Those who have seen Tchaikovsky’s most famous ballet, Swan Lake, have seen and heard the performance of the mazurka. The mazurka is an attractive Polish dance that had a wide impact on society, literature, and music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part will introduce the term “mazurka” and trace the origins of the dance. It will cover details such as who performed it, where it came from, the different forms that it took, and ultimately how the mazurka became a part of nineteenth century Russian society. It will also compare and contrast the numerous differences between the Russian and Polish incarnations of the dance. The second part of the paper will discuss representations of the mazurka in nineteenth century Russian literature. It will explore the mazurka’s symbolic significance in works by Katerina Pavlova, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. To conclude, the paper will discuss the mazurka from a musical perspective and provide a glimpse of the modern form of the dance.
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