The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha

For centuries the exchange of letters between Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) and Prince Kurbskii, Muscovy's first notable defector, has been considered an authentic and important source for sixteenth-century Russian history. Keenan draws on all the tools of source study and literary criticism to demonstrate that the "Correspondence" is a forgery, and in fact was composed some decades later in the seventeenth century.