Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [135]
Boris looked across with reverence at the tall figure by his side. The Tsar had fallen silent and seemed to be lost in thought again.
Then he sighed.
‘Russia has a great destiny,’ he remarked sadly, ‘yet I have more to overcome within the borders of my land even than outside.’
How Boris felt for him. He knew how the bold Shuisky princes – of more senior descent than Ivan from Alexander Nevsky – had humiliated him as a boy; he knew how they and others had tried to undo the work of the great House of Moscow and replace the Tsar’s rule with that of the magnates. He thought of how, when a terrible fire had swept through Moscow only five years before, the Moscow mob had blamed Ivan’s mother’s Polish family and dragged his uncle out of the Assumption Cathedral itself and butchered him. They had even, he remembered, threatened to kill Ivan too.
Ivan’s enemies tried to block all he did; there were many, Boris had heard, who were even saying that the expedition to Kazan was a waste of money.
And now the young Tsar was turning to him – to him, Boris Bobrov from a miserable little estate by Russka – he was turning to him by the dark waters of the Volga and saying quietly: ‘I need such men as you.’ A moment later he had gone and Boris, trying to see him, could only whisper fervently after him, into the shadows: ‘I am yours,’ to which he added that most awesome of all tides: ‘Gosuda’ – sovereign, lord of all.
He had stayed there, trembling with excitement, as the faint dawn at last began to appear in the east.
As the boats continued their journey up the great River Volga that day, Boris was still just as excited by late afternoon as he had been early that morning. What might the meeting with the young Tsar lead to? Was this a prelude to a step forward for his family?
Boris, son of David, surnamed Bobrov. The custom of naming people had changed in recent generations. None, nowadays, but princes and the greatest boyars used the full form of patronymic, with its ending in – vich. Tsar Ivan, for instance, was Ivan Vasilevich but he, a humble noble, was only Boris Davidov, son of David – not Davidovich. To define his identity more precisely, however, a Russian might add to these two names a third – usually the name by which his grandfather was best known. Sometimes this was a baptismal name, like Ivan, so that the third name became Ivanova, shortened to Ivanov. Or it might be a nickname.
It was in this way, during the sixteenth century, that family names began to appear, somewhat late, in Russia. For this third name was sometimes held over to later generations – though the practice was still at the individual’s choice, and a family, having chosen a surname, might easily alter it several times.
Boris’s family were proud of their name. It was, they always insisted, Ivan the Great himself who had given Boris’s greatgrandfather the nickname ‘Bobr’, meaning beaver: though whether it was because he liked to wear a beaver coat, or that he was hardworking, or whether that awesome monarch decided this minor nobleman looked like a beaver, no one seemed to know. But Bobrov the family had decided to be called, and that was that. The Mighty Beaver, they called this ancestor respectfully. It was his father who had given the monastery at Russka its beautiful icon by Rublev, and the family saw to it, with progressively more modest donations, that both men were still remembered by the monks in their prayers.
For the family of Bobrov had fallen from what they had been in former times. The decline had been gradual and was entirely typical of Russian noble families.
In the first place, the estates had been divided many times over the generations, and the last three had failed to acquire new ones. The greatest blow had been when Boris’s grandfather, having become, like so many of his class, hopelessly in debt to the local monastery, had