[4] In a legal document from 9 October 1571, he spelt his own name in Latin letters as Andrej Kurpski manu proprija, while declaring "I am unable to write in Cyrillic.

As a reward, Sigismund II August, king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, gave him the town of Kovel in Volhynia (now in Ukraine), where he lived peacefully, defending his Orthodox subjects from Polish encroachments.

[citation needed] The works attributed to Andrey Kurbsky, collectively known as kurbskiana, may be divided into two groups: those in the Miscellany of Kurbskii (Russian: сборник Курбского, romanized: sbornik Kurbskogo)[10] (a modern name that does not appear in any of the codices[11]), and those outside it.

[12] In 2009, Konstantin Erusalimskii (European University at Saint Petersburg) published a critical edition and scholarly analysis of all the extant miscellanies of Kurbskii (Russian: сборники Курбского, romanized: sborniko Kurbskogo) which have survived in 85 manuscripts (the oldest dating from the 1670s) and, based primarily on their contents, classified them into five groups (recensions).

[23] Skeptics such as Boeck (2012) and Ostrowski (2020) contend that it is more likely that The History is a fabrication of the (late) 17th century, as there is no evidence of its existence between 1583 and the 1670s, and the attribution to Kurbsky has led to several unresolved anachronisms and contradictions.

[21][13] A dramatized account of his life, in which he is depicted as the second-most powerful aristocrat in Russia (second only to the tsar) who is constantly put under pressure by boyars who want to make him revolt against the imperial authority at Moscow, can be found in the epic 1945 work of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible.