again, but keep them exclusively to yourself. Let us now tell you what we think of your king. Harken to our impression but do not be offended by it! You will understand yourself why we cannot consider him as a sovereign father and protector!”
“A father knows his own child, its needs and desires, but your king does not know us nor wants to know us. A chief or ruler guards his charges from enemies and from all harm. The king has never protected us from either rain, storm, sleet, or from the Bruin and these are our worst enemies. He, it is true, proclaims that he defends us from attacks by outlaw bands of Uhri (Hungarians). But how does he protect us? By sending us even worse enemies than these Uhri warriors, his insatiable boyars with their hireling soldiers. The bands of outlaws will attack, plunder what they can and go their way. The boyar, on the other hand, settles down as lord of the soil and is not satisfied with any kind of booty. His career of conquest is aimed at sheer dispossession and enslavement of all of us forever.”
“Not as a ruler and father of our country, do we consider your king, but as the curse of God, sent to us as a chastisement for our sins, from whom we must buy our way out through yearly sacrifices of goods as gifts. The less we know of him and he of us, the better we like it. If only all of our nation of Rus could be rid of him today with all of his gang it would certainly still be a great and prosperous country!”[1]
Tuhar Wolf listened to the passionate dissertation of the
- ↑ There’s a note by Ivan Franko which states that from Zakhar’s speech we must not get the erroneous impression that king Danilo was an evil man. History testifies that he was a sympathetic and for those times a democratic enough sort of individual endowed with unusual wisdom and diplomacy. However, Zakhar’s speech is also characteristic of the people’s attitude at that time towards all the internal wars of dissension carried on by the kings of the various provinces in their competitive effort to gain control of the vast, rich and prosperous Grand Duchy of Kiev.
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