[‘ A person likened in some way to Mazeppa, esp. in being the unwilling rider of a wild horse.']
Pronunciation: Brit. /məˈzɛpə/, U.S. /məˈzɛpə/
Etymology: < the name of Ivan Stepanovyč Mazepa (1644–1709), Ukrainian Cossack leader, popularized in English in the form Mazeppa by Byron’s poem of that name (1819).
In Byron’s version of the story, based on a passage in Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII (1731), Mazeppa is discovered to have been having an affair with the wife of a Polish nobleman, and is punished by being tied naked to a wild horse, which is lashed into madness and then let loose.
Chiefly literary.
A person likened in some way to Mazeppa, esp. in being the unwilling rider of a wild horse.
1836 /Southern Lit. Messenger/ Aug. 555, I began to fancy myself a marine Mazeppa, tied on a seahorse, and doomed to ride the waste of waters forever for my sins.
1839 C. Darwin in R. Fitzroy & C. Darwin /Narr. Surv. Voy. H.M.S. Adventure & Beagle/ III. v. 123 The naked bronze-like figure of the old man with his little boy, riding like a Mazeppa on the white horse.
1851 H. Melville /Moby-Dick/ lx. 314 Only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy..can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with.
1874 G. A. Custer /My Life on Plains/ xiii. 128 So at least thought our amateur Mazeppas as they came dashing toward camp, ever and anon casting anxious glances over their shoulders at their pursuers.
1954 L. Blanch /Wilder Shores of Love/ 291 Was it for this the nomad had ranged abroad? Was the Mazeppa of the desert to rock a cradle?
Compounds
General attrib.
Mazeppa-ride n.
1906 U. Sinclair /Jungle/ xxxi. 397 He went plunging away in mad career—a very Mazeppa-ride upon the wild horse Speculation.
1994 /Chapman/ *77* 95/2 HM’s Mazeppa-ride of a lifework from the first intuitive insight into sensation-experience to the intellectual verbal expression of that diversity in unity.
Derivatives
Maˈzeppa-like adj. and adv.
1837 T. Hood /Desert-born/ in /Wks./ (1862) IV. 167, I found myself, Mazeppa-like, upon the Desert-Born! Terrific was the neigh she gave, the moment that [etc.].
1903 E. Œ. Somerville & ‘M. Ross’ /All on Irish Shore/ 56 Her nerves having been steadied by an hour in the lunge with a sack of oats strapped, Mazeppa-like, on to her back.