Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/418

 394 narrowed the space available for heroes who would not wake out of their dreams and take their place amongst realities, in the hierarchy, under discipline. Such as they had better flee to the Ukraine.

Imagination held a great place in the moral existence of the man we are now studying, and in this there is an essential difference between Ivan and Peter the Great, one of the most positive intelligences the world has ever known. He is also distinguished from his great successor by his very high opinion of his own powers, which is most curiously mingled with that distrust of himself and others of which he was never to rid himself. Peter, like that builder up of a colossal American fortune whom a reporter lately questioned as to the talents to which he owed his success, would have readily affirmed, 'Talents? I have none at all! I work—I work myself to death, and that is all!' Ivan thought he had a great many talents, if not every one. He represented a race of foreign conquerors, and in this very fact of his origin he recognised an element of personal superiority. In Peter the Great we see the consciousness and pride of a common nationality strongly developed. As to certain sides of his temperament, the Reformer was of the populace, and was proud of it, and he would never have said, when handing over some ingots of gold to a foreign workman, 'See well to the weight, for all Russians are thieves!' Ivan frequently made speeches of this kind. He was always talking about his 'German ancestors.' Do the Viennese archives contain a last will, according to which the son of Vassili left his Empire to the House of Hapsburg? I have not been able to verify this fact, which has been advanced by Kostomarov ('Monographies,' xiii., p. 304, note), and I think it most improbable. But the clumsiest fables often have some foundation in truth, and Veit Venge was no doubt merely echoing some remark that had fallen from the lips of the Sovereign—who was fond, it seems, of tracing back the derivation of the word boïar to Baiern (Karamzine, ix., note to p. 166)—when he speaks of the Bavarian descent of Ivan the Terrible. Ivan’s real last will, and the best expression of his being, is to be found in his work, to which I must now return for the last time, so as to sum up its nature and point out its results.

The massacres ordered by Ivan have been notoriously exaggerated by his enemies and his detractors, the first egging on the second. Kourbski mentions the entire destruction of families—such as the Kolytchev, the Zabolotski, the Odiévski, the Vorotynski—all of which appear in the inventories of the