One Eye Between Two Vasilys

If the Ottoman way with a disputed succession—five brothers, eleven years, four of them dead by the end—has the plot and the pacing of a rather unsentimental episode of Tom and Jerry—two parties chasing one another about the premises, exchanging blows, neither ever quite dying—then the Muscovite quarrel of 1425–1453 is an opera. It began a quarter of a century after the Ottoman version and took about a quarter of a century longer than anyone intended. Nothing in it is done quickly, and nothing whatever is done in private.

So I have set it out the way an opera house sets out a Russian piece performed in the original: sung as written, with a synopsis in the programme telling you what is happening on stage and what is being sung about. You will not get the verse. You will get the plot, which in this case is the funnier of the two.

One note before the curtain. The two principal claimants are both called Vasily, which is our Basil, and one of them ends the story with a single eye and the other with none. The title is not a flourish. It is an inventory.

ONE EYE BETWEEN TWO VasilyS

A grand opera buffa in five acts, with a prologue and an epilogue

Five acts, massed choruses and a plot that will not resolve: this is not buffa at all, but grand opera. The war behaved in exactly the same way. It opened as a row about a belt at a wedding and closed with poison, an anathema and the annexation of half of north-eastern Rus’. Let us call the genre grand opera buffa and say no more about it.

Dramatis personae

• VASILY I—tenore buffo. Thirty-six years on the throne, remembered for a will that set his entire family against itself.
• VASILY II, THE DARK—lyric tenor. The lawful heir and the opera’s sufferer. Loses Moscow with some regularity and gets it back with more.
• YURY OF ZVENIGOROD, his uncle—baritone. Claimant by seniority. A grumbler, a stickler, and the only man in the cast who reads the small print.
• VASILY KOSOY, “THE CROSS-EYED”—comic tenor. Touchy, hot-headed, given to scenes.¹
• DMITRY SHEMYAKA—basso buffo. Schemer, usurper, and at the last a pitiable poisoned man.²
• SOPHIA OF LITHUANIA, mother of Vasily II—mezzo-soprano. A lioness in widow’s weeds, regent for her small son, and the one who sings the Aria of the Belt.
• IVAN VSEVOLOZHSKY—intriguing baritone. Secures the throne for Vasily II, expects to marry his granddaughter to him, is refused, and goes over to the other side. The belt passes through his hands too.
• SEMYON MOROZOV, boyar to Yury—lyric baritone. The only man in the opera who proposes that everyone sit down and come to terms. He is murdered for it, by his own side.
• ULUGH MUHAMMAD, Khan of Kazan—basso buffo. Terrifying without, a patter-singer within. Counts roubles and prisoners. Sends his sons to do the fighting.
• STEPAN BORODATY, a clerk—mute role. Well read, knew his chronicles, discharged his commissions punctually.
• POGANKA, a cook—mute role. He and the clerk are the only two denied a single note, and the only two who see a thing through to the end.
• THE CHRONICLER—character bass. Carries the recitatives, stitches the scenes together, and reads out towns and dates with visible boredom.
• CHORUS OF MUSCOVITES—mutters, grumbles, cheers and heckles. At the decisive moment it simply walks out.
• CHORUS OF BOYARS AND RETAINERS—heroic-comic decoration.
• CHORUS OF NOVGORODIANS—the closing bell-chorus.

Prologue: The Testament

A candle. A sheet of paper. Beside it a casket, and in the casket the testament of Dmitry Donskoy, by which the throne passes to a brother rather than to a son. It was drawn up, admittedly, before there was a son to consider.

Vasily I strikes out his brother, writes in his boy, and then, after some thought, adds a codicil placing his wife and children under the protection of his father-in-law, Vytautas of Lithuania. He sings an aria over the document in which he concedes that the sin will be his and observes, with the serenity of a man signing away someone else’s peace, that his son will nonetheless have everything.

The chorus answers from offstage, under its breath, on the theme that fathers-in-law are mortal and that no good will come of this.

The Chronicler, aside, remarks that His Highness has disposed of a principality much as one might dispose of a coat.

Act I: Eight Years of Quiet

Scene 1. 1425. The throne is large and the prince is small: Vasily II is ten. His mother, Metropolitan Photius and the boyar Vsevolozhsky govern in his name, and sing a terzetto over the child’s head—a lullaby, a blessing and a request for a signature, delivered simultaneously and with equal tenderness.

Yury, instead of raising troops, behaves with maddening propriety. His aria of enforced patience makes the position plain: while the boy’s grandfather is alive, one is as quiet as a mouse.

Scene 2. The Horde, 1432. Uncle and nephew travel south to have the matter judged. Vsevolozhsky’s address to the Khan is a model of courtly eloquence: the uncle, he explains, comes seeking the throne on the strength of a dead piece of paper, whereas the nephew comes seeking it on the strength of His Majesty’s living favour—and paper, after all, grants nothing, whereas His Majesty grants everything.

The patent goes to Vasily II. Yury departs empty-handed and pauses at the door for a cavatina, congratulating his nephew on his little Horde-baked treat and observing that he will not be bowing to him for very much longer.

Scene 3. Vytautas dies in 1430, Photius in 1431. A funeral march begins and is interrupted halfway through by a mazurka of grievance: Vsevolozhsky, who had expected his granddaughter to be married to the Grand Prince, is refused—Sophia has chosen the bride, and it is Maria of Borovsk. The affronted boyar dances his way off to Yury, complaining that he did all the talking in the Horde and was not consulted about the wedding.

The chorus takes it up: two buried, the third insulted, and now look out.

Act II: The Wedding, the Belt and the Empty City

Scene 1. 8 February 1433. The wedding feast. The bridegroom is eighteen. Among the guests are Yury’s sons. An elderly boyar who can still remember Donskoy’s wedding points at Kosoy: that belt is a familiar object.³

Sophia tears it off her guest in front of the whole hall and sings the Aria of the Belt—stolen, ancestral, worn by a man with no right to it and no conscience about it. The aria opens out into a terzetto of three incompatible desires: Kosoy on the subject of public humiliation, Shemyaka on the subject of going home, and Sophia still on the subject of the belt.

Scene 2. Yury and his sons rise in revolt. A march. The Klyazma, April 1433: the nephew is beaten and taken at Kostroma without a fight, along with his mother and his young wife.

Yury installs himself in Moscow to a triumphal march—and Morozov enters with the aria of reconciliation, arguing that the prisoner should not be executed but pardoned and given lands of his own. Yury agrees and hands Vasily the town of Kolomna: a magnanimous gesture and a perfectly suicidal one.

Moscow thereupon moves to Kolomna. Nobody organises it; the boyars go, the merchants go, the retinue goes, the entire chorus goes. They are not, the Chronicler explains, in the habit of serving a mere appanage prince. The march continues in an emptying set, quieter and quieter, until Yury is left finishing it alone.

His sons, enraged that their father has listened to an adviser, murder Morozov in the palace and then, appalled at themselves, bolt for Kostroma; their duet of panic consists chiefly of asking one another whose fault this was. Yury is left without a city, without sons and without his boyar, and returns the throne to his nephew unprompted.

The Chronicler: Yury came, the city left; the city came, Yury left.

Scene 3. The peace lasts under a year. Vasily II harries his cousins, lays waste their lands, reaches Galich and burns the town below the walls—to a scherzo of pursuit. Yury, who had sworn not to receive his sons, watches his own town burn and breaks the oath with the relief of a man who has finally been handed a pretext.

Spring 1434, near Rostov: the Muscovite army is beaten for the third time. On 31 March Yury enters Moscow for the second time, and in June he dies—on the throne, at the summit, and spared all subsequent difficulties.

The chorus sums up: the uncle is dead and the troubles are alive.

Act III: The Cross-Eyed

Scene 1. Vasily Kosoy takes up the inheritance and proclaims himself Grand Prince, in an arioso of pretension whose whole argument is that his father left the song unfinished and he intends to finish it. His own brothers decline to support him; Shemyaka prefers the cousin, not out of virtue but out of arithmetic.

Scene 2. Skoryatino, 1436. Kosoy agrees a truce until morning, waits for his opponent to disperse the troops in search of supplies, and attacks—to an aria of perfidy on the theme that a prince’s word holds perfectly well until dawn, and that dawn is a slippery business. He loses anyway.

For the perfidy—and for the affair of the Yaroslavl prince, whose ransom his men took while omitting to release him—Kosoy has one eye put out, to a set of jaunty couplets about what happens to those who dwell on the past. The chorus jeers at him in rhyme. The Chronicler notes, in the flattest voice available, that this is a Greek custom, a Constantinopolitan one, and that it will catch on.

Scene 3. The chase resumes. Vasily II loses Moscow and retakes it. A divertissement with signboards: the scenery revolves, the placards read Moscow, Galich, Kostroma, and the chorus beats time to a jingle about one prince here and another prince there.

The Chronicler, wearily, runs through the rota: yesterday the Second, today the Cross-Eyed, tomorrow Shemyaka, and heaven knows what the day after.

The act closes on an anxious chorus stammering on the word Tatars.

Act IV: Suzdal, Kurmysh and the Trinity

Scene 1. 7 July 1445, beneath the walls of the Saviour Monastery of St Euthymius: the Muscovite army is routed. It is routed by Ulugh Muhammad’s sons, Mahmud and Yakub; the Khan himself remains at Nizhny Novgorod and prefers to watch.

Shemyaka has not troubled to join the campaign at all. With Vasily II in captivity he tries the vacant throne on for size—as the senior man of the line, pending the ransom, strictly pending the ransom—and sings an arioso to the effect that a holy place should not stand empty and that this one is his by right.

Kurmysh. The Khan haggles over the price and sings his couplets with an abacus in his hands: gold, silver, and a prince’s honour, in that order.

Scene 2. Vasily is released on 1 October. He returns to Moscow with a Tatar escort five hundred strong and a promise of estates for them.

Shemyaka at last has a slogan that sings itself, and does so at length: the man has brought Tatars in, has given away our land, and will settle the bill out of your own pockets. For the first time in the evening the chorus of Muscovites turns the other way.

Scene 3. February 1446, the Trinity Monastery of St Sergius. Vasily II is at his devotions. The arrest is staged without a note of music: the orchestra falls silent and one hears only footsteps.

The blinding is done in Moscow, in payment for his cousin’s eye. The chorus, appalled, has three words and one of them is his new name: dark.

Shemyaka proclaims himself Grand Prince—this time in earnest, the fitting having become a possession.

The blinded man is exiled to Uglich, then released to Vologda, from where he goes straight to Tver in search of an alliance, singing on the road the aria of the Dark: sightless, and seeing through every man in the room.

The chorus replies with the proverb about one beaten man being worth two unbeaten ones.

Act V: The Sukhona

Scene 1. The Church sends Shemyaka a series of formidable letters expressing its profound concern. A chorus of hierarchs delivers them, grieving, admonishing, and grieving again.⁴

Scene 2. 1450, Galich: a rout. 1452: surrounded near Ustyug, he withdraws to Novgorod. The allies defect, the treasury is empty.

The chorus of retainers, dispersing, informs him that he is no longer Shemyaka but a pauper.

The Chronicler gives up chronicling in disgust.

Epilogue: The Chicken

Novgorod, July 1453. A kitchen.

A pantomime begins. The clerk Stepan Borodaty arrives from Moscow and bows without speaking. A small parcel passes from hand to hand, and from hand to hand again, until it reaches a cook by the name of Poganka. The orchestra counts the footsteps throughout. Nobody sings.

The Chronicler, the only man present who calls things by their names, records that the poison was given him in a chicken.

Shemyaka takes twelve days to die, and twelve days are ample for an aria of indecent length—plaintive, and sung with the bird in his hands. He asks the chicken, at some length, what it thinks it has done to him. By the eighth day he has stopped singing about power altogether and is singing about the cook, on the theme that a man named Poganka has now thoroughly lived up to his name.

The bells ring out. The chorus of Novgorodians strikes up, brisk and entirely confident: that one is dead, this one will die, and we, Novgorod the Great, shall outlive the lot of them.

The Chronicler, laying down his pen: sing away, Novgorodians, be merry while you can—Ivan of Moscow is coming, and you will not feel much like singing then, nor much like ringing that bell of yours.

Curtain

1. “The Cross-Eyed” and “the Dark” are two ways of naming the same injury, the first indulgent, the second very nearly ceremonial. Kosoy’s nickname is usually explained by the eye he lost, though there is a case for its having been attached to him earlier. ↩︎
2. The etymology of “Shemyaka” is unsettled. One derivation reads it as shee-myaka, formed like kozhemyaka, “leather-kneader”: a man who kneads other men’s necks, a strongman. Another, favoured by A. A. Zimin, takes it from Tatar chimekhu, “to adorn”, whence chimek, “finery”—which makes him simply a dandy. Strongman or dandy, take your pick; the phrase Shemyaka’s justice, meaning a crooked verdict, attached itself to the name regardless, and did so not in his lifetime but a century later, by way of a tale about a corrupt judge. ↩︎
3. A wedding belt from a dowry, swapped at some point in the past by a tysyatsky, the city’s senior military officer, and passed from hand to hand ever since—including, as it happens, Vsevolozhsky’s. It is family memory rather than regalia: what is being torn off a guest at that feast is not a crown but an old grudge.
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4. Whether an actual anathema stood behind the letters is still argued over. No document survives, only the rumour—which, for reputational purposes, is rather more durable. ↩︎