During the twelfth century there had been, in the northern republics of Nóvgorod and Pksov, a strong current of opinion leading, on the one side, to Protestant rationalism, and on the other side to the development of Christianity on the lines of the early Christian brotherhoods. The apocryphal Gospels, the books of the Old Testament, and various books in which true Christianity was discussed, were eagerly copied and had a wide circulation. Now, the head of the Church in Central Russia violently antagonised all such tendencies towards reformed Christianity. A strict adherence to the very letter of the teachings of the Byzantine Church was exacted from the flock. Every kind of interpretation of the Gospels became heresy. All intellectual life in the domain of religion, as well as every criticism of the dignitaries of the Moscow Church, was treated as dangerous, and those who had ventured this way had to flee from Moscow, seeking refuge in the remote monasteries of the far North. As to the great movement of the Renaissance, which gave a new life to Western Europe, it did not reach Russia: the Church considered it a return to paganism, and cruelly exterminated its forerunners who came within her reach, burning them at the stake, or putting them to death on the racks of her torture-chambers. I will not dwell upon this period, which covers nearly five centuries, because it offers very little interest for the student of Russian literature; I will only mention the two or three works which must not be passed by in silence. One of them is the letters exchanged between the Tsar John the Terrible (John IV.), and one of his chief vassals, Prince Kúrbskiy, who had left Moscow for Lithuania. From beyond the Lithuanian border he addressed to his cruel, half-lunatic ex-master long letters of reproach, which John answered, developing in his epistles the theory of the divine origin of the Tsar’s authority. This correspondence is most characteristic of the political ideas that were current then, and of the learning of the period.