AbstractThis article explores the “corporeal” dimension of Iurii Illienko’s reconstruction of cultural and historical discourses in the 2002 film Molytva za het'mana Mazepu [A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa], which focuses on the hetman’s drama, his relationship with Peter I, and the defeat of Swedish and Ukrainian joint forces at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 that signified Ukraine’s submergence into a supranational, imperial community. Illienko’s cinematic space, in which plots of history and sexual politics are mapped onto one another, allows for conceptualizing the body as a site of political and cultural construction, contestation, and radical resistance. Demanding an intertextual approach that involves an open exchange between his cinematic domain and a “universe” of intersecting historical, cultural, ideological and political discourses, his multilayered re-memoration strategies expose both the fictionality and the political dogma surrounding the inherited mythologies. As a decentred reflection of the pa...