This imagery is familiar to all Russians from childhood, as most had to memorize this passage in school, and would almost certainly have been foremost in any Russian’s mind at the sight of the Olympic troika. Gogol’s troika, in its soaring flight, transmogrifies into Russia itself: an icon of the nation’s elemental energy and limitless potential. It was the nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Gogol who in his novel Dead Souls (1842) made this image into Russia’s most revered national symbol. In the splendid pageantry of the 2014 Sochi Olympics, the image of the luminescent Russian troika – a team of three horses at a slow-motion gallop – drew popular appeal. Edyta Bojanowska is a professor of Russian Literature at Rutgers University and the author of Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism.
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