“Playing the victim”: the pathos of denunciation and martyrdom in the works of Ivan the Terrible and Andrey Kurbsky

The article explores changes in the use of the categories of victim and sacrifice in political literary artefacts in the second half of the 16th century: namely, the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Andrey Kurbsky and Kurbsky’s History of the Grand Prince of Moscow. The study shows that the writers of this time used the literary topoi of victim in a fundamentally different way to earlier authors in medieval Russia. The article defines the main means of poetics and rhetoric in the works of Ivan the Terrible and Andrey Kurbsky. The methods for updating the topoi of victim for both authors are similar. Each of them desacralizes a high Christian idea and uses it and a topos for subjective and, as a rule, ideological purposes. Such changes are possible due to the mixing of earthly (profane) and heavenly (sacred) logic when dealing with the categories of victim and sacrifice, which is typical for this time. If, for Kurbsky, the people killed by the tsar are new martyrs, then for Ivan the Terrible, they are justly punished traitors. The tsar believes that subjects should be ready to sacrifice their lives for him. Kurbsky does not deny the necessity of willingness to sacrifice, but he consistently proves that the tsar’s personality does not correspond to Christian ideas about the ideal monarch, so he convinces the reader of the possibility of confronting the tsar. At the same time, both authors characterize themselves as a person affected by the actions of the other and use the literary topoi of victim.