Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/413

 Rh and of the odnoriadka—a garment recently recalled to honour—were matters of doctrine. Nil Sorski's teachings glided over his intelligence, but never reached his conscience. And, on the other hand, he possessed no means of initiating himself into the wider intellectual currents of Europe, whether in the domain of science or in that of art. Europe was still too far away, and Russia too far behind the West. Ivan turned his mind to the most pressing matters, and those easiest of accomplishment. What he asked his neighbours to give him was results—engineers, artisans, printers. This is the course generally pursued by backward peoples anxious to make up for lost time. Look at Japan. In this fashion, too, artificial and superficial civilizations are attained. Modern Russia is an example of this even in the present day.

The detractors of Ivan the Terrible have gone the length of refusing him any originality at all, declaring all he did was to walk, and rather clumsily at that, in the rut his grandfather had cut for him, defend old theories against literary attack on the part of the opposition party, and turn over ideas drawn from the books he had read. The historic prerogatives of the Boïarchtchina were already broken down, the appeal to the new strata of society had begun, the attempts to reorganize the communes on the autonomic principle were nothing but a return to the older form of these institutions, and Ivan, even in his conception of the part he was personally called to play, simply drew his inspiration from the teachings of Holy Writ. These over-severe judges seem to me to forget that it takes something to make anything, and that Napoleon did not find the elements of his Code in his own brain. Besides, they graciously grant the great value of the reforms carried out in the early years of Ivan's reign, though they give all the credit for them to the men who were about the Sovereign. Have they taken the trouble of reading the thirty-seven proposals as to the reorganization of the Church, and the ten proposals or rough drafts of laws, for the organization of the State? If so, they should have realized that the man who wrote these pages was the man who corresponded with Kourbski at a period when Adachev and Sylvester were both far away. In both cases the spirit and style are identical, and that style is most personal in its nature. Adachev, Sylvester, and Kourbski certainly had no hand in the Opritchnina, and yet the Opritchnina and the reforms of the year 1551 together form one complete whole. I have demonstrated this already. And it is because Ivan's biographers could not understand what the Opritchnina was that they have refused to grant him what they have granted to his fellow-workers. Peter the Great was never deceived in this matter.