Mykola Hohol's works are endless inspiration for Vietnamese writers in the 1980s, a time when Vietnam's politics - economy - society were in serious crisis. There is a novel that I really like : Land of Many People and Many Ghosts (Mảnh đất lắm người nhiều ma). Later, it was made into telefilm Land and People (Đất và người), which is also a film that I often rewatch to reflect on. The novel and film both try to show the context of rural Vietnam in the late 1980s, when the government eliminated subsidies and began dividing fields among farmers. Previously, due to pressure from the Soviet Union and the PR of China, fields and land are owned by the state, however everyone understands that the state is a very vague concept, there is even this proverb : Everybody's business is nobody's business (cha chung không ai khóc, "if a man has many children, then when he dies, they will not cry"). Vietnam's agriculture is inherently backward, and the territory is small with an overcrowded population, so the fields become a breeding ground for grass and insects, while farmers are still hungry and poor. The policy of dividing fields thus caused Vietnam to escape hunger in just two years and begin exporting rice - a commodity that previously had to depend on aid from the Soviet Union and a few other Eastern European countries. However, it continued to "give birth" another problem : Some persons with a high ownership mindset will seek to buy fields from men with low educational levels. This problem may be normal in America and Europe, where the land is very large and fertile, but it would be unstable in a territory so small as Northern Vietnam (its total area is only equal to Moskva oblast or Cyprus) but the population always grows too fast. When there are many fields, of course landlords will exert local political influence and make the country's politics become increasingly stagnant. Please note that these landlords basically only have primary or secondary education, they are actually still farmers in thinking, so their politics are tricks to gain benefits, not to make the country strong. That is why the communist government of Vietnam has applied very bloody punishments to all forms of secession like this. Actually, both sides are wrong, so Vietnam is still very slow in developing science and knowledge.
Therefore, the story of The Terrible Vengeance made me quickly understand the issues that Hohol wanted to talk about the condition of the Ukrainian nations in the 19th century. Film The Dancing Skeleton was also made in a similar Vietnamese social context, when fluctuations in world politics had quite complicated effects on the situation in Vietnam.