Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800

by Gary Marker

Overview

Gary Marker describes the pursuit of an effective public voice by political, Church, and literary elites in Russia as synonymous with the struggle to control the printed media, showing that Russian publishing and printing evolved in a way that sharply diverged from Western experiences but that proved to be highly significant for Russian society.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691639628
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #32
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

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Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800

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By Gary Marker

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05441-4

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CHAPTER 1

Printing and the Petrine Revolution

Modern Russian intellectual life, SO the consensus has it, began with Peter the Great. As a corollary to that maxim, one might profitably suggest that Peter's accession also transformed printing into a significant aspect of life in Russia. During his reign, the number of printed titles burgeoned from about six a year in the second half of the seventeenth century to nearly fifty a year in the early 1720s, and the number of Russian or Church Slavonic presses grew from three in late Muscovite Russia to ten in operation at various times in Peter's reign. All of the new presses, moreover, were placed under the direct control of the government rather than under that of the church. Not surprisingly, therefore, the topical composition of books shifted as well — and quite abruptly — away from works of faith and prayer and toward works with more secular concerns.

On the surface, these transitions seem to point to a precipitous decline in the status of the church and devotional publishing and a corresponding rise in the importance of the state and civic affairs. But before we can accept at face value what appears to be a sweeping cultural transformation, we need to examine the particular character of Petrine publishing more deeply. Changes of this magnitude required the active involvement of the tsar, the acquiescence of the church, and the cooperation of the people who produced and distributed the new books and, to some degree, of those who read them. In addition, they cost a great deal of money to bring about. The questions, then, are: Why did such dramatic changes take place, and, secondly, what were their effects on Russian culture?

Most scholars, plausibly enough, have placed the primary responsibility squarely on the shoulders of Peter himself. In the most recent study of Petrine printing, for example, S. P. Luppov, the leading authority on the eighteenth-century Russian book, has suggested that the transformation of printing was one important feature of a more general modernization of society and politics which, although it began earlier, gained rapid momentum under Peter. Peter's insistence upon new schools, new technologies, curricular advances, greater foreign contacts, and the growth of enlightenment came together to give printing a greater role in Russian society. In particular, the creation of primary and secondary schools throughout the empire, although motivated by narrowly practical considerations, did increase literacy, expand the popular interest in both utilitarian and general knowledge, and thereby increase the demand for printed books.

One can discern in this pattern the emerging outline of some sort of structure that was initiated and largely controlled by Peter himself. Rather than being a one-sided reflection of the tsar's will, however, the publishing system, in Luppov's view, managed to establish a symbiosis in which the interests of the state as the producer of the printed word and those of the society as the consumer somehow coalesced around a shared rejection of religious superstition and an interest in modernity and secular affairs. It was this symbiosis that prepared the ground for the subsequent flowering of Russian printing.

Luppov's thesis, if one may call it that, clearly succeeds in integrating printing into a broader context of political innovation, educational reform, and social change. And while it treats the emperor as the major domo of publishing, it eschews an overemphasis on Peter's role in favor of a more modulated picture of interaction between state and society. It achieves all this, moreover, with a wealth of newly uncovered and carefully studied evidence.

The image of a successful adaptation of secular printing to Russian society is not without its difficulties, however. It depends, first of all, on an overly optimistic characterization of reading in Russia, in that it presumes widespread literacy and a demand for secular books that cut across geographic and social boundaries. It fails to explain why, if the Petrine system was so successful and progressive, the secular printing network faced near-collapse and bankruptcy upon his death. Why, moreover, did those in charge of the presses subsequently choose to abandon the essential premises of Peter's printing system and, in essence, start over on a different institutional footing once Peter died? Why, finally, if secularization took such firm root in the society, did the religious presses fare so much better financially than the state presses did?

All of these questions suggest a rather different experience for printing than the one which Luppov and most other contemporary scholars have described. In fact, a review of the entire publishing network from the seventeenth century onward reveals that the social, cultural, and institutional bases for such a dramatic rise in secular publishing were quite limited and, consequently, that the impact of Peter's reform was far more muted than Luppov and others generally assert.

THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BACKGROUND

When Peter came to power in 1689, he inherited a small church-controlled printing system which had had only an episodic impact on Russian culture. Between the late 1550s, when printing first came to Muscovy, and the end of the seventeenth century, Muscovite authorities had established only one major publishing house (pechatnyi dvor) in Moscow, and a handful of small presses in monasteries on the western borderlands. According to the most recent published estimates, these presses collectively printed fewer than 500 titles during the entire seventeenth century, most of which came out in moderate print runs of 1,200 or 2,400 copies.

In spite of the appearance of occasional secular publications, such as alphabet books (azbuki) and the Ulozhenie, or Legal Code, of 1649, more than 95 percent of the printed titles were devotional, mostly prayer books, catechisms, psalters, and sermons. Although our knowledge of the dimensions of reading and literacy in the seventeenth century is extremely limited, it is clear that a much wider range of literature was read than was printed. Such ancient methods of reproduction as hand copying and woodblock printing were widespread and thriving, and they accounted almost entirely for the circulation of fables, song sheets, religious poetry, a great many prayer books, and the entire corpus of Old Believer literature. Printing was in practical terms an exclusive instrument of institutions of the official church and, to a limited degree, the state. All other voices, whether competing or complementary, had to resort to hand copying. A dawning secularization of printing, in other words, was simply not in evidence.

Still, printing was not without its place in Muscovite society. Certain selected titles, including corrected prayer books, psalters, and alphabet books, were published in very large print runs, running into tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands, far larger than what hand copying could produce. To the extent that these books circulated in Muscovite society — a subject that remains largely unexamined — they brought to life some of the most powerful capabilities of movable type, mostly in the service of a militantly reformist Orthodox church.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, to give one illustrious example, the endeavor to compose uniform and authorized editions of printed prayer books unleashed a long-simmering debate within the church over whether an authoritative and corrected text required a return to the Greek originals, as Patriarch Nikon maintained, or whether a proper Slavonic edition could be fashioned from the extant manuscript translations, as the Zealots of Faith insisted. This struggle involved far more than the question of editorial accuracy, as it brought to the surface all the crosscurrents within the church over the autonomy of the Russian church, the relationship with Byzantium, and the sanctity of traditional Slavonic forms of prayer. To both sides, the fate of the Russian church would be resolved around the formulation of the prayer books. When Nikon won, he was in a position to set the course for the new editions and, through them, for the exact language of worship. Nikon, in fact, was very energetic in printing thousands of copies of the new texts and circulating them to the monasteries and parishes, where they were read aloud. The presses of the Orthodox church thereby extended the debates concerning the correction of texts into a general popular controversy that soon precipitated a tumultuous, violent schism within the church. Thus, in this episode, the technological capacity of movable type to produce uniform editions contributed to turning the long-standing controversy over discrepancies in texts into a major struggle, and its ability to produce them in abundance became a powerful tool for the official church, which used it to force abrupt changes and so contributed to popular awareness of the changed texts and, inadvertently, galvanized resistance to them.

By contrast, the government of Muscovy took rather little heed of printing. There is some evidence, to be sure, of an effort to circulate the Ulozhenie of 1649 among various segments of the population, but that was exceptional. Most decrees were not printed at all, and, with few exceptions, the civil authorities saw little purpose in using movable type to communicate regularly with the population.

Peter's Reforms

Peter, of course, set about to change all of this, and on the advice of such trusted correspondents as Gottfried von Leibnitz, he embarked on an aggressive reorganization of printing in Russia. During his travels in western Europe during 1698, for example, he hired several Dutch printers and merchants, including Jan von Thessing, to establish Russian presses in Amsterdam for publishing maps, charts, and books on technical subjects. Although these initial efforts produced very few publications, they led to the enlistment of several established printers into the service of the Russian government, most notably Ilia Kopievskii, an elusive figure who worked for Peter in Amsterdam, Danzig, and Moscow before disappearing in 1709. Peter also hired two other printers of note: Fedor Polikarpov, a graduate of the Likud brothers' typographical school in Moscow, who directed the pechatnyi dvor through most of Peter's reign, and V. A. Kiprianov, who became Moscow's leading cartographer and book merchant during the reign.

Peter's program called for more than talented individuals, however. As part of his administrative reforms, he founded several new institutional publishing houses, including the St. Petersburg Press in 1711, which soon became the leading organ of the government in the new capital; the senate presses in both Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1719; and a new naval academy press in 1721 to print schoolbooks and books on naval science. In addition, the old pechatnyi dvor, which at some point came to be called simply the "Moscow Press" (Moskovskaia tipografiia), gained several new printing presses and employees.

Each of these new presses came into being directly because of Peter's orders, and all of the new institutional presses were intended primarily for governmental use. Certainly the church had easy access to the Moscow and St. Petersburg presses, but the demands of the state came first. Even the single new monastic press, established at the Alexander Nevksii Monastery outside St. Petersburg in 1719, came into being largely to serve as an organ of one of Peter's leading ideological supporters, Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich.

Another aspect of this secularization in the service of the state was the introduction of the new civil orthography in 1707. Peter believed that the old orthography was too archaic to allow for an easy rendering of new technical or educational books. The publication of modern knowledge required something simpler, more latinized, and with fewer obscure vowels and notations. By law, therefore, all secular books were thenceforth to be set in the new type, while books of faith would continue to use the old orthography. Thus, type itself was introduced as a visible symbol of statism and, more specifically, of the separation between the government's publishing program and the church's.

In practice, however, matters were more muddled, since it took the publishing houses several years to acquire enough new printing presses and type fonts to complete the transition. Between 1707 and 1725, fully a third of the titles printed in the old orthography were secular books or laws and notices initiated by the state. Conversely, some of the books that came out in the new orthography were religious. As the governmental publishing houses acquired more presses, they gradually abandoned the old type, so that by the early 1720s the vast majority of governmental publications did employ the new orthography. The church, by contrast, had only limited access to the new materials, and its publications consequently did not undergo significant orthographic revision. The point, however, is that a strict orthographic differentiation of secular and religious books took place only at the very end of Peter's reign. Thus, the secularizing effects of Peter's reform of the alphabet, if indeed there were any effects, could have appeared only after his death.

Paradoxically, the rigid state control probably limited printing's ability to act as an agent of secular or at least lay culture, since Peter denied access to any but the most highly placed individuals within the church and officialdom. Spontaneous expressions from Russian society simply had no place in this universe. Even Kiprianov, the only private publisher of the Petrine era, required a special privilege to operate his press, and even then he printed exclusively what the government ordered.

The formal lines of authority through which both new and old presses functioned further underscored the primacy of official business. In 1701, Peter placed all Russian presses, formerly directed rather loosely by the Department of Printing (Prikaz knigopechataniia), under the newly revived Department of Monasteries (Monastyrskii prikaz) and its chairman, Ivan Musin-Pushkin. As a civil office, the Department of Monasteries brought all publishing, including monastic, directly under civil control, a control that continued after the Department of Monasteries was merged into the Holy Synod in 1722.

Structuring and revitalizing the press in so centralized and hierarchical a manner suited Peter in numerous personal and political ways. It permitted him to play an intimate role in nearly every aspect of book printing. The increased printing capacity gave him the potential to issue as many copies of as many books as he chose. By making Musin-Pushkin directly and personally responsible for overseeing printing, moreover, Peter was ensuring that a loyal and trusted friend would be in charge, and through Musin-Pushkin he could exercise control over how each press functioned editorially.

Peter's personal involvement in publishing went well beyond consultation and ordering that new presses be established. He oversaw translations, contracted with printers, approved copy, and demanded periodic progress reports from publishing houses. Typical of the intensity of Peter's involvement is the following letter, sent to Musin-Pushkin on January 4, 1709:

I received your letter with the books by Rimpler and Borgsdorf and the [new civil] alphabet. But the imprints in these books came out poorly compared with previous ones, neither clearly nor fully formed; in this [matter] it is incumbent upon you to see to it ... that they be published well. ... Also, ... the binding on those books [which you] recently sent is done hurriedly, not very cleanly. ... Also, make sure that the geometry book and the other one by Borgsdorf are hurried along; but with the Kirghorn drafts, I have not ordered them to hurry, but to engrave them carefully. Fifteen hundred or two thousand of the calendars arrived here. ... Two thirds [of them] should appear in semiquire so that officers can enter their affairs for each day in them and so that people to whom they are sold [can] too (they will buy them willingly). I have ordered that they be sold in Moscow and throughout (other) cities.

Two weeks later, on January 19, Peter sent another letter to Musin-Pushkin:

I am sending a book on Swedish military law that I have ordered published in octavo, but first it must be corrected. In some places it has been very poorly translated and in some places there is some very coarse speech. In addition, I am sending a history of Troy which also should be published (it is not necessary to reedit it). ... When the geometry book is completed publish 200 [copies] of it and, as I have directed, do not sell it, but send ten or fifteen [copies] here. Also, publish 300 or 400 of those architecture books, as were sent out to Mister Gagarin and, as I have directed, do not sell them, but send ten or fifteen of them here.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of the Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700-1800 by Gary Marker. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Tables, pg. ix
• Preface, pg. xi
• Introduction, pg. 1
• ONE. Printing and the Petrine Revolution, pg. 17
• TWO. The Church and the Academy, pg. 41
• THREE. Schools and Publishers, pg. 70
• FOUR. The Emergence of Private Publishing, pg. 103
• FIVE. Publishing in the Provinces, pg. 135
• SIX. The Russian Book Trade, pg. 152
• SEVEN. Book Sales and Reading, pg. 184
• EIGHT. Censorship, pg. 212
• Conclusion, pg. 233
• Notes, pg. 237
• Bibliography, pg. 283
• Index, pg. 289