Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/400

 376 Skouratov has denounced as a traitor to the Tsar. 'Treason is in thine Imperial Palace; it sits beside thee: it eats out of the same dish with thee; it wears the same garments as thou.' The poet evidently had a passage out of St. Matthew in his mind (chap. xxvi. 23): 'He that dippeth his hand with Me in the dish, the same shall betray Me.' And then, careless of chronology, he brings in the Tsarina Anastasia and her brother Nikita Romanovitch, who save the innocent Tsarevitch just when he is about to suffer final execution. In others of the poetic versions of the story the Tsar commands that his son's head shall be cut off and set up in front of his Palace; his heart and liver torn out and brought to him; the dagger dripping with his blood shown him, at the very least—and Nikita Romanovitch; the darling hero of the popular poet, deceives the Sovereign by killing a slave, and thus renews the story of Cyrus saved by the envoys of Astyages, or that of Geneviève de Brabant, or of the Sleeping Beauty.

In spite of his resemblance to his father, or because of it, rather, the elder Tsarevitch himself enjoyed considerable popularity. His death was regarded as a national calamity, and all the more so because the future of the country seemed to be threatened by it. Feodor was half an idiot, Dmitri was a little child. The Tsar had had several sons by his numerous concubines—Feodor Basmanov, a brave but cruel man, was believed to be one of these—but none of them had been acknowledged by him. More than ever did Ivan cling to his adopted family, for this man, who did not know what pity meant, had a great need of tenderness. Speaking of Boris Godounov and his sister, he was heard to say they 'were like the two fingers of his hand.' But more than ever, too, he sought to drown his sorrows, and, it may be, his remorse, in an excess of debauchery which was completing the ruin of his already sorely-tried health. Did those gloomy suburb walls hide a mixture of Sodom and Cythera, as most chroniclers have admitted, and as Sylvester's former warnings to his unruly pupil might well lead us to suppose? The authenticity of Sylvester's epistle is doubtful, and a passage from Possevino's narrative has certainly been quite wrongly interpreted in this sense. The Latin words, Qui gratissimus tredecim annos apud Principem fuerat, atque in ejus cubiculo dormiebat, simply imply that Bogdan Biélski, to whom they refer, performed the duties of a spalnik about the Sovereign's person (see ante, p. 360). Many items of the accusation brought against the mysterious Sovereign by chroniclers and historians are no better founded, doubtless, than this one. But the disorders of his life cannot be denied, and they certainly hastened the close of a career which, with