Normalizing the Debate about Kurbskii?

Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbskii (1528-83) was a military commander under Tsar Ivan the Terrible and, from 1564, an émigré in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the book under review here, Konstantin Erusalimskii of the Russian State University for the Humanities argues that Kurbskii was also a writer. Like most specialists, Erusalimskii contends in his book that Kurbskii authored several important literary works and translations from classical and Christian authors. Kurbskii's oeuvre includes letters to Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible, in which Kurbskii denounces his tyranny, and Istoriia o kniazia velikogo moskovskogo delekh (The History of the Grand Prince of Moscow), an account of Ivan's reign and a martyrology of his victims. The latter work has survived in numerous miscellanies, which Erusalimskii has subjected to study for the first time in the historiography.

Not all scholars accept the attribution of these texts to Kurbskii. The participants in the present forum review Erusalimskii's book in the context of the ongoing debate about authenticity. Alexander Filjushkin of St. Petersburg State University seconds the traditional interpretation. He agrees with Erusalimskii that the existing texts stem from original writings authored by Kurbskii. Brian Boeck of DePaul University, who is a skeptic, insists that Erusalimskii has proven neither that Kurbskii put together a miscellany of his own works, nor that he authored the History.

The debate about Kurbskii involves texts that have exerted a profound influence on Russian culture and Russian historical writings in particular. On the basis of these texts, some writers and historians have seen Kurbskii as the first Russian dissident who raised his voice against the tyranny of the Russian state. To others, he was a traitor. Many interpretations of Ivan IV's reign rely heavily on the History, whose author has created a powerful image of two Ivans. The good Ivan won brilliant military victories and launched domestic reforms when he was listening to good advisers. After the expulsion of those advisers from his entourage, Ivan turned into a bloodthirsty tyrant. Though this view has been criticized on several occasions, it is still a major component of mainstream literature about Ivan the Terrible.¹

The texts associated with Kurbskii are also important for our understanding of cross-cultural contacts in Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It is essential to know whether Kurbskii authored them or not before drawing conclusions about his reception of Renaissance and classic culture in emigration. Depending on how we approach the problem of authenticity, Kurbskii may be seen as an influential intellectual and writer, who learned Latin and combined in his works Muscovite Orthodoxy and classical texts, or just a brutal military man and a litigious landowner.

The controversy about Kurbskii was initiated by the American scholar Edward L. Keenan in The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-Century Genesis of the "Correspondence" Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV. He argues that the above-mentioned works were in fact produced by several "pseudo-Kurbskiis" throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.² The most famous of these texts, the letters to Ivan and the History, are 17th-century literary fabrications. Keenan grounds his argument in observations about the dating and distribution of existing manuscripts; in textual similarities between works attributed to Kurbskii and later works of other authors; and in his idea that members of the court elite, including Kurbskii, were alien to religious culture, particularly religious rhetoric and Church Slavonic, which are major components of the texts attributed to Kurbskii.³ Brian Boeck develops Keenan's textual observations but ignores his idea about a barrier between court and church cultures in Muscovy. Keenan himself seems to have lost interest in the theory of two cultures. He has recently suggested that some members of Ivan's court (the Godunovs) were even responsible for a renaissance of religious culture in Muscovy.⁴ Unlike Keenan, who sets up questions in the negative by refuting (or pretending to refute, depending on one's point of view) the traditional interpretations of Ivan IV's reign, Boeck highlights the positive contribution of revisionism to our knowledge of Muscovite culture. He...