After his death in 1709, the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa was portrayed as an avatar of liberty by writers, 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, . 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.
