SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
vol.49 issue2Globalisation, modernism and postmodernism in Etienne van Heerden's In stede van die liefde (2005)Mirage of us: a reflection on the role of the web in widening access to references on Southern African arts, culture and heritage author indexsubject indexarticles search
Home Pagealphabetic serial listing  

Services on Demand

Article

Indicators

Related links

  • On index processCited by Google
  • On index processSimilars in Google

Share


Tydskrif vir Letterkunde

On-line version ISSN 2309-9070
Print version ISSN 0041-476X

Abstract

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.

Keywords : Faust; Mazeppa; Modernism; Romanticism..

        · text in English     · English ( pdf )

 

Creative Commons License All the contents of this journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License