Mazeppa: Hot to trot
Hitching a ride on Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” swept me past several references to Mazeppa, and while it seemed a strange and confusing story from the start, I was riveted by the central image of a man tied naked to a horse that’s running wild across the landscape.
So was Lord Byron, who wrote up every feverish gallop in one of his proto-Poe poems, and Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Liszt and Tchaikovsky all had a go at the legend too, not to mention a couple of avant-garde filmmakers, and that’s Horace Vernet’s sub-famous 1826 painting above. It was in a review of one of these films that I heard about “Ivan Mazeppa, a Polish nobleman’s page who is punished for sleeping with his patron’s wife” by being trussed to a nag in the nude. It’s not quite the whole story, but legends do have a way of morphing fantastically if you don’t keep an eye on them. See the rest.
