My cat Mooshie and the story of Ivan the terrible.

In the begining there was the film by Eisenstein .... that is how i was introduced to "Ivan the terrible" .... it was a very intriguing film in black and white and very theatrical . It made a huge impact on me because i could relate to the story  .....


 
Ivan IV Vasilyevich (/ˈaɪvən/; Russian: Ива́н Васи́льевич, tr. Ivan Vasilyevich; 25 August 1530 – 28 March [O.S. 18 March] 1584),^[2] commonly known as Ivan the Terrible (Russian: Ива́н Гро́зный​ (help·info), Ivan Grozny; "Ivan the Formidable" or "Ivan the Fearsome"), was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and the first Tsar of Russia from 1547 to 1584.
Ivan was the crown prince of Vasili III, the Rurikid ruler of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, and was appointed Grand Prince at three years-old after his father's death. Ivan was proclaimed Tsar (Emperor) of All Rus' in 1547 at the age of seventeen, establishing the Tsardom of Russia with Moscow as the predominant state. Ivan's reign was characterized by Russia's transformation from a medieval state into an empire under the Tsar, though at immense cost to its people and its broader, long-term economy. Ivan conquered the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and Sibir, with Russia becoming a multiethnic and multicontinental state spanning approximately 4,050,000 km² (1,560,000 sq mi), developing a bureaucracy to administer the new territories. Ivan triggered the Livonian War, which ravaged Russia and resulted in the loss of Livonia and Ingria, but allowed him to exercise greater autocratic control over the Russia's nobility, which he violently purged in the Oprichnina. Ivan was an able diplomat, a patron of arts and trade, and the founder of Russia's first publishing house, the Moscow Print Yard. Ivan was popular among Russia's commoners (see Ivan the Terrible in Russian folklore) except for the people of Novgorod and surrounding areas who were subject to the Massacre of Novgorod.
Historic sources present disparate accounts of Ivan's complex personality: he was described as intelligent and devout, but also prone to paranoia, rages, and episodic outbreaks of mental instability that increased with age.^{[3] [4][5]} Ivan is popularly believed to have killed his eldest son and heir Ivan Ivanovich and the latter's unborn son during his outbursts, which left the politically ineffectual Feodor Ivanovich to inherit the throne, whose rule directly led to the end of the Rurikid dynasty and the beginning of the Time of Troubles.


It was the summer of 1991  and i was preparing for my last exams and thesis .... always with my books , my cat Mooshie would go on her walk abouts and bring me gifts of leaves and other insects and small dead lizzards . She would make a great show of this when she put them down infront of me . There was so much sentiment in her and i thought she was saying : "look at what i am doing for you, do you even understand ?" She was normally very adventurous and i caught her being fed by the neighbours and she always came back home with all sorts of  lovely smelling perfumes on her.  I wondered who was it that she went to . Then one day she started to bring me paper and white paged  books which i could write on .... i was very touched , i thought she was clever enough to understand that i needed lots of pages of white paper to write on.

It was quite disturbing for me to see her bring in the book one morning.  Draging it across the garden , she had brought me the book i was thinking of,  i had just seen the film  ie : Ivan the Terrible " ..... it had shaken me to the core .... because it was in black and white and the way Ivan dealt with the aristocrats , was to cleverly choose his own people among " the nation " rather than among his relatives .... 

Back to my cat Mooshie who is cool and sitting infront of her new gift , i am dazzeled by this kind of comminication between me and my beloved and i wonder if i can use the word serendipity in this case ..
..


 Where does serendipity come from?

In the mid-1700s, English author Horace Walpole stumbled upon an interesting tidbit of information while researching a coat of arms. In a letter to his friend Horace Mann he wrote: "This discovery indeed is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word, which as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavor to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called 'The Three Princes of Serendip': as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of…." Walpole's memory of the tale (which, as it turns out, was not quite accurate) gave serendipity the meaning it retains to this day.