The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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the Russians as saviours; yet the same blind of a vassal kinglet which had failed disastrously in the case of Magnus was tried again, with a Swedish prince, Gustav (son of the late Erik XIV.), as its figure-head. Gustav created no enthusiasm among the Livlanders—who were not in a position indeed to show any—and ended by inspiring disgust in his patrons at Moskva. It is probable that Boris was merely staying his hand while Poles and Swedes fought out their domestic quarrels, and hoped to profit by the exhaustion which such conflict must necessarily entail by plundering both parties. The opportunity never came. Little by little the sovereign became aware that he was scarcely possessed of the love of the people for whom he had done so much; the clergy were offended at his suggestion of founding a university, the citizens were aggrieved that he introduced skilled foreigners, who were so badly needed to reorganise the sciences and arts of the country, all classes were scandalised because he shaved off his beard. A terrible famine, caused by inclement weather in the spring and summer of 1601, brought out the good qualities of the Tzar, who disbursed immense sums ungrudgingly among the starving poor, and grappled vigorously and with partial success against the prevailing scarcity. The people, however, saw in the calamity only the wrath of God against a prince who had caused sacred blood to be shed; with their eyes strained upwards to the frescoed roofs of their churches they missed the human endeavour and the open-hearted charity which was striving to alleviate their misfortunes. Portents of disaster and bodings of coming trouble succeeded the famine, for the most part of a very understandable nature. Beasts of the chase became scarce in the forests, packs of famished dogs and wolves roamed round the villages, eagles screamed over Moskva, and black foxes were caught about the city, in addition to which, unknown birds and beasts, strange and therefore marvellous, were observed throughout the country. As there had been a general scarcity of vegetation, and as the towns were honeycombed by the hastily-dug graves of those who had died of want—numbering some hundreds of thousands—this sudden invasion of the forest-folk was not inexplicable. It was also said that women and animals gave birth to monsters; certainly about this time rumour gave birth to extraordinary reports, of more disquieting omen than any of the rest, that Dimitri Ivanovitch had survived the evil designs of his would-be murderers and was yet alive. The people who had credited an irritated Deity with exacting hecatombs of victims for the foul death of a Tzarevitch, were equally prone to believe that the Tzarevitch was not dead, and it only remained for the rumour to take concrete shape for Boris’s throne to be seriously imperilled. With the taint of disaffection visible around him, his government began to take a harsher tone. Although never verging upon the savagery of the later Moskovite sovereigns, the clemency of the first years of his reign was laid aside as useless. Bogdan Bielskie, who had earned the hatred of the citizens in the days of the Terrible, now incurred the displeasure of Boris by alleged contumacy; it was said that his beard was plucked piecemeal from his chin by the Tzar’s orders, but beyond this he was only banished to another district more remote than the one he had formerly administered. More thorough was the swoop upon the Romanov family; the five sons of the late member of Thedor’s Douma, Nikita Romanov, stood high in the public esteem, and stood also very near the throne. An elected prince had some cause to fear the competition of such a powerful and popular family, albeit they were not of Rurikovitch blood. The charge which was suddenly brought against them, of a design to remove the sovereign by means of poison, was probably one of those whispered calumnies which bred freely in the half-Asiatic, wholly mediæval atmosphere of Moskva. It was nevertheless a convenient excuse for destroying the influence of this dangerous party; the head of the house, Thedor, was constrained to enter a monastery, where, as the monk Filarete, he seemed safely out of the way. The other brothers underwent more or less rigorous imprisonment (the severities of which were eventually relaxed), while a crowd of allied or sympathetic boyarins were ordered into captivity or received governorships in remote parts of the country. No blood was spilt except incidentally that of serfs and servants, tortured to disclose incriminating information concerning their masters. That the Tzar, who had received his earliest impressions at the Court of Ivan the Terrible, did not act more in the spirit of his times is a circumstance which may stand to his credit, especially when regard is had to the influences which surrounded him. The Moskva of those days was an environment which in itself propagated monstrous and reactionary ideas. Here were to be seen on every hand wretched hovels, “dwelling-places for human beings,” dark suspicion-speaking bazaars, crowded rookeries of cramped caravansaries, wide open spaces, bleak and untenanted, chill and massive boyarin palaces, weird and awesome temples; and in the Kreml itself “violent juxtaposition of the German Gothic style with those of India, of Byzantium, of Italy—the same tangle of edifices, packed one within another like a Chinese puzzle; the same strange wild orgy of decoration, of form, of colour; a delirium and fever, a veritable surfeit of plastic fancy. Small rooms, surbased vaulted roofs, gloomy corridors, lamps twinkling out of the darkness, on the walls the lurid glow of mingled ochres and vermilions, iron bars to every window, armed men at every door; a swarming population of monks and warriors everywhere.”182 Such was the capital of Russia in the last days of the Rurikovitch dynasty; such it remained throughout the seventeenth century.
175 N. Kostomarov, Rousskaya Istoriya, etc.
176 Karamzin distinguishes the first as Ivan Petrovitch Shouyskie, Kostomarov as Petr Ivanovitch Shouyskie, while Solov’ev gives an alternative of Ivan Petrovitch or Thedor Shouyskie.
177 According to Karamzin 900,000 roubles.
178 S. Solov’ev; N. Kostomarov, Rousskaya Istoriya v’ jhizneopisaniyakh eya glavnieyshikh dieyatelen.
179 S. Solov’ev, Karamzin.
180 Rambaud.
181 S. Solov’ev, Kostomarov.
182 K. Waliszewski, Peter the Great.
Plan of Moskva at the Close of the Sixteenth Century.
1. Cathedral of Mikhail the Archangel.
2. Cathedral of the Assumption (Ouspenski). 3. Spasskie (Saviour) gate. 4. Nikolai gate. 5. Neglina gate. 6. Borovitzkie gate. 7. The Red Place. 8-8. Markets and Bazaars. 9. River gate. 10. Strietenskie gate. 11. Tverskie gate. 12. Nikolskie gate. 13. Arbatskie gate. 14. Tchertol’skie gate. 15. Swannery.
CHAPTER X
THE PHANTOM TZAR
In all historical ages men have been found ready to believe in the pretensions of the personators who seem to spring up as the natural aftermath of a vanished dynasty or a quenched idol; pre-eminently prone to be deluded by such deceptions were the Russians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Inured by the exactions of their religion to an unquestioning faith in the supernatural, incapable from their teaching, as much as from their want of teaching, of forming a critical opinion upon a matter which admitted of doubt, and isolated from their own communities and from the sources of reliable information by vast distances and bad roads, they afforded a fit germinating bed for rumours and frauds of the flimsiest nature. Without proof many of them had accepted the theory that Boris Godounov was responsible for the murder of Dimitri Ivanovitch; equally without proof they were ready to credit the reports which began to fly about the country during the winter of 1603-1604 to the effect that the long-mourned Tzarevitch was alive and gathering an army beyond the Lit’uanian border. The explanation