Editing Ivan the Terrible (section)

=== Letters ===
{{See also|Andrey Kurbsky#Works attributed to Andrey Kurbsky}}
[[D. S. Mirsky]] (1958) called Ivan "a pamphleteer of genius".<ref>{{Cite book | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=Pys__ZDJN6QC&pg=PA21 | title = A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 | isbn = 978-0810116795 |author1=Mirsky, D. S.  |author2=Whitfield, Francis James | year = 1958| publisher = Northwestern University Press }}</ref> The exchange of letters attributed to Ivan and his former vassal [[Andrey Kurbsky]], who defected to Lithuania in 1564, is often said to be the only existing source on Ivan's personality that could provide crucial information on his reign, but Harvard professor Edward L. Keenan (1971) has argued that the letters are 17th-century forgeries.<ref>Keenan, Edward L. (1971) ''The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: the 17th Century Genesis of the "Correspondence" Attributed to Prince A.M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press</ref> That contention, however, has not been widely accepted (exceptions include [[Donald Ostrowski]] and [[Brian Boeck]]); most other scholars, such as John Fennell and [[Ruslan Skrynnikov]], have continued to argue for their authenticity.{{sfn|Ostrowski|2020|pp=190–191}} The most frequently cited argument by proponents of authenticity is the 1987 Morozov article on a manuscript, variously dated to 1594–95 or the 1620s,{{sfn|Ostrowski|2020|pp=198–199}} of the first Kurbskii letter to Ivan,{{sfn|Ostrowski|2020|pp=198–199}} which Martin (2007) asserted "has substantially strengthened the argument for the authenticity of the correspondence".{{sfn|Martin|2007|pp=365–366}} Skeptics point out that Morozov later acknowledged the 1620s as the date of composition, and that he never followed-up his preliminary findings with a separate study that he called for.{{sfn|Ostrowski|2020|pp=198–199}}