The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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in unison with the other birds of prey that hover round the doomed one. For the present, it is worthy of remark that the first political result of the religious schism which was to plunge the greater part of Europe, and especially the Empire, into a paroxysm of strife, was the closing of a long and bitter quarrel in the Baltic lands. As regards the immediate effect of the disappearance of the Order from Prussia, Moskva was chiefly concerned in the isolation which that event entailed upon the Teutonic colony in Livland and Estland. In return for the valuable help von Plettenberg had afforded the Grand-Master during the war, the latter had already granted him complete independence from the control of the Prussian executive; hence, when the secular revolution was effected, the knights of Livland retained their organisation and temporal possessions.127
While Sigismund had been employed in bringing East Prussia under his domination (West Prussia was already an integral part of the Polish dominion), Vasili had composed his differences with his Tartar neighbours. Makhmet-Girei had diverted his warlike tendencies towards the subjection of the khanate of Astrakhan; Kazan, after being several times overrun and almost conquered in a series of campaigns (in which the Moskovite voevodas displayed such scandalous slackness that corruption was openly hinted at), concluded a truce of five years with the Grand Prince. The latter, meanwhile, had struck an astute blow at the prosperity of Kazan by prohibiting Russian merchants from attending the great summer fair held annually at the Tartar city, and by establishing a rival fair at Makar’ev, in the province of Nijhni-Novgorod.128
At a moment when the western Church was offering a spectacle of dissension and rampant heresy, Vasili occasioned a mild scandal in the Orthodox communion by consecrating his unfruitful consort to the service of heaven, and taking unto himself another wife. Twenty years of conjugal felicity had not been crowned with the desired offspring, and the Grand Prince, weary of waiting for the overdue answer to reiterated prayers, took steps to remedy the breakdown in the succession. Solomonia was bundled off to a convent near Souzdal, where she received the veil, enforced, according to current rumour, by a whipping.129 1526Vasili then proceeded to espouse a second wife, selecting for that honour Elena, niece of the imprisoned Mikhail Glinski. This infraction of the Church’s laws was connived at by the plastic Metropolitan Daniel, though the majority of the clergy and many of the boyarins viewed the whole affair with pious reprobation. Tradition credited the inconsiderate Solomonia with the crowning offence of mistaking the nunnery for a lying-in hospital, and giving birth to a male child; the rumour certainly existed, though it is doubtful if it had any foundation in fact.130 Anxious days these for the Moskovite Court. The Grand Princess and her husband progressed wearily from shrine to shrine, invoking the good offices of various saints who were supposed to have influence in the matter, and distributing alms and donations with a lavishness wholly foreign to Moskovite finance, which suggested a conviction that heaven was open to bribery and was only standing out for its price. At length, after three years of patient expectancy, the much-prayed-for infant arrived “on the 25th August 1530, at seven in the morning,” accompanied by a rousing thunderstorm.131 The city of Moskva rejoiced with its sovereign at the birth of the heaven-sent child, to whom was given the name of Ivan. The succession was further ensured by the begetting of another son the following year.
The remainder of the reign of Vasili presented no important features beyond a recurrence of inconclusive hostilities with the Krim Tartars, and occasional diplomatic intercourse with Constantinople. While yet, comparatively speaking, in the prime of life, Vasili was attacked with a leech-baffling malady, which declared itself when he was on his way to the autumn hunting at Voloko Lamsk. 1533For reasons of state it was desirable that the sovereign’s critical condition should be kept from the knowledge of the general public, and especially from the foreign ambassadors. Therefore the suffering monarch was sledge-borne in a painful journey to Moskva, at a season when the falling snow and young ice rendered travelling laborious and unsafe. With the exception of his brothers, Urii and Andrei, Mikhail Glinski—restored to liberty and princely favour—and a few boyarins, none were admitted to the Grand Prince’s presence, but the rumour of his mortal sickness soon spread. The dying man played to the end his cold impassive game of statecraft, and his last hours were employed in arranging safeguards and regulations for the government during the minority of his successor. As the third day of December drew to a wintry close the crowds gathered in the streets and stood round the silent palace, and that night no one slept in Moskva. Dark-robed ecclesiastics emerged from their retreats and swarmed into the house of death like vultures swooping upon a dying beast. And as the huddled crowds watched and waited without, a curious scene was being enacted in the grim bed-chamber. With notable exceptions, it had been the custom for Russian Grand Princes to receive on their deathbed the tonsure, monastical habit, and a new name; this custom the Metropolitan wished to adhere to in the case of Vasili, while Prince Andrei and another layman desired that he should die, as he had lived, a sovereign and not a monk. At midnight, while prince and boyarin were endeavouring to snatch the black neophyte’s robe from the Vladuika, and while the latter solemnly and vehemently cursed them “in this world and the next,” Vasili Ivanovitch drew his last breath. It was the first time in the course of his career that he had shown any impatience. Hastily they thrust the all-important garment on the corpse, and called it Varlam; but the baptismal name had a clear minute’s start. The great bell of Moskva boomed out to the watching multitudes the news that their sovereign was dead. A new day dawned, and another reign had begun.
During the reigns of Vasili and Ivan the Great a new factor in Russian history comes into notice, and afterwards develops into no little importance. This was the appearance in two distinct localities, which may be roughly designated as the lower basins of the Dniepr and the Don respectively, of organised bands of “steppe-folk,” who were neither exactly Russian nor Tartar, nomad nor settled, and who were known under the vague appellation of Kazaks, or Kozaks. The name “has been variously derived from words meaning, in radically distinct languages, an armed man, a sabre, a rover, a goat, a promontory, a coat, a cassock, and a district in Circassia”; an equal uncertainty hangs over the origin of the race, or rather races. Perhaps the clearest account of the etymology and ethnology of the Kozak is that given by a Russian author in a history of the peoples of the Don region. “Kazak signifies alike volunteer, horseman, freebooter. Malo-Russians, mingled with remains of peoples known under the common name of Tcherni Kloboukie, under the name of Kazaks, constituted one people, who became to all intents and purposes Russian ... their fathers dwelling from the tenth century in the neighbourhood of Kiev, were themselves already almost Russian. Increasing more and more in numbers, maintaining among themselves the spirit of independence and fraternity, the western Kazaks organised a Christian republic, and established themselves between the lower basins of the Dniepr and Dniestr, building villages and fortresses.”132 The causes which drove these Slav and Turko outcasts into the wild steppe-land and scarcely accessible islands of the Dniepr, and welded them together in an origin-obliterating union, were first the Mongol invasion, and secondly the gradual establishment of irksome and far-reaching central authorities both in Moskovy and Lit’uania. The absolutism of the one monarchy, and the Catholic persecution of the other, sent men in search of liberty, to swell the ranks of those whose fathers had fled from the insecurity and degradation of a Tartar-haunted land. Similar causes—hostility to the surrounding khanates and impatience of the certain taxes and doubtful protection of the Moskovite government—were responsible for the existence of the Don Kozaks, among whom, however, there was a strong Tcherkess (Circassian) strain, while the Russian element was proportionately weaker. But the great factor in this double evolution was undoubtedly a physico-geographical one. The nature of the steppes themselves, those vast-stretching, level, grass-grown wolds, spread in seeming endlessness under the boundless sky, those solitudes where a man and his horse might lose themselves from all pursuit, called as irresistibly to the lustre after freedom as ever the Highlands of Scotland to the Saxon-hating Kelts, or the Tcherni-Gora to the unconquered Slavs of the Balkan coast. And having lured, it held, and holding, moulded. The