“Mazeppa Rides Again!” Alexander Motyl. Independently published, 2023. 225 pp. ISBN: 979-8395022554 (paperback), $10.25.
Alex Motyl is one of only a few authors with the requisite knowledge of history, literature, the arts and writing skills to be able to write this phantasmagoria.
The story is based on Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa in the universe known as the Romantic period, a time of great intellectual and artistic change in Europe. This tale is about a renowned knight’s troubles, following him through nonlinear time, locations, personages both real, literary and historical. The author adheres to the Romantics credo of individualism, emotion and nature, and these themes are all evident in Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa and our author’s book, “Mazeppa Rides Again!”
Ivan Mazepa (1639-1709), a Ukrainian Kozak becomes Mazeppa (spelled with a double p) in a narrative poem written by the English Romantic poet Lord Byron in 1819. It is based on a popular legend about Mazepa’s early life. Mazepa would later become hetman, the political and military leader of Ukraine. Near the end of this tale, we see Mazeppa going to meet Mazepa’s destiny in the Battle of Poltava (1709).
Tsar Peter of Muscovy defeated the Swedes under Karl XII (1682-1718) and Hetman Mazepa of Ukraine in Poltava. Tsar Peter the First (reign 1682-1725) and Empress Catherine the Second (reign 1762-1796) create the Russian Empire. In 1721, Tsar Peter the First receives the titles “All-Russian Emperor,” and Muscovy becomes Russia.
Between 1764 and 1782, Catherine destroys the Kozak Hetmanate state of Ukraine and Ukraine becomes the cornerstone of the Russian Empire. To restore the Russian Empire anew, Putin invaded Ukraine (Crimea and the Donbas) in 2014 and again during a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
After the Battle of Poltava, Tsar Peter I ordered an anathema on Mazepa, or a formal curse, which the Muscovite Orthodox Church immediately complied with. Mazepa died shortly after the battle in Bendery in today’s Moldova where he was buried and mourned by the priests of the Church of Constantinople.
The cultural and national legacy of Mazepa was revitalized with the independence of Ukraine in 1991. Today, 314 years after his death and on the 325th anniversary of the consecration of the All-Saints’ Church that was financed and erected by him in (1696–1698), a prayer service for Hetman Ivan Mazepa was held. The church sits on the grounds of the Kyiv-Pecherska Lavra, the center of Christianity in Medieval Kyivan Rus’.
This war continues and enables our author to weave in the historical barbarities and genocides perpetuated by Russia against Ukraine and Ukrainians through the ages. This would not have been acceptable to the Western reading public before the 2022 invasion.
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor, a genocide of Ukraine by the Russian Empire (the Soviet Union). Winston Churchill in his memoir of the history of World War II writes that Stalin told him in Moscow in August 1942 that there were 10 million famine victims. Stalin meant that the Ukrainian peasants met their deaths by starvation and its repercussions.
According to the poem, the young Mazepa has a love affair with a Polish countess, Theresa (in the book she goes by Katarzyna, Kasia), while serving as a page at the court of King John II Casimir Vasa. Countess Theresa was married to a much older count. On discovering the affair, the count punishes Mazepa 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. Our author’s ending to the wild ride is different. Mazeppa unties himself and rides west of Krakow to his Polish drinking buddy Gombrowicz, of a minor branch of the Polish shlyakhta (nobility) and from where he starts his worldly adventures.
In the narrative, the author weaves in the history of Byron’s poem that was immediately translated into French and was a source for French Romantic painters. The painters come alive in the story. Mazeppa is an actor in these plays, an equestrian in the circus performances, musical works, novels and more poems.
The glossary at the end of the book is a godsend.
Mazeppa meets Lord Byron in Italy in 1816. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was born January 22, 1788 in London and he died on April 19, 1824, in Missolonghi, Greece.
Byron cuts a dashing figure attracting the attention of both males and females alike. Mazeppa accompanies Byron to Greece, where they have many adventures, philosophize and discuss the greater political meaning of what are lies and what is truth, a sly intrusion into our current political malaise and the burning question of liberating Greece from Ottoman rule.
In the book, Byron dies in Mazeppa’s arms in Missolonghi. In all Mazeppa’s travels there are many adventures, people, dramatic situations enabling Mazeppa to observe and philosophize on life’s conundrums in the world, heroism and war and people caught in nightmarish warscapes. The book is interspersed with stanzas of Byron’s poem. Greek and Roman mythology is freely invoked.
One of the more interesting people he meets in Żywiec, the Tatra Mountains, is Archduke Wilhelm Franz von Hapsburg-Lothringen (1895-1948). He was the pretender to the future Hapsburg monarchy of Ukraine. His Ukrainian name was to be Vasyl I Vyshyvanyi.
In Vienna, he and the archduke are rescued from the Turks by Franz George Kolschitzky (1640-1694) who introduced coffee to Vienna and Europe. When Vienna was besieged by the Turks in 1683, so runs the legend, Kolschitzky, a Ukrainian merchant, formerly an interpreter in the Turkish army, saved the city and won for himself undying fame, with coffee as his principal reward.
In Venice, Mazeppa meets Count Yevgeni Onegin, hero in Alexander Pushkin’s (1799-1837) poem Yevgeni Onegin. In Vienna, Onegin binges on alcohol, duels and brawls because he can’t overcome the guilt of having killed a Sasha Pushkin. The diminutive of Sasha is Alexander. Alexander Pushkin was actually killed in a duel. Mazeppa will meet this villain on several unpleasant occasions in his travels and revels in defining Muscovites by Onegin’s cultural and individual faults.
In the aftermath of Byron’s death, Mazeppa is bereft but is saved by the arrival of a creole femme fatale. Her name was Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868), and she was an American actress, painter and poet, and the highest earning actress of her time. She was best known for her performance in the hippodrama Mazeppa, with a climax that featured her apparently nude and riding a horse on stage. She had great success for a few years with the play in New York and San Francisco. She appeared in a production in London and Paris from 1864 to 1866. In the book, Mazeppa plays himself in the plays and beds her as his vivacious lover.
Nature plays an important role in Mazeppa. The poem is set against the backdrop of the Ukrainian steppes, Greek islands, American prairies, whaling for the great white whale of a mammalian monster called Moby Dick, the nemesis Captain Ahab. The natural world is often used to reflect Mazeppa’s inner state.
In his trip across America, he describes the devastation of the Civil War (1861-1865), his encounter with freed slaves, sees the tragic “trail of tears” trek (1830-1850) of the Indian nations on their forced march to the Indian Territories in the west. He has a low opinion of Adah Isaacs Menken’s hometown of New Orleans. He meets William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), known as Buffalo Bill, an American soldier, bison hunter and showman.
From San Francisco, Mazeppa takes a steamer to Vladivostok in the Russian Empire’s far east and takes the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Ukraine. Tsar Alexander III in 1891 begins the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. On the train, Mazeppa would meet Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine (1790-1857) a French aristocrat and writer who is best known for his travel writing, in particular his account of his visit to Russia. He described the Russian Empire in his “Russia in 1839.” He wrote of a country crushed by despotism and “intoxicated with slavery.” In Omsk, a city on the Irtysh River in the vast region of Siberia, Mazeppa escapes the Russian gendarmes during the arrest of Marquis de Custine, where in the book the Marquis tells Mazeppa that he will be executed.
Escaping on horseback through the Central Asian Steppes, Mazeppa describes the Kazakh nation in the throes of Stalin’s genocidal policies, the Kazakh famine of 1930-1933 that devastated the Kazakh nation and led to the death of a third of the Kazakhs population.
Upon reaching the Black Sea, Mazeppa, holding his horse’s mane, swims for three days and three nights to reach the shores of Ukraine.
The world of Mazeppa is a classic example of a romantic poem, in our case of our universe. It is a story of love, loss and redemption that is told in a style that is both lyrical, dramatic and timeless. This book should be praised by readers for its beauty and its insights into the human condition.