Kazimierz Waliszewski

“ From the elementary and barren independence—the independence of savagery—in which it had lived till Christianity was introduced, the country had suddenly fallen under the yoke of an austere morality—as savage after its own fashion—which forbade liberty to know, liberty to create, and even to exist, in every quarter. Under this rule, all those living forces which have ennobled the human race were condemned, and even accursed. The world of free knowledge was accursed, as a centre of heresy and corruption; the world of free creation was accursed, as an element of corruption ”

“ But two centuries before the Tartars came, the ancient Russia of Kiev was a scene of blood and rapine, plunged in that state of warfare which was to last till the very threshold of the modern epoch was reached, and which was in itself a deteriorating agent. Ferocity is the very essence of war. It has its own laws, which contravene every code and every gospel, and it excludes all honesty. In war, cunning is a merit, and violence a virtue. ”

“ He feels himself unsteady on his throne, and the future of his family strikes him as being no better insured than his own present. He is an exile within his own Empire, waging a struggle, the end of which he cannot foresee, with most dangerous enemies. His strength is worn out, his mind sick. He bears wounds innumerable on his body and his heart, and not a soul has he found to heal them, nor sympathize with his sufferings! His good has been returned with evil—for love he has been given hate! ”

“ Will-o'-the-wisps, flickering over the faces of the stagnant pools, startle the imagination; fierce or venomous creatures, bears and vipers, threaten man with death at every step. Out of all these the Finn had built himself up a religion that was nothing but one long shuddering terror. His gods were the sons of Ahriman, rather than of Ormuzd. Every stone, every tree, was the home of some evil spirit. And only one weapon availed against them—sorcery. His priest was priest and sorcerer in one. An artificial imitation of the noises of hostile Nature calmed the spirits' never-ceasing irritation. ”

“ Luther and Calvin, Wycliff and Huss, had made their entry on the world's stage, and from one end of Western Christendom to the other, on battlefields where brother fought against brother, and on public squares that bristled with scaffolds, in churches torn with distress and courts shaken by revolution, Catholics and Protestants, soldiers and priests, Princes and varlets, were striving to turn the great shout of liberty that had rung from the battlements of the Wartburg into a war-cry, an instrument of massacre and oppression. ”

“ Both in matter and in form, the literature of this period is inferior to that of Kiev. All poetry, all naturalness and simplicity, all freshness and charm, have disappeared. No spontaneity is left. Inspiration is replaced by calculation, and the search after the beautiful, when it occurs—and this is very rare—fails to reach art, and only attains to artifice. Not a line revealing a touch of emotion, or that depth of feeling which might atone for superficiality of thought. No poem at all—and yet this is the epoch of Chaucer and Villon, of Petrarch and Boccaccio. ”

“ But as he stood, with all his faults and vices, his errors and his crimes, his weaknesses and his failures, Ivan was popular, and his was a genuine popularity, which has stood the twofold test of time and of misfortune. This, too, is a result. In the cycle of the historic songs of Russia, the Tsar holds the place of honour, and is shown in by no means repulsive colours; he is open to every feeling of humanity—severe, but just, and even generous. ”

“ There was no rule—no rule laid down, at all events—for the recruiting of this double set of State servants. The Sovereign chose whom he would. Yet, practically, his choice was limited by the difficulty of finding, outside a certain social class, men fit to do the work. The Moscow policy strove to widen these borders and take in fresh blood, drawn from every class of society, even the humblest. These democratic tendencies were checked by the lack of sufficient intellectual development. ”

“ Everywhere his foot slips in blood: an evil smell of carnage hangs in the air, the joyous yells of the drunken feasters mingle with the shrieks of pain wrung from prisoners who are being tortured close by. The whole palace is a Gehenna, a charnel-house. And wherefore? No man knows, or rather all men guess: the Tsar is amusing himself, and these are his pleasures. ”

“ The Kazan Tartars, forsaken by the Crimeans, who quitted the town to the number of 300 fighting men, leaving their women and children behind them, but sacking everything before they went, displeased with Outémich, whom they betrayed to the Russians, and just as ill-pleased, soon afterwards, with Schah-Ali, ended by asking the Tsar to choose them a ruler, and Ivan fancied himself on the brink of a bloodless triumph. ”

“ All the small Russian Princes strove for the possession of the old capital, carrying fire and sword with them. And the truth is this—that, by reason of her spiritual alliance with Byzantium, Russia, thus devastated and dismembered by her own children, was bound to a corpse, held in vassalage by the learning of the Greeks at a moment when doom had fallen on the antique culture, when the ancient schools were closed, when the introduction of the Oriental view had stifled that free inquiry essential to all progress. ”

“ When he indulges in savage orgies over the corpses of the vanquished Tartars, or hands one of his boïars over to the executioner on the merest hint of suspicion, the masses are on his side; they applaud the carnage, and rejoice in their master's joy. Even when they cannot applaud, they shut their eyes respectfully, religiously, and cast a mantle of decent fiction over that which makes their consciences revolt. The populace will not admit that the Tsar killed his own son. ”

“ Above the ruins of a decimated party the Chouïski raised their heads. By their origin they stood very near the throne, and their pretensions aimed at something more than a mere temporary supremacy. They belonged, like Vassili and Ivan, to the line of Alexander Nevski, the elder branch of a family of which the reigning house was only a younger one, and the height to which their dreams of ambition soared may be conceived. ”

“ In the bosom of the Orthodox Church, too, within which, until a recent epoch, every form of intellectual activity has been circumscribed, the national art has felt the action of the twofold current, ascetic and sensualist. A dark medley of monkish cells, blossoming out into a profligate luxuriance of form—that is the Church of the Blessed Basil, and the true image of the Russian spirit of the sixteenth century. ”

“ Some Russian historians, in their anxiety to spare the national pride, have gone so far as to take it to be quite the contrary. According to them, the Polish army, which was almost entirely destroyed by this time, was obliged to accept peace. The Russia of the present day can very well dispense with these travesties of the realities of history, the last and most pitiable refuge of the vanquished. In a war the result of which hangs on a siege, negotiations begun under the guns of the besieging army are simply capitulation in another form. ”

“ The choute, with his jeers at the precepts of the Domostroï and the rules of an Oriental etiquette, stirred the heavy atmosphere of prison and cloister combined, which hung stagnant in every Russian household; he opened doors and broke window-panes, and let a little fresh air into these smothering stoves. In those days every house of any importance sheltered one or two such persons. Ivan had dozens of them, and some paid with their lives for the honour of rubbing elbows familiarly with their Sovereign. ”

“ One of the King of Poland's envoys, John Drohojowski, did his utmost, indeed, to negotiate an alliance, in which the Khan would have been included, at Constantinople, but the Porte needed the Tartars to keep the Persians down, and the Tsar and the King were left face to face at last, alone and unallied. Still Ivan had not to beg subsidies from a recalcitrant Diet, or appeal to the goodwill of his subjects to recruit his army. His Empire was his own, with every soul and all the wealth within its borders. ”

“ Philip, the story of whose martyrdom I shall have to tell, sealed his lonely profession of independence and faith in disowned traditions with his blood, his voice found no echo, his example no followers. The Church, like all the rest of the nation, passed into the silence and the darkness, and there was another wheel in the great machine that ground up the intelligence and the wills of men. ”

“ Silence was to fall once more, when the theory of the absolute and despotic power had triumphed, and the Empire was subject to its rule; and no faint echo of Kourbski's bold clamour was to rise till Europe witnessed the coming of another epoch of revolutionary disturbance, and heard the voice of Radichtchev. But Ivan, in the sixteenth century, could do no less than follow the impulse which prompted every intellectual being, even in Russia, to discourse. ”

“ The fellow-workers to whom Ivan found himself obliged to appeal, some of them drawn from the lowest strata of society, and all incapable of understanding the nature and real object of his enterprise, were even more inclined than he himself to confuse violence with energy. And, docile instruments and complaisant courtiers as they were, they flattered and increased the taste for coarse debauchery which the Sovereign owed to his education, and to certain cruel instincts, inherent, no doubt, in his temperament. The chroniclers have preserved the names of these fellow-workers to us. ”

“ Ostrovski has probably written true history, again, when he shows us Ivan alone with Vassilissa, now his acknowledged favourite. The Tsar wants to leave his new companion, of whom he is beginning to tire, and she keeps him because she is afraid. She speaks of the dead folk that lie between them, and makes him tremble too. She bids him amuse her, and in vain he answers roughly that he is not where he is for her amusement! ”

“ The sixteenth-century struggle for the possession of the Baltic was a dispute over an inheritance. This inheritance had been left by the Hansa, that great political and commercial confederation which the discovery of the New World ruined and left defenceless in the hands of its greedy neighbours. It was a formidable struggle, both as to the competitors—Sweden and Denmark, Muscovy and Poland—whose enmity it stirred, and as to the interests—industry and commerce, religion and culture—it involved. ”

“ Ivan is inclined to see enemies in every corner; but when, while he warns his sons against the snares that will be set for them, he counsels them to inquire personally into every business, and never to depend on others with regard to anything, unless they wish those others to obtain the real power and leave them nothing but its shadow, it is a master in the art of government who speaks, and no madman! ”

“ In the West, the progress of trade and industry led to the organization of the townsfolk into corporations, which armed themselves to withstand feudalism. In the bosom of these associations, in the mutual relations of their members, was elaborated that spirit of liberty from which the institutions of communal autonomy sprang, and that material and intellectual activity which evolved the higher forms of economic existence—the creation of capital, the establishment of credit, and the most elevated forms of cultured life, science, art, and society. ”

“ The man who was soon to face the fury of others, impose his indomitable will by fire and sword, and maintain it, in spite of the hatred, the weak-heartedness, and the defeated conspiracies of his closest comrades, for twenty years, the coming champion of the Opritchnina, could not be a coward. He was the heir of the Russian Princes who had made Russia great, not by prodigies of valour performed on battlefields, but by the dim paths of intrigue, bargain-making, and economy, by miracles of patience, cunning, humiliation, stoically borne ”

“ It was a far cry, indeed, to those French and Italian palaces where the guests already talked, after they had laughed and danced; where the man who could tell a story pleasantly, or 'say the word,' was welcomed; where things of beauty were admired, at all events, if comfort was not generally sought; where love was full of poetry, and there was wit even in hatred; where, if a quarrel arose, men slew each other—after they had taken their leave—nobly, as they had delighted to live. ”

“ The public baths gave rise to much more serious disorders. In them the sexes were nominally separated, but men and women came out of their respective hot rooms, stripped, streaming with sweat, and their blood heated by smart rubbing, met at the entrance, fell without any embarrassment into eager conversation, and cast themselves pell-mell into the river, or rolled in the snow, amidst shouts and jests and jokes the nature of which will be easily divined. ”

“ Thus, in the struggle which, from 1538 to 1543, filled Moscow with violence and carnage, and from which Ivan's own person and the integrity of his inheritance found no protection save in the antagonism of the rival families and their eagerness to destroy each other, the whole existence of the work accomplished by the younger branch of the Rurikovitchy was threatened. But the child had to pass through cruel trials. In their triumph the Chouïski lost all moderation, sacked the Tsar's treasury, and made themselves absolute masters. ”

“ The architects of the Vassili Blajennoï succeeded in producing twice as many, in a mighty jumble of styles, Byzantine, Persian, Hindu, Italian—a wild dance of cupolas and pyramids and campanile. ...
It would be rash, perhaps, to judge this building according to notions of art which, though hallowed by the approval of centuries, can hardly be asserted to be an eternal and universal criterion. Gothic architecture stirred quite as bitter a criticism, at one moment, as that our present æsthetic taste might be disposed to apply to the masterpiece of Barma and Postnikov. ”