Khoma Brut travels in a carriage filled with Cossacks away from Kiev. Adopted by filmmakers, Gogol’s short tale ‘Viy ’ – in which June vacation occasions, and seminary students scatter about Little Russia – is well re-told. The merriment and beauty of the Cossack’s drink and song is enchanting and fantastic, placed and balanced well against the sound, color, and themes of witched devilry.

The biblical and roman thematic references creating ‘Khoma Brut,’ or Thomas Brutus, suggests doubt and betrayal in our hero. Khoma Brut, the seminary student, would draw a circle around himself to extricate these precedents of his birth name, as he does against the witch with increasing confidence over his three nights in the chapel.

The presence of animals and behavior is given great attention in the film, and functions as repose and summation to human activity. Animals are particularly present in the village where Khoma prays. One recalls the pig in the barn which Khoma kicked in the snout, or the goat in the opening scene, whose nose was forced into an open bible by a group of exclaiming seminaries. Khoma is not a representation of doubt or betrayal – he is an animal; Khoma is a Cossack, who drinks, dances, and sings ‘a whole octave lower’ the bass of a voyaging tune. A song with passion not far from spite speaks for the animality of personification.

Khoma’s experience of flight with the witch, when with her he shares the beauty and tranquility of the world as surreal (which is I think not too far-fetched, not too far from an animal’s meditation), was enough for him to surmount his will, bring their flight to a booming end, and beat fatally senseless the wretched beauty. There is cyclic movement in the set during their flight, as there is later much of, in the chapel, when Khoma opposes the circular chasing of her living-deadness and flying coffin.

Poor, poor, Khoma – it is all too absurd. He returns to Kiev, muddy from several leagues of swamp-bog, scats away a worker boy in the seminary (film), and collapses on a window ledge, soaking his feet in a bucket of mop-water. He exhumes several expressions of exhaustion, and then, seeming to have caught his breath, his demeanor changes for a brief second before scene ends. There is a separation here. For having caught up with his ‘breath,’ he doubles over in askance from a dedication to the experience of the absurdity of the world to an inquisiting indifference of it. Khoma is a persistent philosopher, and, as when lost in the dark of night, refuses to rest when a farm stead and drink of vodka may lay somewhere ahead.

In the film, one experience Khoma Brut and his thoughts intimately, especially in the scene when he stops into the tavern with the Cossacks of the carriage. All, including the motion of the camera, become drunk, and the dark red tinted room is for Khoma inescapable. He glimpses the pale faces of three semi-conscious busts, moving slothfully atop one another and collapsing inevitably into a pile on the table to lowermost’s cheek. There is horrible laughter throughout the entire scene.

Khoma survives just fine, by collapsing on to the floor, this evening of debauchery – a Cossack nightmare to be sure – and makes a funny contrast to his three nights of cat and mouse with the beautiful witch. Apparently their flight wasn’t scary enough for him. And what of fear? It is said that Khoma would have survived just fine had he not been afraid of the witch. In more words it can be said that Khoma was far from afraid. It can be said that he was not afraid of her, because he was not afraid to be frightened.

It is before the third night that Khoma rests beneath the sun on some hay. There is the noise of a hen. Khoma slinks beneath an old carriage on all fours and proceeds determined through the street of the village amongst horses, pigs, goats, chicken, and geeses. He then dramatically stops, and I love this (but don’t get me wrong I really respect women), a woman on the street and drinks from her bucket before hastening onward.