The Giants of Russian Literature: The Greatest Russian Novels, Stories, Plays, Folk Tales & Legends. Максим Горький

further checked the struggle for an outlet seawards which had been pursued for the last half-hundred years with such discouraging result; but Moskovy got back some of the places which had been wrung from her weakness, and above all gained breathing time to concentrate her energies on the strife with the arch-enemy Poland.

Both parties had made preparation for pushing the quarrel to the uttermost. The Korolovitch200 Vladislav had, with the insistence of youth, induced the Poles to support him in enforcing his election to the throne of all the Russias, a sovereignty stretching away over a vast expanse of tributary lands till it was almost lost on the horizon of western politics. On the other hand, Mikhail and the Moskovites were braced to fight for their faith, their fatherland, for very existence. 1616Vladislav’s enterprise had received the cautious sanction of the Senate and the more unrestrained blessing of the Archbishop of Warszawa, and in a schismatic-Greek church in the old Volhynian capital, Vladimir, a standard bearing the arms of Moskva had been consecrated; a standard which would, it was hoped, draw the Russians over to the cause of the Polish pretender. In the autumn of 1616 a detachment under the hetman Gonsievskie, consisting of a small but capable force, moved out of Smolensk towards Dorogoboujh and camped at the gorodok of Tverdilitz. Instantly the Tzar ordered his voevodas to make a dash upon Smolensk, thus cutting off Gonsievskie’s line of communication and striking at the enemy on their own ground. The move was well conceived and swiftly executed, but its success stopped short at the outworks of Smolensk. The Russians were not well versed in the art of taking a city by sudden assault, and their leader, Boutourlin, remained helpless in his intrenchments for the rest of the year, his troops exposed to attacks from the besieged on one side and Gonsievskie’s skirmishers on the other, and reduced to feed on horse-flesh for want of other provisions. 1617The new year witnessed vigorous action on both sides; a Polish force was routed by a Russian detachment near Dorogoboujh, an event which caused much rejoicing at Moskva, while in May Gonsievskie drove Boutourlin from before the walls of Smolensk. The same month another Polish attack on Dorogoboujh was repulsed, and the Russians hoped at least to maintain an effective defensive resistance to the invaders, but the turn of the year brought with it worse tidings. In July the hetman’s troops made themselves masters of Staritza, Torjhok, and other places, and pushed their advance guard into the Bielozero district, and at the same time came news that the Korolovitch himself was marching with a fresh army upon Moskva. At the end of August Vladislav effected a junction with the Malo-Russian hetman Khodkievitch, and two months later Dorogoboujh and Viasma had both been occupied by the conquering Vasa. Mikhail saw the fate of his forerunners looming large upon him, and already perhaps heard the bells of Moskva knelling his overthrow or the crowds of Krakow jeering at his misfortunes. But the winter season brought with it a respite; the Poles were beaten back from attacks on Tver and Mojhaysk, and in December Vladislav retreated to quarters in Viasma. From here he put forward proposals for peace negotiations, hoping perhaps to gain over the boyarins and people to his side without recourse to further fighting. The Moskovites, however, answered the Korolovitch boldly, and seemed as little disposed to yield an inch of territory as he was to abate a jot of his pretensions. 1618The first six months of the ensuing year were spent in fruitless discussions, during which time hostilities were as far as possible suspended. On the 29th of June the Poles resumed the offensive by an assault on Mojhaysk, which was defended with spirit against this and several subsequent attacks. Seeing, however, the hopelessness of prolonging the defence of this place against the determined efforts of the Korolovitch’s army, the Russian voevodas withdrew their force on the dark and wet night of the first of August, and retired upon Moskva. Masters of Mojhaysk, the Poles now prepared to clinch their successes by an attack on the capital itself, and Mikhail saw himself threatened in his last stronghold. With the memory of Vasili Shouyskie and Thedor Godounov before his mind the young Tzar may well have distrusted the loyalty which was nevertheless all that remained for him to trust to, and it was not without reason that he sought, by a solemn assembly of the sobor, to confirm and invigorate the staunchness of his subjects. To all appearance the city was lost. On one side advanced the Korolovitch with his victorious army as far as the village of Toushin, of evil memory; on the other, by way of Kolomna, bore down the Malo-Russian hetman, Sagaydatchnuiy,201 with 20,000 Kozaks. The Moskovite voevodas stood by in helpless inactivity while the hetman joined his forces with those of Vladislav, and terror settled down on the capital. The religious fanaticism of the people was countered by their superstition-soaked imaginings, and the appearance of a comet some millions of miles above them in the skies, “over against the town,” intensified the alarm felt at the more immediate neighbourhood of the Polish armies. A demand for submission sent in by the Korolovitch restored the defiant humour of the Moskvitchi; this overture was more or less a blind, as the Poles were meditating a sudden assault, but their designs became known by some means to the citizens, and when, on the night of the 1st of October, the attack was made, the Russians were ready for it. The Arbatskie gate was stoutly defended, and at red dawn the Poles were driven back from that point; along the wall from thence to the Nikitskie gate the efforts of the assailants were directed with no better result, and at the Tverskie gate the onslaught failed by reason of the scaling ladders being too short for their purpose. Nowhere could the enemy force an entrance, and the Polish hetmans had to draw off their discomfited troops from the neighbourhood of the capital. The spell which had hung round the Korolovitch’s advance was broken, and he found himself at the commencement of winter in the heart of a hostile country, whose inhabitants only needed the heartening effect of a success to rouse them on all sides against him. Under these circumstances Vladislav gave permission to his advisers to open fresh negotiations with the Moskovite boyarins of state, and Lev Sapieha, Adam Novodvorskie (Bishop of Kaminiec), and three other notables were empowered to treat for the arrangement of a peace. But notwithstanding the difficulty of keeping together a discouraged and ill-paid army and the instructions which came from Sigismund to bring the war to a speedy conclusion, the Polish prince was loth to relinquish the sovereignty which had seemed so nearly within his grasp, and placed the terms of compensation too high for Russian acceptance. The negotiations which had been opened near Moskva on the bank of the Priesna were broken off, and the Korolovitch once more assumed the offensive. Neither the capital nor the walls of the Troitza offered a very promising point of attack, and a retreating detachment of Poles was overtaken and defeated near Bielozero, but the ravages of the Dniepr Kozaks, who were undeterred in their rangings by the bitter winter weather, disposed the Moskovites to renew the proposals for a peaceable settlement. At length, in the village of Deoulino, three verstas from the Troitza monastery, a truce of fourteen years and six months was agreed upon. Vladislav left Mikhail in possession of the throne of Moskva, but retained the empty consolation of styling himself Tzar; on the other hand Russia yielded up to Poland a long list of towns, most of which had been snatched from her during the fatal “Time of the Troubles,” and which she was now too weak to recover. Smolensk, Tchernigov, Roslavl, Novgorod-Sieverskie and district, Starodoub, Dorogoboujh, Serpeysk, Nevl, and some lesser places were the price the gosoudarstvo had to pay for the peace which had been so long absent from the land; Viasma, Mojhaysk, and some other Pole-held towns were given back to the tzarstvo, and an exchange of prisoners was concerted, by virtue of which Filarete Romanov and the voevoda Shein were restored to their country. (Vasili Shouyskie had died in captivity at Warszawa some years previously.) The ikon of S. Nikolai of Mojhaysk, venerated by the Russians as a living being, and seized by the Poles as a spoil of war, was also included in the stipulated restitutions.202 On the 1st of December 1618 the Truce of Deoulino was signed, and with the opening of the new year Mikhail saw the waters of destruction recede from around his long-menaced throne. As the Polish eagles went winging homeward the land settled down, almost for the first time in the century, to a period of peace and security, and the figurative “voice of the turtle” arose once more in the forests and fields of Moskovy. In June 1619 the inhabitants of the capital went out with their ubiquitous ikons and crosses to receive the restored Filarete, who had been elected to the vacant Patriarchate, and as the bells rang out their welcome to the returning Vladuika Mikhail hailed with joy a father and a counsellor, the Church obtained a head, and the gosoudarstvo an able administrator. State and Church emerged together from the maelstrom which had swept over them both, and in the persons of Thedor and Mikhail Romanov the Russian Empire had found the