Tajemnice księgozbioru Iwana Groźnego

Abstract

[The Secrets of Ivan "The Terrible's" Book Collection]

Tsar Ivan IV (1533-1584), the autocrat of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, left behind the testimony of a bloody tyrant, squandering the lives of thousands of his subjects, however, until recently some Russian historians viewed him as a lonely reformer who was forced to take radical decisions. Many of them maintained the legend of his supposedly exquisite education. In their assumptions they relied on another legend of the Rurikovitch's book collection full of literary gems of antiquity. Although nobody questions the existence of Tsar Ivan's private library, there are many misconceptions about it, especially that the existing documents mention merely 154 titles of books in the collection. They are connected with the person of the Tsar in many ways; he founded some of them, he barely skimmed some, and he confiscated others. The collection was analysed by N.N. Zarubin (1893-1942) many years ago, and various historians supplied it with commentaries during the after-war period.
The source of the misunderstandings about the Tsar's library is the anonymous Index of the collection, supposedly discovered in 1819 in the town of Parnu archives by Ch. Dabelov (1768-1830), professor at the Dorpat (Tartu) University, which included a few references to some Greek and Latin manuscripts, and gave their total number of eight hundred volumes. N.N. Zarubin did not acknowledge Dabelov's Index being afraid of mystification. Perhaps he found those references to unknown works by Virgil, Cicero and other lost texts of Roman authors too shocking to be true. And yet, since the beginning of 19th century, historians have continued to undertake research on Tsar Ivan "The Terrible's" library. Some of them reached the conclusion that it must have been burnt during the Kreml fires in 1547, 1571 or 1611. Others speculated that it was plundered during the Dimitri movement or that the synod library and several Orthodox Church libraries absorbed it. There are still some who claim that Tsar Ivan's collection has remained untouched in a secret room of Kreml. The advocates of the latter hypothesis believe in the authenticity of the Index, and hope to find the Rurikovitch's library within the walls of Kreml one day. The author of the article presented the standpoint of many historians, quoted valuable documents, and in the last part of his work organised the knowledge on the subject of Ivan IV's library in consistence with the principles of bibliologi-cal analysis and using N.N. Zarubin's catalogue, reconstructed for the purpose, of the books whose existence was documented.