Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/243

 Rh the year 1491, and amongst the craftsmen Schlitte was to have sent him, the Tsar had asked for printers. There had been printers at Wilna since 1525. In 1550 Ivan applied to the King of Denmark, who sent him, two years later, a man, half printer and half apostle, Hans Missenheim by name, who brought with him a Protestant Bible and some books concerning religious polemics. We have no clear knowledge of the result of this last attempt. The apostle has left no trace, but the printer certainly had pupils, for in 1553, we note the presence of two Russian typographers, Ivan Fédorov and Peter Timofiéviev, and in 1556, that of a typefounder, Vassili Nikiforov, at Moscow and Novgorod. In 1564, the printing of the first book produced by the native presses was completed. It consisted of the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul. The edition, though faulty as to spelling, is of handsome appearance. But the work of the printers was interrupted, unhappily, by a popular disturbance (p. 72). My readers will be reminded here of Louis XI., who had to defend the first printers he brought in from Nüremberg against accusations of sorcery. Fédorov and Nikiforov were driven to seek refuge in Poland, but in 1568, Andronik Niéviéja, one of their disciples, took up their work at Moscow, and printed a Psalter, of which a later edition appeared in 1578, at the Sloboda of Alexandrov.

Church books still! Church books indeed; but in such works as these their readers—even their Western readers—found many things we have forgotten how to seek in them. It was literature, at all events; it was intellectual food, and, with the writings of Ivan and Kourbski, of which I shall soon have to speak, and the travellers' narratives, to which I have already referred, this same epoch witnessed the beginnings in Russia of a secular literature which even reached the borders of romantic fiction.

Thus set in motion, the national mind began by transforming certain stories of exotic birth—part of the literary inheritance of the preceding century—which it amplified and adapted to current events. Thus, in the legend of Drakoul, Prince of Wallachia, the incident of the nailing of the foreign envoys' caps to their heads by the voiévode's order was applied to Ivan. In Ivachka Peresviétov's famous epistle to the Tsar, he speaks of two other little books which, he says, he has handed to the Sovereign. One of these is still unknown to us. The other is a sort of novel, half political and half historical, in which the sayings of Peter, Palatine of Wallachia—which are reproduced, indeed, in the epistle—and the chastisement inflicted by Sultan Mahmet on unjust judges and pettifoggers are used to justify the reign of terror inaugurated by Ivan.