An Old Russian “Genre Noir”
An Old Russian “Genre Noir”
Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Tales of Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s Crimes
Abstract
Tales denouncing princely crimes, a feature of early Russian chronicles, experienced a kind of revival in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with numerous anecdotes denouncing Ivan the Terrible. These tales mirror the typology of earlier chronicles analyzed by Dmitrii S. Likhachev for the eleventh to fifteenth and, more recently, Natalia Sochneva for the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. We find motifs of quarrel instigated by the devil, the broken oath, the innocent victim, the warning not heeded, the trap laid, and the cruelty of the execution. The most delicate aspect is the punishment of the crime and/or the criminal. Except for (pseudo-)Andrei Kurbskii, the authors do not go as far as to suggest that God will punish the tsar-tormentor, but some suggest that misfortunes at the hands of Crimean Tatars were Russia’s reward for the ruler’s crimes. Thus, late medieval Russian authors could articulate a critical view of their sovereign using an old annalistic subgenre.
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