Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/399

 Rh seized and laid naked on the snow, so that all the passers-by might see them and jeer at them. I merely mention this story to give some idea of the general opinion as to the relations existing between the Sovereign and his heir.

The Tsarevitch’s first wife was called Eudoxia Sabourov; the name of the second was Praxevna Solov. Both were cast off, and forced to take the veil. The third wife, Helena Chérémétiév, was pregnant when the Tsar killed her husband in a fit of rage. There are various versions of what happened in connection with this murder. Some chroniclers have invented a scene in the course of which the Tsarevitch reproached his father for his cowardice in face of Batory's successes, and demanded the command of an army to make an effort to drive out the invader. Others have supposed he interfered in favour of some Livonian prisoners who were being ill-treated by the Opritchniki. Considering the agreement of feeling and thought which, according to most witnesses, admittedly existed between father and son, these stories strike one as highly improbable. Possevino, who was at Moscow three months after the catastrophe, suggests another, and a much more plausible cause. Ivan seems to have met his daughter-in-law within the precincts of the Palace, and noticed a lack of modesty in her attire. She may, owing to her condition, have omitted putting on a girdle over her sorotchka. In his displeasure, the Tsar-Prior struck the poor woman, and so roughly that she miscarried in the course of the following night. As an inevitable consequence, the Tsarevitch reproached his father, who at once flew into a rage, raised his cruel spear again, and this time his son was struck on the temple.

The crime, unintentional though it was; was beyond what even Ivan had accustomed his contemporaries to expect, and the Sovereign, Possevino tells us, was in despair. He spent his nights weeping, yelling aloud in his grief, and every morning he called his boïars together and told them he felt unworthy to continue to be their ruler. But at the same time, basing his request on Feodor's incapacity, he requested them to choose some other successor, and the courtiers, suspecting a trap, besought him to remain in power.

Of all the events which crammed the reign of Ivan the Terrible, this one has taken the strongest hold on the popular imagination. From Arkhangel to Vladimir, from Olonetz to Nijni-Novgorod, over all the wide expanse of the Russian Empire, songs inspired by the hideous drama have been gathered. Rybnikov has published five of them, Bezsonov twelve, and Hilferding eleven. In one of these bylines the victim is not Ivan, but Feodor, whom Maliouta