Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/387

 Rh chess, draughts, and cards. There was much hunting with hounds and greyhounds, hawks and falcons. There was bear-hunting, too, and in his earlier years Ivan appears to have been passionately addicted to this sport. Later, when the cares of government absorbed him, the hunting department suffered from his neglect, and when, after the truce of Iam-Zapolski, Batory expressed a desire to have red falcons, such as he had heard the Tsar possessed, Ivan sent the King back a message to the effect that the breed was extinct; the Tsar, owing to his sorrows, had long since given up hawking. Batory, on his ‘side, inquired what present from himself would be most agreeable to the Sovereign. The reply was 'Good horses, iron helmets, and light, straight-carrying muskets.'

All the vanquished foeman of Polotsk and Viélikié-Louki asked of the victor was arms!

Yet even at that moment he kept a certain number of jesters about him, those douraki or chouty who, even as late as towards the middle of the eighteenth century, were to form an integral part of the Court circle. The jokes perpetrated by these official entertainers may have been more or less witty, but they were almost always obscene. Poverty of intellectual culture ‘favoured an excessive coarseness of imagination, and the extreme moral pressure imposed by the ascetic doctrines which prevailed drove men, by a sort of natural reaction, into ‘the most cynical license. Further, the jester, with the freedom of speech permitted him within certain limits, supplied that need of critical and satirical expression which exists in every society, and which, having no literary vent, here found some measure of satisfaction. The choute, with his jeers at the precepts of the Domostroï and the rules of an Oriental etiquette, stirred the heavy atmosphere of prison and cloister combined, which hung stagnant in every Russian household; he opened doors and broke window-panes, and let a little fresh air into these smothering stoves. In those days every house of any importance sheltered one or two such persons. Ivan had dozens of them, and some paid with their lives for the honour of rubbing elbows familiarly with their Sovereign. There was one called Gvozdev—a Prince, like the man who afterwards became the Empress Anne's dourak—who held an important Court appointment; such pluralism was quite a usual and recognised thing. On a certain day, Ivan, for a joke, turned a bowl of boiling soup (chtchi) over Gvozdev's head. When the poor fellow cried out, the Sovereign, who was drunk, replied by a dagger-thrust, and the jester fell, covered with blood. A physician was summoned. 'Cure my faithful servant,' said the Tsar, quite sobered now; 'I have played with him imprudently.' 'So imprudently,' replied the leech, 'that neither