Publishers Weekly
De Madariaga accomplishes a lot in this significant biography of the 16th-century Russian czar, contextualizing his life without minimizing his brutality. From a compendious knowledge of both primary and secondary sources, de Madariaga shows how Ivan increased his power in an attempt to assert his authority in a vast land still ruled by local princes. He also expanded Russian control to new areas, particularly western Siberia. She doesn't neglect his abuses of power. But the needs of ruling an enormous, divided country don't explain that brutality-both in extracting money from the peasantry to pay for his lengthy wars and in the capricious violence he inflicted on those he suspected of treason. Here de Madariaga admits the role of psychopathology. Nor does the author (Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great), a professor emeritus of Russian studies at the University of London, neglect other aspects of Ivan's reign. She deftly describes the active role that religion, magic and astrology played in Ivan's life and court. In fact, Ivan's belief that violence was necessary to purify himself and his people drove many of his actions, she argues. The book is written for scholars and students, but general readers willing to plow through the dry prose will be amply rewarded with what is likely to become the definitive work on Ivan for some time. Illus., maps not seen by PW. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
For all his infamy, there are few serious English-language biographies of Ivan the Terrible. De Madariaga fills that void masterfully. She has a great gift for distilling information to clear, sensible, compelling essentials, all the while walking the fine line between plausible guesses and confessed ignorance — which is particularly important when, as in Ivan's case, the blanks are many. Covering his life from boyhood to death, she firmly and fairly sifts through the details, many of which are encrusted with centuries of speculation and myth that have served the biases and political needs of a particular time. That he was psychologically disordered, or became so, and innately cruel from adolescence, de Madariaga accepts. But beyond the sheer sweep of her account, what sets it apart is her insistence that judgments be based on words and practices as they were understood in his day, not ours. And by that standard, she argues, Ivan, at least in the first 27 years of his 51-year reign, was not monstrously different from his counterparts elsewhere in Europe.
Library Journal
De Madariaga (Russian studies, emeritus, Univ. of London; Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great) offers a rare complete biography of Ivan IV (1530-84), aiming to correct the misconceptions perpetrated by a sparse paper trail (a fire in 1626 destroyed much relevant material), murky oral traditions, and the subjective slants of Soviet historians and misinformed Western historians. With a marvelous grasp of Russian, European, and comparative history, she sets Ivan within the international context of his own time. As a scholar of the Russian language and the Russian court, she is able to write from the perspective of the 16th-century Kremlin, rather than from the perspective of the West. She also offers fresh studies of the roles that magic and astrology played at Ivan's court. This superior book is suitable for both academic libraries and public libraries with Russian history collections.-Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
