The beginning of the se­venteenth century’ was a time of profound social and political crisis for Russia. The increasing social contradictions produced many uprisings of peasants, bondmen and urban townsfolk. The most important of these was the Peasant War led by Ivan Bolotnikov, the first peasant war in Russian history. […]

The works which contain a record of the Time of Troubles can be divided into two main groups.1 The first consists of works that appeared before 1613, that is, before the election of Michael Romanov to the throne. They are direct responses to events, the direct impression of social and […]

It tells how a certain man in the capital dreamed that the Virgin, John the Baptist and the Holy Saints were praying to Christ in the Cathedral of the Assumption to spare the Orthodox people who had fallen into sin and therefore been made to suffer the horrors of the […]

The New Tale of the Most Glorious Russian Tsardom, written in 1610-1611, is based on a literary reinterpretation of official genres. The anonymous author calls his work a “letter” (pismo) (which is a synonym for gramota): “And may you read this letter without any doubt… And he who takes this […]

One of the first attempts to establish the causes of the Time of Troubles was made in another work written at the same time as the New Tale. This work was written in the genre of the lament. As well as laments for the dead and fallen, Old Russian literature […]

The task of providing an historical explanation of the Time of Troubles fell to writers of the period after the Time of Troubles and the election of Michael Romanov to the throne in 1613, that is, the remaining years of that decade and the following one. These writers belonged to […]

Another writer of this period, the head of a central government department Ivan Timofeyev, depicts Russian history from Ivan the Terrible to Michael Romanov in his Annals,7 written in 1616-1619. By virtue of his office Ivan Timofeyev was constantly dealing with affairs of state. He had access to many important […]

The third author, Prince Ivan Khvorostinin, descended from the house of Yaroslavl appanage princes. In his youth he was closely associated with the Pseudo-Dmitry I, who appointed him royal carver (kravchiy) and, according to another contemporary, held this callow youth in great favour, in which the youth in question gloried […]

Prince Semyon Shakhovskoy was related to Ivan Khvorostinin. His life was full of the sudden changes and vicissitudes so typical of the Time of Troubles. In 1606, when the towns of Putivl, Chernigov, Yelets and Kromy rose up against Tsar Vasily Shuisky, Semyon Shakhovskoy was serving at Yelets. Here his […]

The “discovery of character” meant that writers of the first half of the seventeenth century began to assess their personages regardless of mediaeval convention, their status in the hierarchy. A personage was assessed as an individual, not as a tsar, a general or a prelate. From here it was but […]