Kurbsky, Andrei Mikhailovich

KURBSKY, ANDREI MIKHAILOVICH

(1528–1583), prince, boyar, military commander, emigré, writer, and translator.

A scion of Yaroslav's ruling line, Kurbsky began his career at Ivan IV's court in 1547. From 1550 on, Kurbsky participated in military campaigns, including the capture of Kazan (1552). In 1550 he was listed among the thousand elite military servitors in Muscovy. In 1556 Kurbsky received the highest court rank, that of boyar. During the Livonian war, Kurbsky became a high-ranking commander (1560). In 1564 Kurbsky fled to Sigismund II Augustus, ruler of Poland and Lithuania, fearing persecution in Muscovy. Kurbsky's defection resulted in the confiscation of his lands and the repression of his relatives in Muscovy.

Receiving large estates from Sigismund II, Kurbsky served his new lord in a military capacity, even taking part in campaigns against Muscovy (1564, 1579, 1581). Kurbsky tried to integrate himself into Lithuanian society through two marriages to local women and participation in the work of local elective bodies. At the same time, he was involved in numerous legal and armed conflicts with his neighbors.

A number of literary works and translations are credited to Kurbsky. Among them are three letters to Ivan IV, in which Kurbsky justified his flight and accused the tsar of tyranny and moral corruption. His "History of the Grand Prince of Moscow" glorifies Kurbsky's military activities and condemns the terror of Ivan IV. Kurbsky is sometimes seen as the first Russian dissident, though in fact he never questioned the political foundations of Muscovite autocracy. Continuing study of Kurbsky's works has overturned traditional descriptions of him as a conservative representative of the Muscovite aristocracy. Together with his associates, Kurbsky compiled and translated in exile works from various Christian and classical authors. Kurbsky's literary activities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth are a striking example of contacts between Renaissance and Eastern Orthodox cultures in the second half of the sixteenth century. Kurbsky's interest in theological and classical writings, however, did not make him part of Renaissance culture or alter his Muscovite cultural stance.

Edward L. Keenan argues that the texts attributed to Kurbsky were in fact produced in the seventeenth century and that Kurbsky was functionally illiterate in Slavonic. Keenan's hypothesis is based on the dating and distribution of the surviving manuscripts, on textual similarities between works credited to Kurbsky and those by other authors of later origin, and on his idea that members of the sixteenth-century secular elite, including Kurbsky, remained outside the tradition of church Slavonic religious writing. Most experts reject Keenan's ideas. His opponents offer an alternative textual analysis and detect circumstantial references to Kurbsky's letters to Ivan IV in sixteenth-century sources. Scholars have discovered an earlier manuscript of Kurbsky's first letter to Ivan IV and have provided considerable information on Kurbsky's life in exile, on his political importance as an opponent of Ivan IV, and on the cultural interaction between the church and secular elites in Muscovy. Though Kurbsky claimed he could not write Cyrillic, this statement is open to different interpretations. Other Muscovites, whose ability to write is well documented, also made similar declarations. Kurbsky's major works were translated into English by J. L. I. Fennell: The Correspondence between Prince Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia (1955); Prince A. M. Kurbsky's History of Ivan IV (1963).

See also: ivan iv; livonian war; yaroslav vladimirovich

bibliography

Auerbach, Inge. (1997). "Identity in Exile: Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbskii and National Consciousness in the Sixteenth Century." In Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 1359–1584 / Moskovskaya Rus (1359–1584): Kultura i istoricheskoe soznanie (UCLA Slavic Studies. New Series, vol. 3), ed. Ann M. Kleimola and Gail L. Lenhoff. Moscow: ITZ-Garant.

Filyushkin, A. I. (1999). "Andrey Mikhaylovich Kurbsky." Voprosy istorii 1:82–96.

Halperin, Charles J. (1998). "Edward Keenan and the Kurbskii-Groznyi Correspondence in Hindsight." Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 46:376–403.

Keenan, Edward L. (1971). The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-Century Genesis of the "Correspondence" Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV, with an appendix by Daniel C. Waugh. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sergei Bogatyrev