Cultural legacy of Mazeppa
One story about him says that as a young man, he was caught in flagrante with a noblewoman, whose husband punished him by tying him naked to a wild horse and setting them free; eventually he reached the Cossacks and became their military leader.
He played an important role in the Battle of Poltava (1709), where – after learning that the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, intended to replace him with Alexander Menshikov – he deserted his army and sided with King Charles XII of Sweden.
According to the poem, the young Mazeppa is serving as a page at the Court of King John II Casimir Vasa when he has a love affair with the Polish Countess Theresa, married to a much older count.
Horses in art had long been a popular theme, so when the poem was translated into French the same year by Amédée Pichot, a wave of French painters decided to depict Mazeppa's "wild ride", including Théodore Géricault (1823, now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art[4]), Eugène Delacroix (1824, Finnish National Gallery[5]), Horace Vernet (1826, Musée Calvet in Avignon[6]), and Louis Boulanger (1827, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen[7]).
A theatrical version of the story soon appeared: a show called Mazeppa, or the Tartar Horse premiered at Antonio Franconi's Cirque Olympique in Paris in 1825.
[9] Aleksandr Pushkin wrote a poem-response to Byron entitled Poltava (1828–29), which opens with an epigraph from the Englishman's poem, and in which he portrays Mazeppa as a villain who betrayed Russians.
Victor Hugo was inspired by the French Romantic paintings to compose "Mazeppa", one of the major pieces in Les Orientales (1829), which he dedicated to Boulanger.
[11] John Frederick Herring Sr., an Englishman who had started out as a stagecoach driver, painted several versions of the story: two are "after Horace Vernet" (circa 1833, Tate[12][13] and in 1842 "MAZEPPA"[citation needed].
Another French Romantic painter, Théodore Chassériau, re-interpreted Byron's poem, with Cossack girl at Mazeppa 's body (1851, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg[18]).
Other women had played Mazeppa (see Breeches role), including Charlotte Cushman, but Menken's interpretation -- "sexing up" the part, scandalously performing the nude scene clad only in a flesh-colored bodystocking—really caught the public imagination.
A 2009 biography of Lake (who later married Wild Bill Hickok) estimates that two million Americans saw her athletic interpretation of Mazeppa, many more than saw Menken's sexualised one.
In 1910, Francis Boggs produced a short film based on the stage play of Byron's poem titled Mazeppa or the Wild horse of Tartary.
[27] Gericault decided to stay and live with the circus and painted only horses to try and understand the mystery of this animal; Mazeppa embodies a man carried away by his passion.
[citation needed] A South African interpretation of the Mazepa-Mazeppa motif describes it as "Romantic Phaethon" (a character in Greek mythology who drove the sun-chariot too recklessly) and points to its appeal to Modernist poets such as Bertolt Brecht and Roy Campbell.
