The presentation took place at the bookstore Ye. The publishers believe that a book about Mazepa is very topical, especially nowadays, when the very fact of genocide is denied, and the deeds of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych are deprecated by the country’s highest authorities. “Perhaps the time is coming when Mazepa’s name will be disgraced in the same way,” said Vasyl Habor, founder of the “Private Collection” of Piramida Publishers. “We have to oppose such infringements, therefore we print such books.”
Lord Byron’s Mazepa is the last in a series of books published by Piramida. It covers four figures from European culture and five centuries of history. It is the story of the Ukrai-nian Hetman Ivan Mazepa, a hero, lover, warrior, diplomat, strategist, intellectual, and poet; the romantic poet and member of the House of Lords, George Gordon Byron; the symbolist poet, translator, theorist of translation, and literary critic Dmytro Zahula; and the modern Ukrainian artist Volodymyr Loboda.
According to Habor, the book about Mazepa is not just an encounter of the four artists, but also a dialog between cultures and times.
Byron’s admiration for the history of far-away Ukraine was, in Habor’s opinion, a logical stage in his restless life and creative work, and quite common for the romantic European literature and arts. For example, such artists as Delacroix, Jericho, Orlovsky, Hugo, Slovatsky, Tchaikovsky, and Liszt, dedicated their works to Mazepa.
We would like to remind that a translation of Byron’s Mazepa made by Zahula was first printed in 1929, and remains one of the brightest monuments of the Ukrainian Byroniad.
