The director calls his baroque opus a "filmic poem" dedicated to cossack leader Mazepa. This form was the "only possible alternative to the curse on the great leader Mazepa". For a short period of independence of the Ucraine from Russia in the 17th century, he had fought side by side with Karl XII. from Sweden against Peter the Great. After that, Mazepa vanished from the "official" history books. Illenko shows Mazepa as a Ucrainian hero of the people and doesn't shy away from absurd surreal or drastic image compositions. In the centre stands a sumptuously loaded table, a metaphor for the feast of life and death, because in the director's own words: "The film is a "phantasmagoric dream about the bloody feast of three huge phantoms of European culture: Tsar Peter the Great, Swedish King Karl XII. and Hetman Mazepa." Recently at the Berlinale, the work inspired discussions about nationalistic tendencies and the obvious anti-Russian attitude.