Poltava 1709 - The Battle and the Myth Paperback / softback

The Battle of Poltava has long been recognized as a crucial event in the geopolitical history of Europe and a decisive point in the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Russian Empire.

The Russian victory at Poltava contributed to the decline of Sweden as a Great Power and was a major setback to Ukrainian independence.

Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish king Charles XII against Tsar Peter I, remains a controversial figure even today. In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from many fields of study-history, military affairs, philology, linguistics, literature, art history, music-to mark the 300th anniversary of the battle.

This book is a collection of their papers on such topics as the international, Russian, and Ukrainian contexts of the battle; Mazepa in European culture; the language and literature of the period; art and architecture; history and memory; and fact, fiction, and the literary imagination.

Mazepa himself is the focus of many of the articles-a hero to Ukrainians but a treacherous figure to Russians.

This book provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle's major players.