Mazeppa

Onward we went—but slack and slow;

His savage force at length o'erspent,

The drooping courser, faint and low,

All feebly foaming went.”

At the mention of the name “Mazeppa” an English-speaking person thinks of Byron and sees him as Byron imagined him: a youthful Don Juan transformed by an amorous adventure into a man of action, a mythical character rather than an historical figure.

The material used by the poet for this romantic sublimation consists of a handful of facts gleaned from Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII and possibly also a scabrous anecdote: the Polish poet J. B. Zaleski may have entertained Byron with the story of Mazeppa’s punished courtship in the form in which it had survived until the Romantic era. Its earliest written record is to be found in the memoirs of J. Ch. Pasek, the Polish counterpart of Samuel Pepys, who recounts the episode in the following matter-of-fact terms.