Precarious Partners by Kari Weil;

Author:Kari Weil; [Weil, Kari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

MAZEPPA IN FRANCE: FROM ROMANTIC GENIUS TO EQUESTRIAN CIRCUS

Mazeppa is the tale of a young Ukrainian gentleman who had an adulterous affair with the wife of a count and as punishment was tied naked to the back of a horse set loose across the steppes. The tale inspired a generation of authors and painters from England and France. Byron’s 1819 poem of that name launched the notion of what Nigel Leask has called an “equestrian sublime”: a new Romantic celebration of the horse not as the submissive “workaday engine of society,” or as the servant of war popularized in the eighteenth century, but as an image of fury that was wild and animalistic, if also poetic.26 The equestrian sublime draws on Plato’s dark horse from the Phaedrus, symbol of uncontrolled appetites and bodily lust, to celebrate Romanticism’s resistance to aesthetic and political authority. French paintings of the Mazeppa legend by Géricault and Delacroix focused on a passive but eroticized male figure with legs splayed across the back of a frenzied horse. In a more cautious manner, Victor Hugo wrote his own version of the Mazeppa story, published in Les orientales of 1829, in which he insisted that the horse was only a symbol for the artist’s “genius” and thus forestalled any hint of bestiality in the myth.

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