Matréna, with its tragical issue, the judicial murder of Kotchúbey and Iskra, are celebrated by the "Russian Byron" Pushkin, in his poem Poltava. He forms the subject of a novel, Iwan Wizigin, by Bulgarin, 1830, and of tragedies by I. Slowacki, 1840, and Rudolph von Gottschall. From literature Mazeppa has passed into art in the "symphonic poem" of Franz Lizt (1857); and, yet again, pour comble de gloire, Mazeppa, or The Wild Horse of Tartary, is the title of a "romantic drama," first played at the Royal Amphitheatre, Westminster Bridge, on Easter Monday, 1831; and revived at Astley's Theatre, when Adah Isaacs Menken appeared as "Mazeppa," October 3, 1864. (Peter the Great, by Eugene Schuyler, 1884, ii. 115, seq.; Le Fils de Pierre Le Grand, Mazeppa, etc., by Viscount E. Melchior de Vogüé, Paris, 1884; Peter the Great, by Oscar Browning, 1899, pp. 219-229.)
Of the composition of Mazeppa we know nothing, except that on September 24, 1818, "it was still to finish" (Letters, 1900, iv. 204}. It was published together with an Ode (Venice: An Ode) and A Fragment (see Letters, 1899, iii. Appendix IV. pp. 446-453), June 28, 1819.
Notices of Mazeppa appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, July, 1819, vol. v. p. 429 (for John Gilpin and Mazeppa, by William Maginn, vide ibid., pp. 434-439); the Monthly Review, July, 1819, vol. 89, pp. 309-321; and the Eclectic Review, August, 1819, vol. xii. pp. 147-156.
