The Personality of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the historical concept of V. O. Klyuchevsky

Abstract

The article is devoted to the identification of the content of the representation of the personality of the Moscow tsar Ivan IV in the concept of "sociological history" by V.O. Klyuchevsky. The object of the work is the historiographical discourse of the personality of Ivan the Terrible in the works of professional historians of the nineteenth century. The subject of the study is the representation of the personality of the Moscow autocrat in the historical concept of V.O. Klyuchevsky. The purpose of the work is to reveal the content of V.O. Klyuchevsky's historical ideas about the personality of Ivan the Terrible in the context of the concept of tsarist power in the Moscow centralized state of the XVI century. The methodological basis of the article is the approaches of the new cultural and intellectual history as the history of ideas functioning in a certain socio-cultural context, covering discursive practices and historiographical creativity. The socio-cultural approach allows us to objectively reflect on the historical circumstances that influenced the formation of views and evaluative judgments of the researcher. The author's conclusions are based on the analysis of a fragment of a lecture course devoted to the characteristics of the personality of Ivan the Terrible, positioned as a historiographical source – the work of a historian who implements the function of presenting historical knowledge as scientific and socially oriented. The article concludes that the autocratic model of the state structure of the Moscow centralized state, in many respects, became a product of the patrimonial system that developed in the era preceding the reign of Ivan the Terrible and, from the point of view of V.O. Klyuchevsky, contained a distinct tendency of the predominance of the state over society. Ivan IV, in the concept of V.O. Klyuchevsky, acted as a kind of hostage of a situation when systemic problems were combined with the peculiarities of his upbringing and attitude to the future sovereign during his childhood.