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According to the Rostov Chronicle, the
moment Ivan the Terrible was born the entire
sky was lit uninterruptedly by lighting, accompanied by tremendous thunder that
shook the entire country. Most probably this was, if true, a coincidence, but
the fact is that during his very long reign the country was shaken more than
once and many of its citizens would have preferred to b hit by lightning than
to face the unpredictable and often cruel fits of the tsar. From his early days
Ivan lived in the entourage of the unscrupulous and ruthless princes
Ovchina-Telepnev-Obolenskii, Glinsky, Shuiskii and Belskii and had seen around
him a series of arrests, deportations, tortures and bloody conflicts. In a way
this was part of his "Normal" life and must be considered at least
partly responsible for the formation of his character. We also know that Ivan
was for a long time under the evil influence of Gregory Maliuta-Skuratov, his
henchman, who fed the tsar's mania of persecution, insinuated against many
boyars and provided the tsar with new "Traitors." Maliuta was Boris
Godunov"s father-in-law and undoubtedly helped his political ascendancy,
making him one of the most influential personages at the Kremlin's court. The
rest of the responsibility for Ivan's character was due to his unusual, maybe
pathological, nature, full of contradictions and especially of almost
continuous internal fights between pride and remorse. We know from the
Chronicle that several days after he terrorized seventy decent delegates from
Pskov in the village of Ostrov, Ivan took the sacraments and repented for this
sin. He summoned a large crowd of Muscovites and delegates from all over the
country to Red Square, and promised to put an end to arbitrary floggings,
tortures and executions. This was to no avail for later his cruelty reached its
worst during the punitive expedition against the Novgorodians. Ivan was present
at the Red Square when two hundred of them were hanged, burned on the stakes or
beheaded. For the Archbishop of Novgorod Leonid, Ivan reserved a special
punishment: The Archbishop was sewn into afresh bear's skin and thrown to the
dogs, after which the terrible tsar ordered a mass to be celebrated for the
soul of the unfortunate prelate. All this points out that, at moments, Ivan
must have enjoyed the tortures of his victims, and only a while later prayed
and cried for them, and in public called himself a damned soul,
a"Stinker" and the like. Almost at the end of his life he murdered
his own son, Tsarevich Ivan, hitting him on the head with his staff, and then
did everything possible to save his son's life. Ivan's sexual behavior bordered
on what we should call extreme permissiveness, and undoubtedly he was over
bearing in this respect. He married seven times and had who knows how many
mistresses. At one time he seriously considered proposing marriage to Queen
Elisabeth of England.
Russian historians differ very much in their evaluation of Ivan as a man and
even in the judgements they pass upon his reign and achievements. While no one
condones his crimes, there are those who do not blame Ivan but emphasize the
conditions under which he was brought up and, later, under which he had to
fight against ruthless boyars to put an end to feudal fragmentation of the
country. N.M. Karamzin saw in Ivan almost an "Angel" when young and
the "Villain" and "Blood-sucker" later. For S.M. Soloviev
the fight that Ivan waged against boyars was a natural phenomenon in the
transition from the patrimonial to the centralized form of government. V.O.
Kliuchevskii put the blame on bad education of the orphan and the conditions
under which he was brought up. His argument is that the "Oprichina"
(the destruction of the old landed aristocracy) was directed against certain
persons and not against the system itself. For S.F. Platonov Ivan as a man is
an enigma, though concerned to defend the autocracy. Lenin and Stalin consider
Ivan a determined ruler for whom a powerful centralized state was the only way
to protect the country from foreign aggression. They care even less for the
victims than Ivan did, and it is not surprising that both followed a similar
pattern in liquidating the opposition. For them and the present rulers Ivan
remains an ideal autocrat, tough, sometimes transported with rage, who
destroyed the boyars as a class, unified the country, delivered the final blow
to the Tatars, tried to slightly open a window to Europe by attempting
incursions to the Baltic Sea. Begun the conquest of Siberia and laid the
foundation for a multi-national state. It is not surprising that the Great
Soviet Encyclopedia characterized Ivan the Terrible as "One of the most
remarkable statesmen." In their legends, songs and poems Ivan's simple
subjects and their descendants considered him "Defender of
Christianity" and their own "People's Tsar," who rightfully
punished the boyars and made Russia a great power. Both his father and
grand-father were referred to on certain occasions as tsars, though officially
they were grand dukes. Ivan IV was the first to be solemnly crowned tsar of all
the Russias. The ceremony took place in the Kremlin's Cathedral of the
Assumption in 1547, establishing the tradition that was followed by all Moscow
rulers.
The changes in the arts that began during the reign of his father continued
with greater strength during the reign of Ivan IV. There was an increased taste
for splendor often achieved by weakening of Byzantine traditions. In
architecture the picture is clear: The traditional features of wooden
construction were preserved in new stone churches, as was strikingly
demonstrated by the Church of the Ascension in the village of Kolomenskoye, the
first to be built of the kind known as "Kamennaya Shatrovaya," stone
agee type term to denote a superstructure in the form of a high pyramid of four
or multi-layers. Obviously Ivan IV did not care much for the style that
Gioranvanti and Novi had brought to Moscow. The tsar wanted something that
would match his imagination; the answer was found in the intricate and often
decorative Russian wooden church. The iconography continued to rely mainly on
certain Novgorod traditions and then, after literature had had its impact,
slowly and very gradually became exposed to Western influences. Maxim the Greek
played an important role in the transition, which was considerably facilitated
by the great fife of 1547 that destroyed a good part of Moscow and severely
damaged many buildings within the Kremlin. The tsar's palace had to be restored
and redecorated and it was mainly there that the influence of Italian painting
became visible. Russians called these influences in literature, miniatures,
painting and architecture "Friazhskie," an adjective used for
everything that came from Genoa, meaning "Of Latin origin." The
tendency towards realism in painting, most probably brought to Moscow by
"Friazi," was perceptible in the famous frescoes of the Cathedral of
the Annunciation in the Kremlin, painted after the fire of 1547, which we have
already described. From the photos that reached us we clearly see that the
artists who painted them had a sense of proportion and were very well
acquainted with the anatomy of man. As for Novgorod, Ivan the Terrible
devastated the city in 1570, seized most of its icons and treasures and put an
end to its artistic life for many years. The fall of Novgorod further weakened
the Byzantine traditions, and reduced the opposition to Western influence that
had already started penetrating into Russia through the doors that Maxim the
Greek had opened slightly by his daring remarks about new icon and fresco
paintings
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