Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/258

 234 of his own literary education. 'You ought to be ashamed to write like an old mad woman, and send so ill-composed an epistle into a country full of people who know grammar and rhetoric, dialectics and philosophy!' The allusion to the publicity of the controversy is clear enough here. But both parties continued to shirk the pith of the question.

The dates of the first three letters thus exchanged are unknown. Ivan dates the fourth from Wolmar, the day after he took that town, in 1577. The victor does not fail to draw arguments from his late triumph. He has won it without the help of Kourbski and his friends. Kourbski's reply appeals to Cicero; but this time his opponent swerves. He writes again, but no answer comes. Batory has appeared upon the scene, and given the Tsar other things to think of.

In his own country, Ivan's great antagonist has found apologists and detractors, all equally convinced. The first seem at present to be carrying all before them, and while they await the statue which will no doubt stand, some day, on one of the Moscow squares, they are erecting a literary monument which is not devoid of value to the glory of the nation. In the eyes of the learned author of the 'History of Russian Literature' (Pypine, ii. 171, 172), as in those of an older biographer (P … ski, Kazan, 1873), Kourbski, with all his faults, and in spite of them, is the most eminent representative of the civilizing ideas assimilated by the Russia of the sixteenth century. He marks the comparatively high level to which a Russian of that period, far from the Western centres of information, hampered in his search after knowledge, choked by Government terrorism, might yet raise himself. Kourbski was a man of science, too, who strove to widen the field of knowledge which had satisfied most of his fellow-citizens. He was also the first public writer his country possessed, and, to crown it all, he was its first citizen, in the true sense of the word, the first who fell in love with the idea of progress, and was capable of lifting his voice against a brutal despotism.

These are noble titles, but they need verification. Kourbski's Moscow career is still veiled in great obscurity. The details of his residence in Poland are better known, for life there was more open. These details do not reflect much honour on the wanderer. Though sufficiently well provided with money and land by the country of his exile, he was an odious master, a hateful neighbour, and the most detestable and unruly of subjects. While he was translating St. John Chrysostom and calling out against despotism, he committed, or allowed his stewards to commit, abuses of his own power quite as monstrous as any of which Ivan may have been