The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький
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But not thus even could they get rid of the spirit of the impostor whom they had crowned and anointed. Already, before his downfall, new spectres had started up in various quarters, following on the same lines. From Poland had come a fable that Boris had deluded the Moskvitchi with a sham death and interment and had fled to England disguised as a merchant. A more substantial fraud was that of a false Petr, a supposed son of Thedor Ivanovitch, who was actually carrying on a war of petty depredation at the head of some Volga Kozaks. With a people so easily deluded the ghost of the “child of Ouglitch” would not be easily laid.
Kostomarov’s question, “Who was the first false Dimitri?” is one of those problems of history that seem to become more tangled and unsolvable the more light is brought to bear on them. A careful study of the circumstances and nature of his career, while leading to a strong conviction that he was not Dimitri Ivanovitch, equally disturbs the theory that he was Grigorie Otrepiev. The man who showed himself alike indifferent to the Greek and Latin cults, who would not cross himself before the adored ikons—the real Dimitri would have prostrated himself before them, if heredity and early education go for anything—who, moreover, was earnestly concerned for the education and welfare of his people; who strove by personal effort to raise the fighting value of the deplorably slack Moskovite army, and who restored the old boast of Monomachus, never to leave to subordinates what might be done by himself, above the effete Byzantine-borrowed etiquette of the later Russian Gosoudars; who, in the midst of feasting and rejoicing was steadily preparing for an attack on the Sultan, and who treated his private enemies with clemency and even distinction; the man who displayed all these qualities in the course of a few months was assuredly not a Rurikovitch, nor was he an adventurer who had received his education only in a Moskovite monastery, who had seen life only in a Kozak camp. That he was really an instrument in the hands of the Jesuits, nursed and educated for the purpose which he was afterwards called upon to fulfil, necessitates not only a much greater intimacy with Russian affairs than that body are known to have possessed, but also a foreknowledge on their part of the course those affairs were likely to take under the Godounov dynasty. Such pretenders are not made in a day. Each supposition takes the inquiry no farther than the starting-point—who was the first false Dimitri? And here it must be left. Russian historians of the Orthodox Faith at least are able to say with absolute conviction that the Tzar of 1605-6 was not the real Dimitri, for the latter was beatified by the Church, and many miracles were performed at his reputed tomb. If the supposed impostor were proved to be identical with the veritable Ivanovitch, a new and embarrassing dilemma would arise. The history of the career of the Ljhedimitri is instructive as to the slender evidence on which whole peoples will base their implicit belief in a resuscitation, or even in a resurrection. Such beliefs have lived again and again in human history; some are living yet. Ljhedimitries, false Pucelles, Perkin Warbecks, missing Archdukes, and others that need not be mentioned, have their perennial Easter in the credulity of mankind.
The catastrophe which had overtaken the impostor-Tzar included in its scope the foreign guests who were partly responsible for the outbreak. The massacre commenced with Dimitri’s musicians and servants in the Kreml and extended to the lodgings of the Poles and Lit’uanians in the Kitai- and Biel-gorod. For seven hours the church-bells dinned out their vibrating war-music, and tumultuous crowds of citizens and strielitz put to death such of the foreigners as were unable to defend themselves. Well to the fore in the work of butchery were the priests and monks, who turned the occasion of the Marina marriage into a S. Bartholomew of their own, hunting down with zealous rage the “enemies of their religion.”188 The houses of the Palatine and of some of the other Polish nobles were vigorously defended by their retainers, who fired from the windows upon their assailants. Vasili Shouyskie (who had led the first rush into the Kreml, crucifix in one hand, sword in another), and other boyarins rode about the streets endeavouring to calm the tempest they had raised, and were able to save Mnishek, the Tzaritza, the ambassadors, and those of the Poles who had been successful in defending their thresholds. The bells were quieted, and the people dispersed to their homes, or vented their smouldering rage in mutilating the figure on the Red Place.
With the disappearance of the Ljhedimitri the Moskovites were again confronted with an interregnum, and on this occasion there was no one very obviously marked out to fill the vacant throne. By a process of exhaustion they fixed on the Rurik-descended kniaz who had offered the most determined opposition to the impostor, and who had engineered the revolution which had brought about his overthrow. Vasili Ivanovitch Shouyskie, a man of mediocre talents, widowed and past his prime, was scarcely a promising personality with whom to start a new dynasty, and the election of a sovereign of such an obviously stop-gap nature almost invited new intrigues and new apparitions. Prudence suggested at least a recourse to a national assembly, such as that which had elected Boris, but Shouyskie preferred to take the tide of his fortune at its flood, and was content to receive the crown of all the Russias from the hands of the boyarins, clergy, and merchants of Moskva. Nor was this the only error he committed in the impatience for power to which old men are especially liable. The trail of Polish influence made itself visible even in the electoral gathering of the nobles and citizens who had just entered a blood-drenched protest against all that pertained to the West-Slavonic state. An oath was exacted from Vasili to the effect that he would swear to govern in consultation with the boyarins, and to put no one to death without their consent; that he would listen to no false denunciators; and that he would not confiscate the lands, goods, shops or houses, of the relatives of condemned offenders.189 This concession, the first step towards the Pacta conventa of Poland, was an innovation which shook men’s ideas of the sacred nature of the sovereign, and reduced the new Tzar more than ever to the position of a make-shift ruler, the mere head of a boyarin douma. Without waiting for the consecration of a new Patriarch (the Russian Primates regularly toppled over and disappeared in the political earthquakes which engulfed their temporal masters), Vasili’s coronation was solemnised on the 1st of June, the earliest date by which the corpses of the victims of the late massacre could be cleared out of the city. The first act of the new reign was one of nervous ostentation; the remains of the genuine Dimitri were solemnly transported from Ouglitch to the Kreml of Moskva, where they were reinterred in the Cathedral of the Archangel. Here, in this sacred environment, under the eye of the Tzar, it was hoped that this troublesome Ivanovitch would sleep in peace and cease to haunt the throne which should have been his heritage. The revolution was completed by the election of Hermogen, Metropolitan of Kazan, to the Patriarchate, the new head of the Church being a bitter opponent of all that savoured of foreign heresy. Surrounded by courtiers who had not had time to develop disaffection, by complaisant priests and heavily-armed strielitz, encompassed on all sides by the stately and sanctified buildings of the Kreml, and breathing an atmosphere laden with the exhalations of centuries of accumulated homage rendered to saints and sovereigns, Vasili may have fancied himself, in fact as well as title, Tzar of all the wide Russias. But throughout the hot days of July and August, when the sun blazed on the white and gold cupolas, and the dogs slunk about with lolling tongues in the shady bazaars of the Kitai-gorod, and frogs croaked dismally from the steamy marshes of the Neglina, dust-coated messengers kept pouring in to the Tzar’s paradise, by the Saviour and Nikolai Gates, with tidings of trouble and unrest throughout the land. From the Sieverski country, from Toula, Kalouga, from the camp at Eletz, from the Volga valley, and from far Astrakhan came reports of sedition and open rebellion, and the burden of each report was the magic name Dimitri. It almost seemed as if, in scattering the ashes of the impostor to the winds, his undertakers had sown a crop of phantoms which was now springing up in all directions. The most persistent rumour was that Dimitri had escaped once again from the hands of his would-be murderers and had fled into Poland, another man having been killed in his stead; the Moskvitchi instantly recalled the fact that the face of the corpse so ostentatiously exposed on the Red Place had been covered by a mask. Another widely-circulated version invented a new Dimitri who had only just emerged from the obscurity of his exile and claimed the throne as the real child of Ouglitch. Nowhere at the outset was there even the foundation of a pretender round whom these legends might crystallise; he existed as yet only in the popular imagination. The first impostor had created the belief in a romantically restored Dimitri; the belief now called for another impostor. Several princes and boyarins of the lesser