castle nearby, and creep up to one of the windows that a strange light is issuing from. In it, he sees Katerina’s father calling up spells and her soul appears in a blue haze. The sorcerer seems to be commanding her as she sleeps and Danilo is horrified, finding his suspicions true. He discusses his wife’s dream, which coincides with the event, and she begsin to realize who her father really is, calling him the Antichrist. The Cossacks capture him and chain him in the cellar, and he tries to get his daughter to let him out out of pity, for the chains don’t bind him but the walls do, which were made by a holy man though Danilo is unaware. She lets him out and then curses herself for doing so. A bit later, a group of Poles, organized by Stetsko, come to take Danilo’s land but they are struck down by him and his fellow Cossacks one by one. However, at the end of the battle he is shot by the sorcerer from behind a tree and dies, leaving only his child with Katerina, who is then murdered. She grows mad due to her mistake and her husband’s consequent death, and then one day a traveler comes to her house that seems to rouse her back to sanity. However, when he states that Danilo once said to him that he should marry her should he die, Katerina recognizes it is the sorcerer and tries to stab him, but he kills her instead when he gets hold of the knife, fleeing afterwards on horseback. After this, Stetsko begins to see Danilo as a great knight in the mountains, growing mad from seeing him everywhere. He pleads to a holy man near Kiev to help him, but he will not for the sorcerer is already damned. Eventually, Danilo’s spirit catches up with the sorcerer and casts him into an abyss where corpses await to eternally gnaw on his body. The largest of the corpses is a man named Petro, he murdered his brother out of jealousy and was thrown into the abyss for punishment, given by his brother and agreed to by God. The corpses are said to wail and releases terrifying sounds into the surrounding area and it is apparently based on a real legend. Location Map of Ukraine with Kiev highlighted. ... Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Ottoman Empire. ... This article is about the river. ...