Resumo

VOSS, Tony. Mazeppa-Maseppa: migration of a Romantic motifMazeppa-Maseppa: migration of a Romantic motif. Tydskr. letterkd. [online]. 2012, vol.49, n.2, pp.110-135. ISSN 2309-9070.

Mazeppa (1640 - 1710), The Ukrainian leader and folk-hero, has a controversial history, and a distinct presence in literature and the graphic arts. Byron's poem (1819) of the legendary figure's "wild ride" released a mythical energy which absorbed certain French poets and painters of the 19th century. While the Russian tradition, at least from Pushkin's Poltava (1828), re-worked the historical Ukrainian hetman from a Tsarist and nationalist perspective, the myth of the Western Romantic Mazeppa is best realised by Delacroix, perhaps in anticipation of the displacement of the horse by Faustian technology. Mazeppa becomes a Romantic Phaethon, shifted from the transcendent to the mundane, from a vertical to a horizontal trajectory. Early in the century Mazeppa had also become a figure and theme of popular spectacle and literature, incorporated by the common imagination into politics, journalism and folklore, coming to terms with a new Faustian context. A small group of poets of the 1920s and 1930s return in different Modernist ways to the theme. The coda of this selective survey is sounded in South Africa.

Palavras-chave : Faust; Mazeppa; Modernism; Romanticism..

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