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Mazepa
also: Herr Masepa, Ivan Mazepa
Ivan Mazepa, the seventeenth-century Cossack hetman whose legendary romantic exploits -- fixed in European letters by Byron's "Mazeppa" and Pushkin's "Poltava" -- made his name a byword for a dashing, faithless lover; invoked here as a joking nickname for Alexander Chekhov.
Reading notes
- To Al. P. Chekhov, 9 March 1876. Taganrog. §3 sir Mazepa
A mock-heroic nickname for Alexander, invoking Ivan Mazepa, the Cossack hetman whose legendary romantic exploits (fixed in European imagination by Byron's poem and Pushkin's Poltava) made his name a byword for a dashing, faithless lover.