The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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man of new and unpalatable ideas. All this gives a glimpse of a strong personality, an enlightened mind, healthily contemptuous of the foibles and superstitions with which it came in contact, and a vigorous faculty for reform and organisation. A rare character in the long list of Moskovite sovereigns. Such a one recurs some ninety years later and creates a new Russia. The Ljhedimitri, himself a man of straw, appears to have tried to cram into a few months the patient efforts of a lifetime. Probably the fact was that the extraordinary facility with which his enterprise had been carried to a triumphant conclusion gave him a false idea of his own powers and of the dispositions of the Russians. In one respect only do his transactions approach, at one and the same time, to the childish arrogance of the legitimate Moskovite Sovereigns and the petulant vanity which might be expected of a mushroom monarch; not only did he demand from the Pope and the King of Poland the acknowledgment of the old disputed title of Tzar, but he further stipulated for the style of Cæsar (Kesar), an innovation of his own devising. It is possible that this solemn trifle, which threatened to interrupt his good understanding with Rome and the Holy See, was really introduced for that purpose, in order to get rid of allies who were likely, now that he had attained his ambitious object, to become inconvenient. That he had, from conviction or policy, privately entered the Catholic Church during the days of his pretendership seems fairly evident; that it was not expedient to carry the matter farther will be readily comprehended. The Jesuit Father, Pierling, in an historical disquisition on the subject, combats the assertion of the Russian writers that the Ljhedimitri was “invented” or first brought forward by the Society of Jesus, the Nuncio in Poland, or any agent of the Pope.186 Certainly there is no evidence on which to rest such a charge, which probably had its origin in inter-Christian jealousy. The fairest and most reasonable conclusion is that the Jesuits, Ragoni, and the Holy See, allowed themselves to be somewhat easily persuaded of the legitimacy of the claims of a pretender who might render splendid services to their Church. Rome had ever been dazzled with the hope of bringing the Russian Communion into her maternal embrace, and the prospect was the more alluring now that her spiritual dominion had been shorn and abbreviated by the Protestant heresy in the north of Europe, and by the Mohametan encroachments in the south-east. At the same time it should be borne in mind that the evidence on which the Catholics and Poles grounded their ostensible faith in the Ljhedimitri was substantially the same as that which imposed upon the whole of Russia. The zeal of a convert—and a pensioner—showed a considerable abatement when the adventurer was safely transformed into Tzar, and Dimitri evinced no disinclination to continuing bowing down in the house of Rimmon for the rest of his life. The Poles who still hung about his person were permitted to worship freely after their own fashion, and to penetrate into the sacred places of Moskovite Orthodoxy; but when sounded on the subject of establishing the Latin faith the Tzar talked evasively of educating his subjects and of initiating a war against the Sultan, objects nearer his heart than a revolution of dogmas. If a contemptuous clemency could have inspired the Moskvitchi with affection for a veal-eating sovereign, the False Dimitri would not have lacked popularity. Vasili Shouyskie and his two brothers were recalled from their disgrace and banishment, and the former was admitted into the Council of the Tzar. The axe and the gibbet had a long rest, and the monarch hunted bears instead of boyarins. Dimitri might have strengthened his position and gained time to live down the prejudices of his subjects by effecting a prudent marriage; by allying himself with the Romanov or even the Shouyskie family he would have created a party for himself among the nobles and have secured an incontestable link with the line of Rurik, either by remote descent or recent connection. For some reason of his own he was bent on fulfilling his betrothal vow to Marina Mnishek, and such was his impatience to see his bride at Moskva, sharing his throne, that the Palatine, her father, was able to exact considerable sums of money and concessions on the question of the future Tzaritza’s religious liberty (she was a Catholic), before escorting her to her expectant husband. May 1606The arrival at the capital of the Polish maiden, attended by her father and a following of some 2000 persons, together with an embassy from King Sigismund, did not inspire the citizens with any greater affection for their monarch, already tainted in their eyes with partiality for foreign customs and alien faiths. The bride made her state entry in a carriage decorated with silver eagles and drawn by ten pied horses. The tzarskie troops, in red coats with white cross-belts, were drawn up to receive her; cannon, bells, drums and trumpets, sounded a welcome; only the people kept an ominous silence. It was noted with disapproval that as she entered the Kreml through the Saviour Gate, a portal usually crossed with deep obeisance, the Polish band crashed out their national air, “For ever in weal as in woe.” The wedding and coronation festivities were carried on with a lavish display and open-handed conviviality seldom seen before in Moskva, but they were not preceded by the elaborate religious ceremonials by which the Grand Princes of yore had been wont to “purify” any consort they took from un-Orthodox lands. The woman who now shared the throne of Monomachus was a Pole and a Latin; as for the Tzar, no one knew what or who he was—except perhaps Mariya Nogai. The popular discontent had found a rallying-point in the Shouyskie zamok; ’Dimitri had pardoned Vasili Shouyskie, the latter had never forgiven ’Dimitri. Before the arrival of the bridal foreigners the boyarin had set in movement the conspiracy which was intended to hurl the impostor from his mis-gotten throne. The plot was a wide-reaching one and could scarcely be kept from the Tzar’s knowledge, but the newly-wedded monarch, strong in contemptuous security and engrossed in feasting and music, paid scant notice to the warnings which he received from spies or the croaking of his guests as to the temper of the people. The 18th of May he had fixed for a sham battle around a specially constructed wooden fortress; in the early hours of the 17th his subjects gave him a display of a less make-believe nature. Besides the accumulated dislike for the Tzar and all his ways, the Poles who had flocked in such numbers to the marriage festival of Marina Mnishek gave bitter offence to the Moskvitchi by their haughty and irreverent bearing. It was the old history of Kiev repeating itself. The Russians chafed to see the Kreml of their cherished capital, the Holy of Holies of the Moskovite nation, overrun by swaggering Poles and lawless Kozaks, and the hour of vengeance was eagerly awaited by all classes. On the night of the 16th the strangers and the Tzar’s household, weary with wine and revelry, sought unsuspectingly their accustomed couches; otherwise “no one slept that night in Moskva.” As the sun’s first rays touched on the gilded cupolas an alarm bell clanged out from a church; another and another took up the signal, till all over the watching city the warnings resounded. The noise penetrated into the Kreml and roused the Tzar from his bed; the body-guard hazarded the explanation that a fire had broken out, and the Ljhedimitri returned to his chamber. But soon above the clanging was heard the angry yelling of a blood-seeking multitude, and Basmanov, who since his celebrated desertion of the Godounovs had remained true to his adopted master, burst in upon the startled Tzar and warned him to fly. The voevoda himself faced the clamouring crowd on the palace staircase and sank beneath a shower of murderous blows. The Ljhedimitri, hunted through his apartments, jumped or was thrown from an upper window and lay broken and senseless in a courtyard. His bleeding corpse, seized by some strielitz, was borne into a chamber where his principal boyarin enemies gathered round; for a few short moments he returned to a consciousness of agony from broken limbs, saw pitiless scowling faces around him, heard taunts and abuse from angry throats; then bullets and sword-thrusts closed his last audience. His body was dragged with ropes out through the Saviour Gate, to the striking of the same bells that had welcomed his state entry eleven months ago, and haled to the convent of the Ascension, where dwelt the pseudo-mother Mariya. The corpse might well have been beyond recognition, but to the insistence of the boyarins the old Tzaritza declared that the Ljhedimitri was not her son—a recantation as worthy of belief as the former avowal, and nothing more. The carrion that yesterday had been Tzar of all the Russias was dragged back to the Red Place, where, naked and with a ribald mask on its face, it was exposed for three days. At its broken feet lay the corpse of the voevoda who had been faithful to the death. “They loved each other in life; let them be together now.” So passed the Phantom Tzar from the throne he had so strangely haunted; phantom still, even when his dishonoured body had been flung into an unhallowed grave beyond the city walls, in “the house of the wretched,” a waste-land where outcasts were buried. Here, it was rumoured, mysterious fires were seen at night. The boyarins wished to be troubled with no further resurrections; the corpse was dug up and burned, and the ashes, mingled with gunpowder, blown to the winds from a cannon.