In fonder times, the tsar scalded and stabbed to death a prince

James Meek

  • Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia by Isabel de Madariaga
    Yale, 484 pp, £25.00, July 2005, ISBN 0 300 09757 3

Like a single-column photograph in a newspaper, the portrait of Tsar Ivan IV on the dust jacket of Isabel de Madariaga’s book has been cropped down to the essential features: the mournful brown eyes, the long, slightly beaked nose, the plump little mouth nestling in the silver-black whorls of a beard which bleeds out to the edge of the paper. On the inside of the back flap is the caption. ‘Tsar Ivan IV’, it reads. It isn’t him. It is not a picture of the demented, deluded, murderous failure of a man who ruled Russia for 37 years, from 1547 to 1584. ‘There is no authentic portrait of the tsar in existence,’ Isabel de Madariaga writes, ‘and all those reproduced in books about him are imaginary.’

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