After his death in 1709, the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa was portrayed as an avatar of liberty by writers such as Voltaire, Lord Byron, and Victor Hugo. In his 1731 book on King Charles XII of Sweden (reigned 1697–1718), Voltaire popularized an apparently apocryphal story in which a young Mazepa was found to be carrying on an affair with the wife of a Polish nobleman. Mazepa was stripped and bound to a horse that was released onto the steppes, where a group of Cossacks found him near death and nursed him back to health. This tale was perpetuated by many, most prominently Lord Byron in an 1819 epic poem titled Mazeppa, and Mazepa’s “wild ride” was depicted by multiple French artists, beginning with Théodore Géricault in 1823. The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, on the other hand, characterized Mazepa as motivated by personal ambition, emphasizing the hetman’s betrayal of Peter and the czar’s ultimate victory in his 1829 poem, Poltava. In more recent decades, since Ukraine obtained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Mazepa has once again been recognized as a hero of Ukrainian autonomy and now appears on the country’s 10-hryvnia banknote.

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