Mazepa

By Walter Kish

For Ukrainians, March is remembered primarily as the month we commemorate both the birth and death of Taras Shevchenko.  Often overlooked is the fact that March is also the birth month of another towering figure from Ukrainian history, namely Ivan Mazepa, who was born on March 20 somewhere around 1640 in the town of Bila Tserkva just south of Kyiv. 

Although most Ukrainians consider Bohdan Khmelnytsky to be the most famous of the Kozak Hetmans, most Europeans would be more familiar with Ivan Mazepa.  Khmelnytsky’s fame is primarily limited to Ukrainians, Poles and Russians, since as Hetman, he had little contact with the rest of Europe. His exploits, though they may have had a large impact regionally, garnered little notice outside the immediate neighbourhood of Ukraine.

Mazepa, on the other hand, was well known throughout Western Europe, not only for his extensive travels there (which included Poland, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France), but also for his famous though ill-fated alliance with King Charles XII of Sweden and their campaign against Czar Peter I of Russia which ended so disastrously at the Battle of Poltava in June of 1709.  He cut a dashing, heroic and romantic figure and became the subject of numerous literary and musical works.

In 1809, the noted British poet Lord Byron wrote a well-known epic poem titled Mazeppa, loosely tracing Mazepa’s life from youth to Hetman.  It became very popular and made Mazepa a symbol of the popular literary Romantic movement of that time, spurring numerous other poems, dramas, musical works and paintings.  One such drama, Mazeppa or the Wild Horse of Tartary, became the most widely performed and popular drama in the American Wild West of the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.  It purports to portray an event, presumably more legend than fact, from Mazepa’s youth, wherein after being caught in a romantic dalliance with the wife of a noble, he is tied naked to the back of a wild horse which is then sent galloping through the Steppes.

Mazepa figures prominently in Alexander Pushkin’s poem Poltava, which is loosely based on the historic battle.  Victor Hugo, one of France’s greatest authors of all time, wrote a poem titled Mazeppa as did the famed Polish poet Juliusz Sowacki.  Mazepa has even attracted more contemporary authors as witnessed by the fact that even modernist playwright and poet Berthold Brecht wrote a poem titled Ballade vom Mazeppa.

The legendary Hungarian composer Franz Liszt penned a symphonic work titled Mazepa, though the most famous musical work inspired by Mazepa, was Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazepa, which is based on Pushkin’s poem Poltava.

More recently, Mazepa’s colourful and epic life has even inspired a number of movies.  The earliest of these was a black and white, silent film produced by the Russians in 1909 titled Mazeppa.    A Polish film also titled Mazepa and based on Juliusz Slowacki’s poem came out in 1976.

In 2002, Ukraine produced a movie titled A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa, directed by Yuri Ilienko and starring Ukraine’s best known actor Bohdan Stupka. The movie met with mixed reviews, primarily because of its X-rated content and the director’s propensity, as one reviewer wrote, “to shock, to antagonize, to revolt, to make the viewer not just register the action on the silver screen but literally to suffer it”.

Admired by some and reviled by others, Mazepa certainly left his mark on Ukrainian history.  His twenty two year reign as Hetman was marked for the most part by economic prosperity, liberal support for the arts and education, and considerable building of churches, schools and state institutions.  The period of his rule has often been referred to as the Mazepa Renaissance.  Mazepa is commemorated by the Ukrainian state in having his portrait grace Ukraine’s 10 Hryvnia banknotes.