The only surviving copy of a Testament of Ivan the Terrible stems from the beginning of the 19th century with a watermark from 1805. In January 1822 the director of the Foreign Office's archive, Aleksei Malinovskii, sent the testament to the historian and novelist Nikolai Karamzin, who was working on his History of the Russian State, and who published it in the commentary to the ninth volume of the History. An analysis of Aleksei Kurbatov's and Vasilii Tatishchev's alledged authorship of the testament's preface and commentary leads to the conclusion that the testament displays the literary devices of a fictional text. The preface presents a story complete with the grammatically ambiguous signature ,,A. Kurbatova“, a host of conflicting dates and several lost copies of a lost original. The argument for Tatishchev's authorship rests solely on some peculiarities concerning the publications of his personal copy of the Sudebnik of 1550. The questions surrounding the testament are resolved easily when one takes into account the literary hints and regards the text as an early 19th-century mystification.
This article examines five German pamphlets published between 1570 and 1582, which describe Ivan IV’s Oprichnina. The pamphlets serve as vitally important but underutilized sources for this period in Ivan IV’s reign and are widely regarded by historians as eyewitness accounts. This study dissects the pamphlets into thematic parts (or “motifs”) and explores these themes as they appear across these five sources. The comparative textual analysis here shows that these pamphlets – the main German sources for Ivan IV’s Oprichnina – are not eyewitness accounts, but complex texts that rely on a variety of mostly early published sources, and that the master narrative of the Oprichnina they provide should not be taken as true eyewitness accounts.
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