muckefuck | Strange connexions

Some time ago, a Facebook Friend changed his middle name to "Mazeppa". I'm not even sure when he did it because it only registered for me after I'd been reading Doctor Zhivago. There's a reference in there to Ivan Mazeppa, a 17th-century Cossack hetman whose name became anathema. Literally. As late as Pasternak's time, "mazepenets" was still in use as a pejorative term for someone opposed to central authority.

My buddy, however, is not exactly a Russophile. As far as I know, he's not into history at all. So the identification always puzzled me. When I finally remembered to ask him about it, it was his turn to look puzzled. Of course it had nothing to do with Ukraine's long history of resistance; it was a reference to the eponymous character ("The stripper who bumps it with a trumpet") in the musical Gypsy.

So now we were left wondering what connexion, if any, there could possibly be between a historical Cossack and a Broadway vaudevillian. The answer (as it so often is in such cases) is Byron. His poem based on a fictionalised account of the early life of Ivan Mazeppa is centred around a depiction of him strapped naked to a wild horse a punishment for diddling the wife of a Polish count. Naturally, this inspired a dramatisation in Paris featuring a young woman playing the role of Mazeppa, a show widely copied in the UK and America. By the time Gypsy appeared over a century later, the original inspiration was obscure, so the primary associations of "Mazeppa" were with burlesque acts.