This darkly evocative, poetic and imagistic film is based on several folktales recounted by Nikolai V. Gogol (1809-1852). Cinematically complex and varied, the nonlinear story is told with virtually no dialog and serves mainly as a framework for showing scenes with deeply mythological imagery. It concerns the efforts a young peasant is making to win the hand of a rich man's daughter, in the course of which the peasant is led deeper and deeper into complicity with the evils that surround him. This Ukrainian film was shot in 1968, but only received general release in 1989.