The special interest which the compiler of The Tsar’s Book showed in the account of Basil Ill’s death would appear to be linked with the following circumstance. The lengthy amendment to The Tsar’s Book contained an account of the tsar’s illness, Ivan IV’s illness in 1553, in the course of […]

The existence of deliberate invention in historical narrative is seen most clearly in the semi-official, mid-sixteenth-century work The Book of Degrees of the Tsar’s Genealogy.18 The Book of Degrees was compiled in 1560-1563 in the Macarius’ circle that produced The Great Menology and was similar to it in structure. It […]

This combination of literary and publicistic invention is found not only in The Book of Degrees but in other sixteenth-century works of historical narrative. It is seen most clearly in The History of Kazan. Written in 1564-1566,20 The Short Legend About the Beginning of the Realm of Kazan differed from […]

Secular tales were less widespread in the literature of the sixteenth century than in that of the second half of the preceding century. They also differed radically from the tales of the preceding period in character also. The tales of the sixteenth century are predominantly didactic, openly instructive. Examples are […]

The Tale of Queen Dinara has come down to us in a miscellany of works connected with the circle of Metropolitan Macarius (the tales of the Crimean invasion and the Moscow fire of 1547), and evidently appeared in the first half of the sixteenth century.23 The main heroine is the […]

The last sixteenth-century tale appeared after the death of Ivan the Terrible. It is the historical Tale of the Campaign of Stephen Bathory Against Pskov. Like the historical tales of the fifteenth century, it had a single theme. That theme was the siege of Pskov by King Stephen Bathory of […]

In the sixteenth century in Russia a new type of literature became widespread, namely, works dealing with current political issues, or, to use a later term, polemical works. Joseph of Volokolamsk. The first work of sixteenth-century Russian polemics was a book written at the very beginning of the century that […]

The polemical tradition of Joseph of Volokolamsk was continued by Daniel, who first succeeded Joseph as abbot of the Volokolamsk Monastery, then became Metropolitan of All Russia. Daniel is the author of a large Miscellany of sixteen sermons and also of many epistles to individuals. Unlike Joseph, Daniel was dealing […]

Joseph of Volo­kolamsk and Daniel were opposed by polemicists of a more independent nature. The most talented of the polemicists who opposed the Josephites was undoubtedly Vassian Patrikeyev, a prince who had been forced to become a monk in the White Lake Monastery of St Cyril by Ivan III. At […]

The subjects raised by Vassian Patrikeyev attracted other sixteenth-century publicists as well. The most educated among them was undoubtedly Michael-Maxim Trivolis, who became known in Russian as Maxim the Greek. Today we know quite a lot about the life of this educated monk. Acquainted with many eminent Greek and Italian […]