Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/17

Rh Who did it? The man of whom Custine wrote that he had, 'so to speak, outrun the limits of the sphere within which God permits His creature to work harm,' the tortures, whose figure is a nightmare, whose name is a terror, the emulation of Nero and Caligula—the Terrible!

Here we have one of the most curious instances of aberration to be found in legend, and even in critical history.

To begin with the name 'the Terrible,' with which, to insure the recognition of my personage, I have been forced to head my volume-the name is, I say, a misinterpretation. The Russians of the present day, deceived by a translation imposed on them by foreigners, do not recognise this themselves. The Germans hesitate between der Schreckliche (the Terrible) and der Grausame (the Cruel), and while both versions are incorrect, the second is the worst. Never did the Muscovites of his time call Ivan thus. He was the groznyï. Now hearken: In the course of an epistolary dispute which is one of the curiosities of the period, Batory having reproached his adversary with surrounding himself with battle-axe-men (ryndy) when he received the King's envoys, Ivan replies, 'Eto tchine gossoudarskii, da i ' 'Thus it must be, for my rank and the respect I must inspire').

The Groza has never meant any other thing. Consult the 'Domostroï,' the famous Muscovite household book of that epoch, as to the duties imposed on the father of the family; he is expected to be groznyï—that is to say, respected and worthy of respect. But what, then, of the tortures, the scaffolds, the hecatombs of human lives, whereof the chroniclers speak? That is another matter. Do you know, in any European country, a chapter of sixteenth-century history that reads like an idyll? In Poland, perhaps, where the szlachta, with the last of the Jagellons, was inaugurating the perilous experiment of the noli me tangere. And there, again. Batory set things in order for a time. But from this point of view Poland and Russia were the very antipodes, and if the latter has succeeded where the former failed it is just because she has not been too dainty as to her methods. Look into the huge crucible in which this people has laboured, from the Ural to the Carpathians, the White Sea to the Black; it is not