Republic of uzbekistan ministry of higher and secondary special

2.7. "Siege of Corinth"
In the poem The Siege of Corinth, written after Lara, Byron reveals the anti-social essence of individualism in its extreme expression. Having become a traitor to his homeland out of personal revenge, Alps is deprived of the aura of nobility and proud dignity that the heroes of previous poems were endowed with. And not Alps is the true hero of the poem, but the old Minotti , who raised the people to defend Corinth from the Turkish invaders.
2.8. " Parisina " and The poem "Mazepa"
In the last poem of this cycle, " Parisina ", which is based on an event from the Italian chronicle described by the English historian Gibbon, the noble romantic hero reappears. The poem was written in the autumn of 1815, first published in February 1816. Dedicated to one of Byron's friends - Skrop Beardmore Davis. This poem can be seen as an introduction to the tyrannical dramas from Italian history written by Byron in exile.

Some motifs of "Oriental poems" make themselves felt in the poem "Mazepa", but in it they appear in a special form, are reduced and do not belong to the leading and significant ones.

Hetman Ivan Mazepa , of course, received the greatest publicity . There is a huge amount of material that testifies to its great popularity in European literature, historiography, painting, music, theatrical art , etc. This material is divided into two categories - the history of Mazepa and the myth about him.

There are two events in Mazepa's biography, of completely different scale and significance, that turned out to be attractive to writers. The first is a relationship with a married woman, an everyday adventure of youth, which was overgrown with speculation and turned into a legend about how Mazepa, tied to the back of a wild horse, raced through the steppes of Ukraine, and about his further exaltation. The appearance of this legend became possible because the second event took place, a large-scale and resonant action - Mazepa's attempt to liberate Ukraine from Moscow domination with the help of the Swedes and its tragic denouement.

The most famous works of European literature and art about the Ukrainian hetman include George Byron's poem "Mazeppa". The English poet found the plot of this poem in Walter's "History of Karl ΧΙΙ" (1731), in its 4th section, where it is about Ukraine and its hetman Mazepa. Here Walter characterizes Ukraine as "a country that has always strived for freedom and persistently fought for its achievement" [ ]. In the context of the history of Ukraine outlined in this way, Walter introduces the image of Mazepa and interprets his actions accordingly. In The History of Charles ΧΙΙ, Voltaire also spoke about the unusual adventure of the young Mazepa mentioned above.

This legend about Mazepa originated in Poland and was brought to France with the court of King Stanislav Leshchinsky. It appeared on the basis of an everyday incident, which is told in several versions in the Polish mimoiriste . The most famous of them is set forth in the mimoirs of J. Pasek, a Polish writer of the late 17th century. In accordance with it, Mazepa, arriving at his estate in Volyn, had a love affair with the wife of a nobleman, was discovered by him and punished by being tied up and released into the field on a horse. But it was not a wild horse brought from the steppes, but the horse of Mazepa himself, and he carried him not to the steppes for hundreds of kilometers, but to his own estate, located nearby. This mythopoetic potential, which appeared in Walter's story, was brilliantly realized already in the era of romanticism by Byron in the poem "Mazeppa".

In modern literature, this work is interpreted as what laid the foundation for the "Mazepa myth", which eventually spread in numerous interpretations and transformations. Indeed, in Byron's poem there is a transition of the historical plot and the hero to another hypostasis.

Byron's poem consists of the story of the hero himself about the unusual adventure of his youth and from the night scene in the steppe after the battle of Poltava. In the scientific literature, it is generally believed that the main plot of the work is the story of the hero, this is only its plot design. In Byron's poem there are two storylines and, accordingly, two images of Mazepa, in his youth and in old age, but the semantic emphasis is shifted to his other hypostasis. And the point is not only that the image of Mazepa - the hetman incomparably richer and more interesting than Mazepa's lover, and first of all, because it manifests the ideological and conceptual discus of the work. In the structure of the work, Mazepa's story about the incident of his youth has an explication a character that reveals his "path to the throne", which is lost near Poltava. The typical Byronian motif of the unpredictability of human destiny is derived from the same picture.

The image of Mazepa the hetman is depicted in the poem with sparing, but measured and precise strokes in their own way. Here is a colorful portrait of the hetman :
“Here is Mazepa. ancient oak,

As he himself is old, stern and rude,

Gave him shelter; calm, brave

The prince of Ukraine did not want

Lie down, though he was doubly exhausted,

Not taking care of the horse…” [10.]

In which the Cossack traits of his character are not forgotten - as they were presented to the English romantic poet. But more significant is the psychological characteristic, or, more precisely, the spiritual and psychological image of Mazepa. He is portrayed by Byron with careless sympathy, such features as: courage, endurance and self-control in the most difficult trials, as well as resilience under the blows of an unmerciful fate are accentuated. Such a stroke of the image is also significant: during the most cruel test, when the work of his whole life crashed, Mazepa finds the strength to support the young Swedish king.

From the purely artistic point of view of Byron, this poem was especially successful in the dynamic picture of the hero's mad gallop, bound on a wild horse. This amazed readers and attracted their attention.

The poem is characterized by a limited combination of "poetic painting" with an expressive reproduction of the experiences and mental states of the hero, with a strong lyrical pressure, which gives it a typically Byronian sound, harsh and gloomy.

In the peculiar poetic geography of Byron, Ukraine belongs to a special romantic world, designated by the very conditional name "East". And the main feature of this world is the proximity to the "state of nature." Like many romantics, Byron admired untouched nature, spontaneous and wild, on which “false civilization” had not yet left its mark, and poeticized it, especially in “oriental poems”, to which Mazeppa gravitates in this aspect. At the same time, Byron is quite accurate in fixing the real geographical features of Ukraine: first, a wild horse carries the hero of the poem past castles, cities and villages destroyed during the recent Turkish raid, then through forests and forests, that is, the forest-steppe, and only after that do the pictures of the steppe appear. - as an apotheosis not only of the poetic and pictorial, but also of the lyrical and psychological plan. And if before that the hero still had hope for salvation, now it is completely fading away, instead boundless despair and alienation of the doomed from the whole world come.

As the hero is physically lost in the deserted immensity of the steppe, the bright colorful pictures of the poem are increasingly filled with lyrical and meditative content and become a plastic expression of his loneliness and alienation, from which death is inseparable. Usually Byron is characterized as a poet of disappointment and world sorrow, but with no less right he can be called a poet of immense titanic suffering. The suffering of a lonely and doomed hero, not heard or shared by anyone, is a theme that has always worried the poet and found its manifestation in many of his works, among which the poem " Mazeppa", next to "Manfred", belongs to one of the main places.

In the created landscapes he included historical "relics", there was a contrast between nature, majestic and eternal, and "traces of history". There are similar "traces of history" in the poem "Mazepa", moreover, these are traces of a specific Ukrainian history. It should also be noted that in Byron's poem, the biography of Mazepa and the events of Ukrainian history are given in sync.

The poem is written in energetic, impetuous iambic tetrameter, which perfectly conveys the stormy dynamics of the poem. The figurative structure of the work, its structure, is subordinated to the same task of reproducing stormy dynamics. Thus, conveying the frantic gallop of a horse, Byron compares it with a river stream, with lightning, with the northern lights and a meteor, and finally with a raging sea.

It should be noted that Mazepa is perfect for the role of a Byron-type romantic hero. As the Polish researcher J. Ostrovsky notes, “his story, based on exotic realities, contained a plot of unhappy love and cruel punishment. The unstoppable gallop of a horse is at the same time an instrument of fate, which prepared Mazepa for great political achievements. Even the final defeat of the hetman endows him with an additional halo of martyrdom” [9]. All these elements of the structure of the work carried a symbolic content, which easily grew into a myth, although, of course, the author's intentions did not include the creation of a mythical image.

The image of Mazepa in the poem also has such features as willfulness and the fight against the demons of evil, which brings him closer to the heroes of the Promethean type and to the mythical hero himself. The idea that Byron's interpretation of Mazeppa refers to " Promethean images" was expressed by Professor S. Rodzevich. He wrote that Bonivar and Mazepa are “those historical persons in whom the poet finds reflections of the suffering and zeal of Aeschylus's immortal titan. This, in turn, will be reflected in the paintings of O. Vernet and L. Boulanger , where the figure of a hero tied to a horse resembles the figure of Prometheus chained to a rock. In the poem, this fatal run into the boundless expanse, which breathes with threat, is perceived by the fading consciousness as a road to nowhere. But it was not death, Mazepa was found by the villagers and they took him out, brought him back to life. Although fate turns out to be merciless to him, he suffers a severe defeat when, it would seem , the goal of his life becomes a reality. But this defeat did not break him. In the image of Mazepa the Hetman , we have, as a result, a peculiar version of Byron's titanic personality, defeated, but not broken, a personality of the same type as Manfred, but in a different vein. It should be noted that the plot of the entire poem is based on the supporting positions of the page and the hetman , the half-dead and the ruler of the country, who organize the work of ideological and artistic integrity.

As noted, Byron's poem "Mazeppa" was widely publicized in Europe and responded in literature, painting, music and other arts. The image of Mazepa has become one of the "eternal images" of historical origin such as Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, etc., which are mythologized in various ways in specific artistic incarnations.[9]