.gif)
Mazeppa (Byron)
Encyclopedia
This article is about the poem by Lord Byron, for other uses see Mazeppa
Mazeppa is a Romantic
narrative poem
written by Lord Byron in 1819
, based on a popular legend about the early life of Ivan Mazepa
(1639-1709), a Ukrainian
gentleman who later became Hetman
of the Ukrainian Cossacks. According to the poem, the young Mazeppa, while serving as a page at the Court of King John II Casimir Vasa, has a love affair with a Countess named Theresa, who was married to a much older man. The Count, on discovering the affair, punishes Mazeppa by tying him naked to a wild horse and setting the horse loose. The bulk of the poem describes the traumatic journey of the hero strapped to the horse. The poem has been praised for its “vigor of style and its sharp realization of the feelings of suffering and endurance”. This poem also inspired Alexander Pushkin to write his poem Poltava
as an answer to Byron's poem. The collection contained the short story "A Fragment", also knowns as "Fragment of a Novel
" and "The Burial: A Fragment", one of the earliest vampire
stories in English.
: Mazeppa and the Swedish
King Charles XII
, together with their armies, are retreating from the Battle of Poltava
, where they were defeated by the Russia
ns. Exhausted and war-weary, the two men set up camp for the night. (Stanzas 1-2) The King admires Mazeppa's horsemanship, and Mazeppa offers to tell him how he learnt this skill (Stanza 4).The poem then switches to the first person. Mazeppa describes his youth and his service as a page to King John II Casimir in Poland. (Stanza 4). He becomes acquainted with Theresa, a beautiful Orientalized
woman who "had the Asiatic eye" (l. 208). She is married to a Count who is thirty years her senior (l. 155). Mazeppa falls passionately in love with her (l. 266-7), is unable to control his passions (l. 290-295), and they meet at night and consummate their love. (l. 298-300)
However, the Count's men catch them together (l. 325-6) and bring him to the Count. The Count orders an unusually cruel punishment: Mazeppa is to be tied naked to a steed, which is then to be taunted and set loose. (Stanza 9) Stanzas 10 to 18 recount the steed's flight across Eastern Europe, emphasizing the pain, suffering and confusion that Mazeppa feels. However, the horse has seemingly limitless energy. Mazeppa nearly dies twice. In Stanza 13, he describes himself "full in death's face" (l. 557), but is restored when the horse swims through a river. Stanza 18 concludes with a description of "an icy sickness" and his vision of a raven flying overheard, ready to feast on his corpse. However, in Stanza 19, Mazeppa awakes to find himself in bed, with his wounds being tended by a "Cossack Maid" (l. 817). In the final stanza, Mazeppa's narrative ends. The poet-narrator describes Mazeppa preparing his bed for the evening. The King is already asleep (l. 867 - 880)
However, this colorful legend was in circulation before Byron published his poem. Voltaire
repeats it in History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731). This appears to have been Byron's main source for his poem: his 'Advertisement' to the poem includes three long quotations from this work. Several critics have also speculated that Byron was familiar with the novel Memoires d'Azema (1764) by the French
writer André Dorville, as there are significant similarities between the plot of this novel and of Byron's poem.
Byron's references to Mazepa's participation, in the Great Northern War
alongside Charles XII, and their eventual defeat, are historically accurate.
(1817), which describe agonized, maudlin Byronic heroes and the later satirical, ironic Don Juan
(1818-9). Leslie Marchand argues that Mazeppa is a partly unsuccessful work, as it is torn between high emotion and lighter irony. Mark Phillipson also sees Mazeppa as a transitional work of a "mongrel genre, the historical verse-romance". He argues that the poem is characterized by "moral ambivalence", and it remains unclear whether Mazeppa is a sympathetic hero or not.
The question of whether the audience is expected to sympathize with Mazeppa has long been a subject for critical discussion. W.H. Marshall (1961) argues that Mazeppa is entirely unsympathetic: a "garrulous and egoistic old man" who never atones for his crime and whose hackneyed description of his passion for Teresa "becomes tedious at once". Jerome McGann (1968) takes the opposite view, arguing that Mazeppa's "wild ride" acts an initiation process which makes him into a mature hero who is able to restrain his passions, unlike King Charles. He compares Mazeppa to Meursault, the existentialist
hero of Albert Camus
' novel The Stranger
(1942).
Hubert Babinski (1974) also offers a sympathetic reading of the character Mazeppa, pointing out his kindness to Charles and the horses in the opening and closing chapter. Babinski suggests that the hero Mazeppa is "one of Byron's most realistic creations, heroic within the bounds of human potential" and that he is a "fine specimen of a man". He further argues that Mazeppa's death-in-life experiences during his "wild ride" are central to the poem's meaning and symbolic of the possibilities of human transformation and rebirth. He argues that the French painters who took up the Mazeppa theme further developed this idea.
More recent interpretations have attempted to apply the insights of critical theory
to the poem. Zbigniew Bialas (1999) offers a Saidian
postcolonial reading, suggesting that Byron orientalizes Eastern Europe and attempts to stamp an identity on Mazeppa, who nonetheless evades fixed national and political identities. Jane Stabler (2004) reads the poem through the prism of postmodern theory
, suggesting that uses Byron's Mazeppa as an example of a poem which "draws attention to the fictive contours of history".
However, Byron's poem was popular among his contemporaries and provoked the rise of a 'Mazeppa Cult' among his contemporaries. The French poet Victor Hugo
wrote his own poem 'Mazeppa' for his 1829 collection Les Orientales
, acknowledging Byron. Several French artists produced paintings depicting Mazeppa's "wild ride" including Théodore Géricault
, Eugène Delacroix
, and Claude-Joseph Vernet. Currier and Ives
published an illustrated edition of Byron's poem in 1846
In Russia, Aleksandr Pushkin
's narrative poem Poltava
(1828-29) deals with a later stage of Ivan Mazepa's life, his switching of allegiance from the Russians to the Swedes and his defeat in the Battle of Poltava.
In the theatre, a show called "Mazeppa, or the Tartar Horse" premiered at the Cirque Olympique in Paris
in 1825. This was copied in both the USA and England In the USA version of this act, Mazeppa was played by a female, Adah Isaacs Menken
, who was scandalously clad only in tights. Mazeppa became the most widely performed drama in the American west from the 1860s until the turn of the century, and was also popular in London. In 1877, Albert Aiken
wrote a dime novel
called The Indian Mazeppa or The Madman of the Plains, where the Mazeppa myth is transposed to the Wild West.
The persona of the female Mazeppa is used as the stage name of a stripper, a character in the well-known Broadway musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable
(1959).
In the early twentieth century, a film Mazeppa or the Wild horse of Tartary, based on the stage play derived from the Byron poem, dir. Francis Boggs
, (1910) was produced in the USA.
on 28 June 1819, alongside Byron's "Ode to Venice" and a short prose fragment, "Fragment of a Novel
", one of the earliest vampire tales in English literature.
Mazeppa
-Places:United States* Mazeppa, Minnesota* Mazeppa, Pennsylvania* Mazeppa Township, Wabasha County, Minnesota* Mazeppa Township, South DakotaAustralia* Mazeppa National Park-People:* Ivan Mazepa, known also as Mazeppa, a Ukrainian Cossack hetman...
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
narrative poem
Narrative poetry
Narrative poetry is poetry that has a plot. The poems that make up this genre may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be simple or complex. It is usually nondramatic, with objective regular scheme and meter. Narrative poems include epics, ballads, idylls and lays.Some narrative...
written by Lord Byron in 1819
1819 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The period from September 1818 to September of this year is often referred to among scholars of John Keats as "the Great Year", or "the Living Year", because during this period he was most...
, based on a popular legend about the early life of Ivan Mazepa
Ivan Mazepa
Ivan Stepanovych Mazepa , Cossack Hetman of the Hetmanate in Left-bank Ukraine, from 1687–1708. He was famous as a patron of the arts, and also played an important role in the Battle of Poltava where after learning of Peter I's intent to relieve him as acting Hetman of Ukraine and replace him...
(1639-1709), a Ukrainian
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
gentleman who later became Hetman
Hetman
Hetman was the title of the second-highest military commander in 15th- to 18th-century Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which together, from 1569 to 1795, comprised the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or Rzeczpospolita....
of the Ukrainian Cossacks. According to the poem, the young Mazeppa, while serving as a page at the Court of King John II Casimir Vasa, has a love affair with a Countess named Theresa, who was married to a much older man. The Count, on discovering the affair, punishes Mazeppa by tying him naked to a wild horse and setting the horse loose. The bulk of the poem describes the traumatic journey of the hero strapped to the horse. The poem has been praised for its “vigor of style and its sharp realization of the feelings of suffering and endurance”. This poem also inspired Alexander Pushkin to write his poem Poltava
Poltava (poem)
Poltava is a narrative poem written by Aleksandr Pushkin in 1828-9 about the involvement of the Ukrainian Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa in the Battle of Poltava between Sweden and Russia. The poem intertwines a love plot between Mazepa and Maria with an account of Mazepa's betrayal of Tsar Peter I...
as an answer to Byron's poem. The collection contained the short story "A Fragment", also knowns as "Fragment of a Novel
Fragment of a Novel
Fragment of a Novel is an unfinished 1819 vampire horror story written by Lord Byron. The story, also known as "A Fragment" and "The Burial: A Fragment", was one of the first in English to feature a vampire theme. The main character was Augustus Darvell. John William Polidori based his novella The...
" and "The Burial: A Fragment", one of the earliest vampire
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...
stories in English.
Overview
The poem opens with a framing deviceFraming device
The term framing device refers to the usage of the same single action, scene, event, setting, or any element of significance at both the beginning and end of an artistic, musical, or literary work. The repeated element thus creates a ‘frame’ within which the main body of work can develop.The...
: Mazeppa and the Swedish
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
King Charles XII
Charles XII of Sweden
Charles XII also Carl of Sweden, , Latinized to Carolus Rex, Turkish: Demirbaş Şarl, also known as Charles the Habitué was the King of the Swedish Empire from 1697 to 1718...
, together with their armies, are retreating from the Battle of Poltava
Battle of Poltava
The Battle of Poltava on 27 June 1709 was the decisive victory of Peter I of Russia over the Swedish forces under Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld in one of the battles of the Great Northern War. It is widely believed to have been the beginning of Sweden's decline as a Great Power; the...
, where they were defeated by the Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
ns. Exhausted and war-weary, the two men set up camp for the night. (Stanzas 1-2) The King admires Mazeppa's horsemanship, and Mazeppa offers to tell him how he learnt this skill (Stanza 4).The poem then switches to the first person. Mazeppa describes his youth and his service as a page to King John II Casimir in Poland. (Stanza 4). He becomes acquainted with Theresa, a beautiful Orientalized
Orientalism
Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...
woman who "had the Asiatic eye" (l. 208). She is married to a Count who is thirty years her senior (l. 155). Mazeppa falls passionately in love with her (l. 266-7), is unable to control his passions (l. 290-295), and they meet at night and consummate their love. (l. 298-300)
However, the Count's men catch them together (l. 325-6) and bring him to the Count. The Count orders an unusually cruel punishment: Mazeppa is to be tied naked to a steed, which is then to be taunted and set loose. (Stanza 9) Stanzas 10 to 18 recount the steed's flight across Eastern Europe, emphasizing the pain, suffering and confusion that Mazeppa feels. However, the horse has seemingly limitless energy. Mazeppa nearly dies twice. In Stanza 13, he describes himself "full in death's face" (l. 557), but is restored when the horse swims through a river. Stanza 18 concludes with a description of "an icy sickness" and his vision of a raven flying overheard, ready to feast on his corpse. However, in Stanza 19, Mazeppa awakes to find himself in bed, with his wounds being tended by a "Cossack Maid" (l. 817). In the final stanza, Mazeppa's narrative ends. The poet-narrator describes Mazeppa preparing his bed for the evening. The King is already asleep (l. 867 - 880)
Sources and Inspiration
There are historical sources which verify that Ivan Mazepa served in the Polish Court to John II Casimir. However, it is unclear why he left Poland in 1663 and returned to his homeland in what is now Ukraine. There is no historical evidence to support that Mazepa was exiled from Poland because of a love affair, or that he was punished by being strapped to a wild horse.However, this colorful legend was in circulation before Byron published his poem. Voltaire
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
repeats it in History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731). This appears to have been Byron's main source for his poem: his 'Advertisement' to the poem includes three long quotations from this work. Several critics have also speculated that Byron was familiar with the novel Memoires d'Azema (1764) by the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
writer André Dorville, as there are significant similarities between the plot of this novel and of Byron's poem.
Byron's references to Mazepa's participation, in the Great Northern War
Great Northern War
The Great Northern War was a conflict in which a coalition led by the Tsardom of Russia successfully contested the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in northern Central Europe and Eastern Europe. The initial leaders of the anti-Swedish alliance were Peter I the Great of Russia, Frederick IV of...
alongside Charles XII, and their eventual defeat, are historically accurate.
Analysis
Many critics see Mazeppa as a transitional work in Byron's oeuvre. Its dates of composition (1818-1819) place it between the earlier Eastern tales such as The Prisoner of ChillonThe Prisoner of Chillon
The Prisoner of Chillon is a 392-line narrative poem by Lord Byron. Written in 1816, it chronicles the imprisonment of a Genevois monk, François Bonivard, from 1532 to 1536.- Writing and publication :...
(1817), which describe agonized, maudlin Byronic heroes and the later satirical, ironic Don Juan
Don Juan
Don Juan is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra by Tirso de Molina is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630...
(1818-9). Leslie Marchand argues that Mazeppa is a partly unsuccessful work, as it is torn between high emotion and lighter irony. Mark Phillipson also sees Mazeppa as a transitional work of a "mongrel genre, the historical verse-romance". He argues that the poem is characterized by "moral ambivalence", and it remains unclear whether Mazeppa is a sympathetic hero or not.
The question of whether the audience is expected to sympathize with Mazeppa has long been a subject for critical discussion. W.H. Marshall (1961) argues that Mazeppa is entirely unsympathetic: a "garrulous and egoistic old man" who never atones for his crime and whose hackneyed description of his passion for Teresa "becomes tedious at once". Jerome McGann (1968) takes the opposite view, arguing that Mazeppa's "wild ride" acts an initiation process which makes him into a mature hero who is able to restrain his passions, unlike King Charles. He compares Mazeppa to Meursault, the existentialist
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
hero of Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
' novel The Stranger
The Stranger (novel)
The Stranger or The Outsider is a novel by Albert Camus published in 1942. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of existentialism, though Camus did not consider himself an existentialist; in fact, its content explores various philosophical schools of thought, including absurdism, as...
(1942).
Hubert Babinski (1974) also offers a sympathetic reading of the character Mazeppa, pointing out his kindness to Charles and the horses in the opening and closing chapter. Babinski suggests that the hero Mazeppa is "one of Byron's most realistic creations, heroic within the bounds of human potential" and that he is a "fine specimen of a man". He further argues that Mazeppa's death-in-life experiences during his "wild ride" are central to the poem's meaning and symbolic of the possibilities of human transformation and rebirth. He argues that the French painters who took up the Mazeppa theme further developed this idea.
More recent interpretations have attempted to apply the insights of critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
to the poem. Zbigniew Bialas (1999) offers a Saidian
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
postcolonial reading, suggesting that Byron orientalizes Eastern Europe and attempts to stamp an identity on Mazeppa, who nonetheless evades fixed national and political identities. Jane Stabler (2004) reads the poem through the prism of postmodern theory
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
, suggesting that uses Byron's Mazeppa as an example of a poem which "draws attention to the fictive contours of history".
Literary significance and reception
Babinski points out that although Mazeppa received a flurry of reviews upon publication, later critics of Byron have rarely addressed the poem. Certainly there is less scholarship on Mazeppa than many of Byron's other narrative poems, and Mazeppa does not appear in Byron anthologies such as the 1978 Norton Critical Anthology.However, Byron's poem was popular among his contemporaries and provoked the rise of a 'Mazeppa Cult' among his contemporaries. The French poet Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
wrote his own poem 'Mazeppa' for his 1829 collection Les Orientales
Les Orientales
Les Orientales is a collection of poems by Victor Hugo, inspired by the Greek War of Independence. They were first published in January 1829.Of the forty-one poems, thirty-six were written during 1828...
, acknowledging Byron. Several French artists produced paintings depicting Mazeppa's "wild ride" including Théodore Géricault
Théodore Géricault
Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault was a profoundly influential French artist, painter and lithographer, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings...
, Eugène Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
, and Claude-Joseph Vernet. Currier and Ives
Currier and Ives
Currier and Ives was a successful American printmaking firm headed by Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives . Based in New York City from 1834–1907, the prolific firm produced prints from paintings by fine artists as black and white lithographs that were hand colored...
published an illustrated edition of Byron's poem in 1846
Aleksandr Pushkin
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature....
's narrative poem Poltava
Poltava (poem)
Poltava is a narrative poem written by Aleksandr Pushkin in 1828-9 about the involvement of the Ukrainian Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa in the Battle of Poltava between Sweden and Russia. The poem intertwines a love plot between Mazepa and Maria with an account of Mazepa's betrayal of Tsar Peter I...
(1828-29) deals with a later stage of Ivan Mazepa's life, his switching of allegiance from the Russians to the Swedes and his defeat in the Battle of Poltava.
In the theatre, a show called "Mazeppa, or the Tartar Horse" premiered at the Cirque Olympique in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1825. This was copied in both the USA and England In the USA version of this act, Mazeppa was played by a female, Adah Isaacs Menken
Adah Isaacs Menken
Adah Isaacs Menken was an American actress, painter and poet.-Life and career:There are significant inconsistencies in the various accounts of Menken's early life. In her autobiographical "Some Notes of her life in her own Hand,", Menken claimed she was born Marie Rachel Adelaide de Vere Spenser...
, who was scandalously clad only in tights. Mazeppa became the most widely performed drama in the American west from the 1860s until the turn of the century, and was also popular in London. In 1877, Albert Aiken
Albert Aiken
Albert Victor Aiken was a footballer who played in the Football League for Brentford.-References:...
wrote a dime novel
Dime novel
Dime novel, though it has a specific meaning, has also become a catch-all term for several different forms of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S...
called The Indian Mazeppa or The Madman of the Plains, where the Mazeppa myth is transposed to the Wild West.
The persona of the female Mazeppa is used as the stage name of a stripper, a character in the well-known Broadway musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable
Gypsy: A Musical Fable
Gypsy is a musical with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. Gypsy is loosely based on the 1957 memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous striptease artist, and focuses on her mother, Rose, whose name has become synonymous with "the ultimate show business...
(1959).
In the early twentieth century, a film Mazeppa or the Wild horse of Tartary, based on the stage play derived from the Byron poem, dir. Francis Boggs
Francis Boggs
Francis W. Boggs was a stage actor and pioneer silent film director. He was one of the first to direct a film in Hollywood.-Biography:...
, (1910) was produced in the USA.
Publication history
Byron began writing Mazeppa on 2 April 1817 and completed it on 26 September 1818. It was first published by John MurrayJohn Murray (publisher)
John Murray is an English publisher, renowned for the authors it has published in its history, including Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Byron, Charles Lyell, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Melville, and Charles Darwin...
on 28 June 1819, alongside Byron's "Ode to Venice" and a short prose fragment, "Fragment of a Novel
Fragment of a Novel
Fragment of a Novel is an unfinished 1819 vampire horror story written by Lord Byron. The story, also known as "A Fragment" and "The Burial: A Fragment", was one of the first in English to feature a vampire theme. The main character was Augustus Darvell. John William Polidori based his novella The...
", one of the earliest vampire tales in English literature.