Tsar Boris (drama)
Encyclopedia
Tsar Boris is a 1870 drama
by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
, written in 1868-1869 and first published in 1870
in the #3, March issue of the Vestnik Evropy
magazine. It became the third and the final part of Tolstoy’s acclaimed historical drama trilogy which was begun by The Death of Ivan the Terrible
(1864) and Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich (1868) plays.
s editor Mikhail Stasyulevich
: " Tsar Boris, I'm going to start it in the nearest future: all the necessary material is at hand". In the early October the work begun and on November 11 of the same year the author informed Nikolay Kostomarov
that Act I has been just finished. In a letter to Mikhail Stasyulevich
, dated December 2, 1868, Tolstoy opined that this first piece has "turned out well".
Then the process halted: Tolstoy became intrigued by and confused with the Danish
Prince Johan
's character, princess Ksenya
's fiancée (and Prince Christian
and spent some time investigating his background. This took some time, and only on February 7, 1869, Tolstoy informed Boleslav Markevich
in a letter that "this giant ship has taken another start and now breaking waves". On February 19 Tolstoy wrote to Stasyulevich: "Two acts are now ready. The third one will be crucial in answering the question, whether the whole thing was worthwhile and am I to continue with clear heart".
While working on the Act 2 Tolstoy got distracted continuously: numerous ballads ("The Song of Harald and Yaroslavna", "Three Massacres", "The Song of Vladimir's Korsunh Campaign") were written in those days. In June 1869 he finished the Act 3 and informed Afanasy Fet
on this in a letter (June 23), then in October 7 reported to Stasyulevich that the play was ready, barring three scenes that remained unfinished. By November 3 the thing has been completed, according to the letter to Markevich. On November 30 four Acts of the play were sent to Vestnik Evropy, with a promise that the fifth one will follow suit. On the same day Tolstoy sent Kostomarov a copy, asking him to see if there might be some blunders in the speeches of Misail and Grigory. Some corrections were made and sent to the magazine in December and January 1870.
While still working on the play, Tolstoy mentioned in a letter to the editor that his wife liked Tsar Boris better than the two other plays of the trilogy and that he tended to agree with her. Later he had to admit Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich objectively was the strongest of the three, even if he liked Tsar Boris a lot.
Despite the failure with Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich’s stage production, Tolstoy was working on Tsar Boris counting on it being staged and proposed to present special author's memorandum to future directors, as he did in the two previous cases. In the spring of 1870, when the third of the three tragedies was published as a separate edition, Tolstoy submitted it to the theater censorship department. On April 28 the play, with minor cuts, received the censors' permission. But the directorial Committee of the Imperial theaters refused to accept it. The Tsar Boris was premiered in Anna Brenko's Moscow Pushkin Theater in 1881, six years after Tolstoy's death.
under the Spanish banner". To Kostomarov he wrote:
Neither Kostomarov nor Baron Ungern-Sternberg provided definitive answers as to the dilemma Tolstoy had been haunted by, so he chose to support the version which contradicted that of Karamzin. According to the play, when the Spanish king "rose to a war, threatening to chain free nation down", the Dutch prince "came up to help his persecuted brothers" and fight against Spain. Meanwhile, Ungern-Sternberg's help in a way proved to be essential. The Baron sent Tolstoy series of excerpts from the official Danish chronicles, some of which mentioned Johan as being King Frederick
's illegitimate child. This detail gave the author an idea as to the possible motives of those responsible for the Danish Prince's death. On November 30, 1869, he wrote to Stasyulevich:
As for the name, in excerpts provided by Baron Undern-Steinberg and in some of the Russian chronicles, the Danish Prince was being referred to as Johan (Ioann) and Christian and Tolstoy decided to choose the latter ("so as for him not to be confused with Ioann Grozny").
he'd support: it was just the Grigory Otrepyev one that he rejected outright. Then, the Impostor's plotline, initially considered to be significant, has been dropped altogether. This move had a logic to it: this strand of the story would have got only in the way of the play’s main idea, as the author saw it. "The battle that my hero fights and loses, is the battle with the ghost of his own crime, haunting him as some sort of mysterious threatening creature which gradually destroys his whole life… The whole drama which begins with Boris’ inauguration is, in effect, is nothing but a grandiose fall. It ends with Boris’ death which is brought about not by poison but by the general anemia of a guilty man who comes to the realization of what a mistake his crime had been", Tolstoy wrote in a letter to Princess Saine-Witgenstein
on October 17, 1869.
sky, Mitya. The latter's emergence Tolstoy explained in a letter to Stasyulevich (dated November 30, 1869): :The introduction of Mitya the Outlaw was prompted by Schiller
's advice he's given through his Marquis of Posa
character: "Let them treat with respect dreams of their youths". What Tolstoy meant, apparently, was that Mitya appeared in the Prince Serebrenny novel, where Resheto and Nakovalnya were given a mention too.
's talking of Boris' intention of making Prince Johan the King of Estonia
was borrowed from the same source (Vol.XI, 45).
Among other books Tolstoy used as sources the Dutch trader Isaac Massa
’s memoirs which were published in 1868 in Brussels
, Mikhail Pogodin
's book The History in Characters of Boris Godunov and His Times (1868) and Nikolay Kostomarov
's Moscow State's Time of Troubles in the Early XVII c. (1868). It was according to by Massa's account that Tolstoy, admittedly, recreated Maria Godunova, the way she looked and behaved. From Massa's book the episode of Godunov and the ex-Queen, late Prince Dmitry’s mother's meeting, has been taken.
Tolstoy rejected Karamzin's version of The False Dmitry being Otrepyev, the fugitive monk. "We are to know for sure who he is. And we must give him name, even if we are to invent it", Boris insists in the play. That was exactly Kostomarov's idea: "The Grishka's name has been chosen as the first one that came to hand. They had to name urgentry, rip him off that awful Dmitry name", he wrote.
's) in both dramas looks like the same text. Among Tsar Boris’ direct borrowings from Karamzin is the scene where the Tsar is receiving ambassadors in Act 1 which is, in effect, the dramatization of the first paragraphs of Karamzin's History, Vol.IX ("The External Affairs" section). Some fragments of Tolstoy's tragedy might be seen as references to those of Pushkin's. The Scene 1 of Act IV (with common people talking of The False Dmitry and Grigory Otrepyev dilemma) looks like almost a paste from the Boris Godunov’s scene at the "Square before the Cathedral in Moscow". In fact, the whole way of the Godunov character's evolution, from The Death of Ivan the Terrible to Tsar Boris, might have been the direct consequence of Tolstoy checking himself against Pushkin, according to Yampolsky.
What made Tsar Boris different from Pushkin's Boris Godunov was the philosophical aspect of its general idea. Tolstoy's Boris was in many ways cast after that of Karamzin, who pictured the doomed ruler's tragedy in metaphisical terms, as being a kind of a price he had to pay for his bloody deed. The masses turned away from Boris (as Karamzin and Tolstoy saw it) because of his rapid moral deterioration. Pushkin, on the other hand, regarded Godunov's downfall as natural in the political and social situation of the time. Heavy consciousness didn't help, but had it been clearer, this wouldn't have prevented the Tsar's demise which was inevitable "since what he had to fight after all, was not just the Impostor, but his own people" (Yampolsky).
There was some of what scholars termed "factual contamination", too. Miranda, the Papal nuncio
, says things that had been actually pronounced by Pope Clement VIII
's legate
Allessandro di Comolo who visited Moscow in the times of Fyodor Ioannovich (Karamzin, History, Vol.X, 190). Lachin-bek's speech was that of another Persian ambassador in Russia, Azi Khozrev who (according to Karamzin's History, Vol.X, page 192) said those words in 1593.
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, often referred to as A. K. Tolstoy , was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright, considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist...
, written in 1868-1869 and first published in 1870
1870 in literature
The year 1870 in literature involved some significant new books.-New books:*Thomas Bailey Aldrich - The Story of a Bad Boy*Thomas Archer - The Terrible Sights of London*Rhoda Broughton - Red as a rose is she...
in the #3, March issue of the Vestnik Evropy
Vestnik Evropy
Vestnik Evropy was the major liberal magazine of late-nineteenth-century Russia; it lasted from 1866 to 1918....
magazine. It became the third and the final part of Tolstoy’s acclaimed historical drama trilogy which was begun by The Death of Ivan the Terrible
The Death of Ivan the Terrible
The Death of Ivan the Terrible is an historical drama by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy written in 1863 and first published in the January 1866 issue of Otechestvennye zapiski magazine. It is the first part of a trilogy that is followed by Tsar Fiodor Ioannovich and concludes with Tsar Boris. All...
(1864) and Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich (1868) plays.
History
On August 27, 1868, Aleksey Tolstoy wrote in a letter to the Vestnik EvropyVestnik Evropy
Vestnik Evropy was the major liberal magazine of late-nineteenth-century Russia; it lasted from 1866 to 1918....
s editor Mikhail Stasyulevich
Mikhail Stasyulevich
Mikhail Matveevich Stasyulevich was a Russian writer and scholar, author of books on ancient history, journalist, editor and publisher, best known as the founder and editor-in-chief of Vestnik Evropy, one of Russia's leading literary magazines...
: "
Nikolay Kostomarov
Nikolay Ivanovich Kostomarov , of mixed Russian and Ukrainian origin, is one of the most distinguished Russian and Ukrainian historians, a Professor of History at the Kiev University and later at the St...
that Act I has been just finished. In a letter to Mikhail Stasyulevich
Mikhail Stasyulevich
Mikhail Matveevich Stasyulevich was a Russian writer and scholar, author of books on ancient history, journalist, editor and publisher, best known as the founder and editor-in-chief of Vestnik Evropy, one of Russia's leading literary magazines...
, dated December 2, 1868, Tolstoy opined that this first piece has "turned out well".
Then the process halted: Tolstoy became intrigued by and confused with the Danish
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
Prince Johan
John, Prince of Schleswig-Holstein
Johan of Schleswig-Holstein was the youngest son of Frederick II of Denmark and Norway and Sophia of Mecklenburg-Schwerin...
's character, princess Ksenya
Tsarevna Xenia Borisovna of Russia
Xenia Borisovna Godunova was a Russian Tsarevna, daughter of Tsar Boris Godunov, and sister of Tsar Feodor II of Russia.She was very beautiful and well educated...
's fiancée (and Prince Christian
Christian IV of Denmark
Christian IV was the king of Denmark-Norway from 1588 until his death. With a reign of more than 59 years, he is the longest-reigning monarch of Denmark, and he is frequently remembered as one of the most popular, ambitious and proactive Danish kings, having initiated many reforms and projects...
and spent some time investigating his background. This took some time, and only on February 7, 1869, Tolstoy informed Boleslav Markevich
Boleslav Markevich
Boleslav Mikhailovich Markevich 1884, Saint Petersburg) was a Russian writer, essayist, journalist, and literary critic of Polish origin; author of a number of popular novels, including: Marina of the Aluy Rog , A Quarter of a Century Ago , The Turning Point and The Void .-Biography:Boleslav...
in a letter that "this giant ship has taken another start and now breaking waves". On February 19 Tolstoy wrote to Stasyulevich: "Two acts are now ready. The third one will be crucial in answering the question, whether the whole thing was worthwhile and am I to continue with clear heart".
While working on the Act 2 Tolstoy got distracted continuously: numerous ballads ("The Song of Harald and Yaroslavna", "Three Massacres", "The Song of Vladimir's Korsunh Campaign") were written in those days. In June 1869 he finished the Act 3 and informed Afanasy Fet
Afanasy Fet
Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet , was a Russian poet regarded as one of the finest lyricists in Russian literature.-Origins:...
on this in a letter (June 23), then in October 7 reported to Stasyulevich that the play was ready, barring three scenes that remained unfinished. By November 3 the thing has been completed, according to the letter to Markevich. On November 30 four Acts of the play were sent to Vestnik Evropy, with a promise that the fifth one will follow suit. On the same day Tolstoy sent Kostomarov a copy, asking him to see if there might be some blunders in the speeches of Misail and Grigory. Some corrections were made and sent to the magazine in December and January 1870.
While still working on the play, Tolstoy mentioned in a letter to the editor that his wife liked Tsar Boris better than the two other plays of the trilogy and that he tended to agree with her. Later he had to admit Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich objectively was the strongest of the three, even if he liked Tsar Boris a lot.
Despite the failure with Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich’s stage production, Tolstoy was working on Tsar Boris counting on it being staged and proposed to present special author's memorandum to future directors, as he did in the two previous cases. In the spring of 1870, when the third of the three tragedies was published as a separate edition, Tolstoy submitted it to the theater censorship department. On April 28 the play, with minor cuts, received the censors' permission. But the directorial Committee of the Imperial theaters refused to accept it. The Tsar Boris was premiered in Anna Brenko's Moscow Pushkin Theater in 1881, six years after Tolstoy's death.
Сharacters developement
In the course of the seven years Tolstoy spent working on his drama trilogy his attitude towards his characters was going through changes. In the second and especially in the third play Boris Godunov comes across as more deep and complicated figure. According to scholar Igor Yampolsky, Tolstoy was beginning to see in him a potentially Europen-type monarch whose idea was to lead Russia out of historical isolation and patriarchal stagnation into the world political arena, and it was this aspect that made Boris Godunov for him such an appealing character. On the other hand, Tolstoy's attitude towards Maria, the wife of Boris, has developed brom bad to worse: more and more he was attributing to her Boris' "evil" features. While in The Death of Ivan the Terrible Maria gets horrified and frightened when learning of her husband's ambitions, in Tsar Boris she helps him with zest and cruelty, motivated by personal interests, not by those of the state. The two Marias – of the first and the third plays – were so different that Tolstoy seriously considered re-working parts of The Death of Ivan the Terrible in 1870, before all three were to be published as a single book.The Danish Prince
Aleksey Tolstoy, who used Nikolay Karamzin's History of the Russian State as the major source, became intrigued by and confused with the John, Prince of Schleswig-Holstein's character, princess Ksenya's fiancée and Christian IV of Denmark's brother. He applied to Kostomarov and Baron Karl Ungern-Sternberg for help, trying to resolve a mystery of "how could Ksenya's fiance have fought (according to Karamzin) in the NetherlandsNetherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
under the Spanish banner". To Kostomarov he wrote:
Neither Kostomarov nor Baron Ungern-Sternberg provided definitive answers as to the dilemma Tolstoy had been haunted by, so he chose to support the version which contradicted that of Karamzin. According to the play, when the Spanish king "rose to a war, threatening to chain free nation down", the Dutch prince "came up to help his persecuted brothers" and fight against Spain. Meanwhile, Ungern-Sternberg's help in a way proved to be essential. The Baron sent Tolstoy series of excerpts from the official Danish chronicles, some of which mentioned Johan as being King Frederick
Frederick II of Denmark
Frederick II was King of Denmark and Norway and duke of Schleswig from 1559 until his death.-King of Denmark:Frederick II was the son of King Christian III of Denmark and Norway and Dorothea of Saxe-Lauenburg. Frederick II stands as the typical renaissance ruler of Denmark. Unlike his father, he...
's illegitimate child. This detail gave the author an idea as to the possible motives of those responsible for the Danish Prince's death. On November 30, 1869, he wrote to Stasyulevich:
As for the name, in excerpts provided by Baron Undern-Steinberg and in some of the Russian chronicles, the Danish Prince was being referred to as Johan (Ioann) and Christian and Tolstoy decided to choose the latter ("so as for him not to be confused with Ioann Grozny").
The False Dmitry
Even as late as the work on Act 1 was completed was Tolstroy still undecided as to which version of False Dmitriy IFalse Dmitriy I
False Dmitriy I was the Tsar of Russia from 21 July 1605 until his death on 17 May 1606 under the name of Dimitriy Ioannovich . He is sometimes referred to under the usurped title of Dmitriy II...
he'd support: it was just the Grigory Otrepyev one that he rejected outright. Then, the Impostor's plotline, initially considered to be significant, has been dropped altogether. This move had a logic to it: this strand of the story would have got only in the way of the play’s main idea, as the author saw it. "The battle that my hero fights and loses, is the battle with the ghost of his own crime, haunting him as some sort of mysterious threatening creature which gradually destroys his whole life… The whole drama which begins with Boris’ inauguration is, in effect, is nothing but a grandiose fall. It ends with Boris’ death which is brought about not by poison but by the general anemia of a guilty man who comes to the realization of what a mistake his crime had been", Tolstoy wrote in a letter to Princess Saine-Witgenstein
Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein
Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein was a Polish noblewoman who pursued a 40-year liaison/relationship with Franz Liszt. She was also an amateur journalist and essayist and it is conjectured that she did much of the actual writing of several of Liszt's publications, especially his Life of Chopin...
on October 17, 1869.
Minor characters
There were less of fictitious characters in Tsar Boris than in the first two plays of the trilogy, and all of them minor ones: Dementyevna, Resheto, Nakovalnya, the posadPosad
A posad was a settlement, often surrounded by ramparts and a moat, adjoining a town or a kremlin, but outside of it, or adjoining a monastery in the 10th to 15th centuries. Usually it was inhabited by craftsmen and merchants, known as posadskiye lyudi .In the Russian Empire a posad was a small...
sky, Mitya. The latter's emergence Tolstoy explained in a letter to Stasyulevich (dated November 30, 1869): :The introduction of Mitya the Outlaw was prompted by Schiller
Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...
's advice he's given through his Marquis of Posa
Don Carlos (play)
Don Carlos is a historical tragedy in five acts by Friedrich Schiller; it was written between 1783 and 1787 and first produced in Hamburg in 1787...
character: "Let them treat with respect dreams of their youths". What Tolstoy meant, apparently, was that Mitya appeared in the Prince Serebrenny novel, where Resheto and Nakovalnya were given a mention too.
Sources
The major source for all three plays of Aleksey Tolstoy's historical drama was Nikolay Karamzin's History of the Russian State (1816-1826). The conversation in Tsar Boris between Semyon and Boris Godunov concerning prospects of attaching peasants to land accurately reproduces fragments of History (Vol.X, 209-210, Vol.XI, 22, 86). Maria GodunovaMaria Grigorievna Skuratova-Belskaya
Maria Grigorievna Skuratova-Belskaya , was a Tsaritsa of Russia as the spouse of Tsar Boris Godunov.In 1570/1571, Godunov strengthened his position at court by his marriage to her as she was the daughter of Tsar Ivan the Terrible's favorite Malyuta Skuratov-Belskiy.She was the mother of Tsar Feodor...
's talking of Boris' intention of making Prince Johan the King of Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
was borrowed from the same source (Vol.XI, 45).
Among other books Tolstoy used as sources the Dutch trader Isaac Massa
Isaac Massa
Isaac Abrahamszoon Massa was a Dutch grain trader, traveller and diplomat, the envoy to Muscovy, author of memoirs witnessing the Time of Troubles and the maps of Eastern Europe and Siberia. He was married to Beatrix van der Laen...
’s memoirs which were published in 1868 in Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
, Mikhail Pogodin
Mikhail Pogodin
Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin was a Russian historian and journalist who, jointly with Nikolay Ustryalov, dominated the national historiography between the death of Nikolay Karamzin in 1826 and the rise of Sergey Solovyov in the 1850s. He is best remembered as a staunch proponent of the Normanist...
's book The History in Characters of Boris Godunov and His Times (1868) and Nikolay Kostomarov
Nikolay Kostomarov
Nikolay Ivanovich Kostomarov , of mixed Russian and Ukrainian origin, is one of the most distinguished Russian and Ukrainian historians, a Professor of History at the Kiev University and later at the St...
's Moscow State's Time of Troubles in the Early XVII c. (1868). It was according to by Massa's account that Tolstoy, admittedly, recreated Maria Godunova, the way she looked and behaved. From Massa's book the episode of Godunov and the ex-Queen, late Prince Dmitry’s mother's meeting, has been taken.
Tolstoy rejected Karamzin's version of The False Dmitry being Otrepyev, the fugitive monk. "We are to know for sure who he is. And we must give him name, even if we are to invent it", Boris insists in the play. That was exactly Kostomarov's idea: "The Grishka
Karamzin and Pushkin parallels
Scholars, analysing Tsar Boris next to Aleksander Pushkin's Boris Godunov, noted several similarities, one obvious reason being that both authors used Nikolay Karamzin's History of the Russian State as a major source. As a result, the prayer (which in Pushkin's play a young boy says in Shuysky's house and in Tolstoy's Shuysky does it himself, at RomanovRomanov
The House of Romanov was the second and last imperial dynasty to rule over Russia, reigning from 1613 until the February Revolution abolished the crown in 1917...
's) in both dramas looks like the same text. Among Tsar Boris’ direct borrowings from Karamzin is the scene where the Tsar is receiving ambassadors in Act 1 which is, in effect, the dramatization of the first paragraphs of Karamzin's History, Vol.IX ("The External Affairs" section). Some fragments of Tolstoy's tragedy might be seen as references to those of Pushkin's. The Scene 1 of Act IV (with common people talking of The False Dmitry and Grigory Otrepyev dilemma) looks like almost a paste from the Boris Godunov’s scene at the "Square before the Cathedral in Moscow". In fact, the whole way of the Godunov character's evolution, from The Death of Ivan the Terrible to Tsar Boris, might have been the direct consequence of Tolstoy checking himself against Pushkin, according to Yampolsky.
What made Tsar Boris different from Pushkin's Boris Godunov was the philosophical aspect of its general idea. Tolstoy's Boris was in many ways cast after that of Karamzin, who pictured the doomed ruler's tragedy in metaphisical terms, as being a kind of a price he had to pay for his bloody deed. The masses turned away from Boris (as Karamzin and Tolstoy saw it) because of his rapid moral deterioration. Pushkin, on the other hand, regarded Godunov's downfall as natural in the political and social situation of the time. Heavy consciousness didn't help, but had it been clearer, this wouldn't have prevented the Tsar's demise which was inevitable "since what he had to fight after all, was not just the Impostor, but his own people" (Yampolsky).
Chronology issues
As in the other two dramas of the trilogy, there are several cases of chronological discrepancies in Tsar Boris. Acts II, III and IV should have been dated 1602 (according to the time of the Danish Prince Johan's arrival in Moscow) and 1604-1605 as for the False Dmitry-related events. Kleshnin who died in 1599, appears as part of the events that happened several years later.There was some of what scholars termed "factual contamination", too. Miranda, the Papal nuncio
Nuncio
Nuncio is an ecclesiastical diplomatic title, derived from the ancient Latin word, Nuntius, meaning "envoy." This article addresses this title as well as derived similar titles, all within the structure of the Roman Catholic Church...
, says things that had been actually pronounced by Pope Clement VIII
Pope Clement VIII
Pope Clement VIII , born Ippolito Aldobrandini, was Pope from 30 January 1592 to 3 March 1605.-Cardinal:...
's legate
Legate
Legate may refer to:*Legatus, a general officer of the ancient Roman army drawn from among the senatorial class*Papal legate, a messenger from the Holy See*Legate, a rank in the Cardassian military in the fictional Star Trek universe...
Allessandro di Comolo who visited Moscow in the times of Fyodor Ioannovich (Karamzin, History, Vol.X, 190). Lachin-bek's speech was that of another Persian ambassador in Russia, Azi Khozrev who (according to Karamzin's History, Vol.X, page 192) said those words in 1593.
External links
- Царь Борис. The original Russian text.