Today, nearly five centuries after his birth, Prince Andrei Kurbsky remains probably no less a controversial and talked-about figure than he was during his own lifetime and that of the terrible tsar. It is no surprise that he is something of a symbolic if not emblematic figure in Russian history.
Terror of the Livonians and scourge of Kazan, Kurbsky was a significant figure because he changed an important vector in Russian history. Prior to the rule of Ivan the Terrible, we find historical chronicles filled with stories about how certain key figures from the Tatar, Lithuanian and Polish kingdoms fled to Russian in search of a better life or simply in an attempt to save their own lives. With Kurbsky, we see the beginning of a major movement in the opposite direction, and this is why certain historians quite seriously consider him the forbearer of the nonconformist movement, the first Russian dissident.
But is this reputation well founded? Who knows? The prince’s bright and controversial figure casts a shadow over the other lower ranking subjects of the Tsar of Muscovy who travelled West earlier than Prince Kurbsky. And among these others are those who actually committed deeds damaging the state. But prior to his exodus, Kurbsky was not known to have done anything unworthy, save expressions of sympathies for his many countrymen who had fallen from grace.
Kurbsky managed to sense that winds were shifting, reading signals coming from both sides: enticing letters from the Polish and Lithuanian side and very specific warnings of impending danger from his Muscovite friends – he should not risk returning to Moscow from Yuriev, where he was serving as the military governor.
Even from the relatively scant historical records surviving today, we can surmise that the prince was not all sugary and sweet. But he also was not the spineless, self-interested and hapless narcissist depicted in Sergei Eizenshtein’s renowned film. And the accusations that Kurbsky sought to seduce the tsar’s wife Anastasia and take up the princedom of Yaroslavl (Kurbsky originated from the Smolensk-Yaroslavl line of princes) are on conscious of Tsar Ivan.
The literary talents of Prince Kurbsky were recognized by no less than the class sensitive Big Soviet Encyclopedia, and his quill seems no duller several centuries after the ink dried. The Russian historian Nikolai Ustryalov, prior to publishing these historic in the 19th century, noted that many Russian readers would find it uncomfortable to read Kurbsky’s writings. But nonetheless they should read them.
Truth be told, some people with a twinge of bitterness ask: did Kurbsky have to write his most famous and longest first letter to Tsar Ivan just in order for Alexei Tolstoy to so succinctly sum it up in 16 lines of a poem three hundred years later?
In Lithuania Kurbsky settled in and aged quickly, picking up the mannerisms of his environs and coming to resemble neighboring barons. Later his descendants converted to Catholicism and within a century the Kurbsky dynasty was no more…
Georgy Osipov
