CHAPTER II
THE OPRITCHNINA
I.—THE FICTIONS AND REALITIES OF THE DRAMA. II.—THE TERROR. III.—THE TSAR SIMEON. IV.—THE OPRITCHNINA AT THE BAR OF HISTORY.
I.—The Fictions and Realities of the Drama.
Most of my Russian readers and some of my French ones have read the adventures of Prince Serebrianyï, as related by Alexis Tolstoï. The hero of the tale, returning to Russia after an embassy to a foreign Power, meets a troop of armed men, whom he takes, by their appearance and behaviour, for lawless bandits. He sees them sack a village and murder or violate the inhabitants. He acts according to the dictates of his brave heart, and then only, when the law has laid its hand on his collar, does he discover he has been guilty of treason. The men he had taken for brigands are the Tsar's servants, and their performances a perfectly regular specimen of the new order of things imposed on the country. The culprit is conducted to the monarch's new residence, the Sloboda of Alexandrov, and passes from one surprise and horror to another—from the courtyard where roving bears bar the way of suspicious-looking visitors, to the banqueting-hall, the road to which is fringed with torture-chambers and dungeons, and where the Tsar, surrounded by guests disguised in monkish attire, distributes gloomy smiles and cups of poisoned liquor. Everywhere his foot slips in blood: an evil smell of carnage hangs in the air, the joyous yells of the drunken feasters mingle with the shrieks of pain wrung from prisoners who are being tortured close by. The whole palace is a Gehenna, a charnel-house. And wherefore? No man knows, or rather all men guess: the Tsar is amusing himself, and these are his pleasures.
The novelist has not relied wholly and solely on his imagination. He has sought to write history, and history, in the person of her most illustrious exponents in his own country, has furnished him with the elements of his picture, with his outline and his pigments. This is the Opritchnina, as the story is told by Karamzine, by Soloviov, by Kostomaroy, and in our own days by Klioutchevski and Mikhaïlovski—a hideous tale of massacre, ordered, without reason, without object, by a Sovereign who treated himself to this bloody play, perpetrated, shamelessly and remorselessly, by men who rode up and down the country with their insignia, a dog's head and a
