Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/256

 232 some dark corner of his mind and heart, a spirit of fierce and suspicious Orthodoxy.

And at the same time, the patriotic instinct stirred in the voluntary exile's heart. As a Polish poet once said in exquisite verse, 'A man's country is like his health: it is not till he has lost it that he knows its worth.' Kourbski, sending Prince Constantine Ostroski his Slav translation of one of St. John Chrysostom's homilies, indignantly exclaims against the idea that this magnate, who, though a subject of the Polish King, belonged to the Orthodox faith, should have thought of translating it into that 'barbarous language'—Polish! And he plunged into violent disputes with the Lithuanian partisans of Theodore Kossoï and other Muscovite heresiarchs, once his own friends. And he warred against the Jesuits, those 'wolves brought into the fold,' even though he turned their zeal to account against the Protestants. And, not to howl with the wolves, but to be better able to fight them, he began to learn Latin in his old age, and advised one of his comrades in exile, young Prince Michael Obolenski, to leave his wife and children and put himself to school, at Cracow first of all, and then in Italy—a precursor of the troops of students, male and female, who now besiege the doors of our teaching centres. Some of the fruits of this busy effort—fragmentary translations of St. John Chrysostom and Eusebius, and a preface written for the 'New Pearl' (Novyï Margarit)—have been preserved to us.

But, above all other things, Kourbski mended his best pen with a view to his explanation with Ivan. In his pleadings we find more rhetoric than truth, less reason than passion. He enumerates his services and the ill-treatment he has endured; he vents imprecations on the Tsar's crimes and his abuse of power, on his dissolute life and the unworthiness of his new favourites—such men as Basmanov and Maliouta-Skouratov, debauchees or bloody ruffians. Copiously and laboriously, he exhausts all these facile themes, yet never lays a finger on the heart of the question, the complex and deep-seated causes of the disagreement between the Sovereign and the portion of society which refused to accept the master's will.

This fact diminishes the historical value of the document. But that its author should have been able to sting the Tsar of all the Russias into taking up the gauntlet and entering on a literary duel; that he should thus have made his own disgrace and rancour echo far and wide, and drawn the ancient struggle between past and future, between the partisans of the old and new system, between the two rival branches of the house of Rurik, into these narrow lists, is in itself a great matter, and marks an epoch of capital importance in the national history. It is an eloquent affirmation of the entrance