Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/163

 Rh of the land. My readers are already acquainted with the position assumed, as to this delicate matter, by Nil Sorski and Vassiane Patrikiév. Towards 1550, a pamphlet, couched in a form so strange as occasionally to render the author's thoughts unintelligible, but full of a striking fervour of expression, gave a fresh impulse to the views of the Niéstiajatéli (non-acquirers). The pamphleteer borrows his characters—the wonder-workers of Valaam, Sergius and Hermann—from the world of fiction. His own personality is wrapped in mystery. Some people have chosen to identify him with Patrikiév, but the author's denunciations of the excess of wealth accumulated in the hands of the 'black' clergy, and the abuses resulting therefrom, are too vehemently irreverent to proceed from a wearer of the klobouk. There is something monkish, indeed, about the curious artlessness of his political ideas; the permanent assembly he longs to see established is to apply its chief anxiety and care to insuring the strict keeping of fasts! But would Patrikiév, monk as he was, have ventured to claim, as the sole property of the laity, the place his brother priests had usurped in the Sovereign's councils? The lot of the cenobite, according to the author of this pamphlet, is poverty and prayer. Patrikiév's ambitions tended in quite a different direction.

The problem thus set was widening its borders, threatening other joint interests, inciting other claims. If the excessive expansion of monastic property was an evil, were not the distributions of land, now so numerous, to the 'men who serve,' and the gradual monopoly of the soil by the privileged class, whose conduct Ivan had just branded with dishonour, evils too? And behold, a second pamphlet, published under the form of an epistle or petition to the Tsar, from Ivan or Ivachka Peresviétov—whether this was the author's real name or a pseudonym has never been thoroughly settled—formulated an accusation against this rival class of landholders. By their spells and their intrigues they were said to have won the Sovereign's heart, and imposed their will on him in every particular. Enriched beyond all measure, as much so as the monks, by their expropriation and merciless squeezing of the dispossessed husbandmen, they lived in idleness and debauchery. As cowardly as they were greedy, they jeopardized the safety of the Tsar's armies in time of war, and in time of peace they levied a huge tithe on the taxes extorted from his subjects, and became the responsible agents of all the public woes.

But what then? The secularization of the monastic properties had been an item in the Muscovite policy for many years. Ivan III. had turned his attention to the matter, and made some slight attempts in that direction. How did Ivacha