New Perspectives on Early Cyrillic Printing

Slavonic and East European Review, 95, 4, 2017 REVIEW ESSAY New Perspectives on Early Cyrillic Printing CHARLES J. HALPERIN Bogatyrev, Sergei (ed.). The Journeys of Ivan Fedorov: New Perspectives on Early Cyrillic Printing. Special issue: Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 51, 2017, 2–3, pp. 173–408 (235 pp.). Illustrations. Tables. Notes. 2014 was the 450th anniversary of the printing by Ivan Fedorov and Petr Mstislavskii of the first dated book to appear in Muscovy (Russia), Apostol (Acts and Epistles) in 15641 and the 440th anniversary of Fedorov’s printing of the first book to appear in Ukraine, a Primer in 1574. In honour of these events Sergei Bogatyrev of University College of London (UCL) organized, as a joint project of UCL and the British Library, an international conference, ‘Revisiting Ivan Fedorov’s Legacy in Early Modern Europe’, held on 9 May 2014 at the British Library, which holds copies of each landmark book, sponsored by the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies, European Institute and Centre for Early Modern Exchanges. Bogatyrev has now edited selected papers from that conference,2 with one addition, as a double issue of the journal Canadian-American Slavic Studies, for which he served as Guest Editor.3 The double issue contains Bogatyrev’s introduction, nine substantive articles grouped in three Charles J. Halperin is an independent scholar, residing in Bloomington, Indiana. I wish to express my sincerest appreciation to Sergei Bogatyrev for consultation in the preparation of this review article. I alone remain responsible for its errors and conclusions. 1 The first books printed in Muscovy, probably during the 1550s, lack dates or printers’ names. 2 And edited extremely well. I found only two typographical errors, in Bogatyrev’s ‘Introduction’, Fedorov became ‘a wander’, should be a ‘wanderer’ (p. 181), and in Rogatchevskaia, ‘Soviet expert agency’ should be ‘Soviet export agency’ (p. 386). 3 The title of the special issue, given above, appears in the hard copy, not the online version of the double issue. EARLY CYRILLIC PRINTING 721 sections, each of three articles,4 including one by Bogatyrev, a note also by Bogatyrev (all told, Bogatyrev wrote a quarter of the entire double issue),5 and a very helpful ‘List of Contributors’ (pp. 405–08) with biographical and bibliographic information on the contributors. Six essays contain illustrations, many full-page in colour (Cleminson, Bogatyrev’s article and note, Erusalimskii, Franklin and Rogatchevskaia). This impressive publication offers insights into the great variety of current research on the appearance of printing among the East Slavs, particularly Russians and Ukrainians.6 By their current affiliations, five of the participants at the conference came from Great Britain, two from Ukraine and four from Russia. The double issue does not contain two conference papers, by scholars from Russia and Great Britain respectively.7 In addition, one Russian presented a different article for publication than the paper he presented in London.8 Thus the double-issue includes articles by four scholars from Great Britain (Bogatyrev, Cleminson, Franklin, Rogatchevskaia), two from Ukraine (Bondar, Ul’ianovs’kyi), and three from Russia (Filyushkin, Usachev, Erusalimskii). Four of the articles appear in Russian with English-language abstracts.9 Bogatryev’s ‘Introduction: A Printer on the Move’ (pp. 173–83) supplies background information on the conference presented above as well as on Ivan Fedorov. Fedorov, a deacon at the Moscow Church of St Nicholas of Gostun, began printing in Moscow with Petr Mstislavets under the patronage of Tsar Ivan IV and Metropolitan (the head of the 4 The section titles appear in the hard-copy ‘Table of Contents’ but not in the online ‘Table of Contents.’ In both versions they appear above the title in the first article of each section. 5 An eleven-page introduction, forty-one page article, and five-page note, fifty-seven pages of 231 pages (not counting the ‘List of Contributors, which he compiled). 6 Printing in Cyrillic began earlier outside Muscovy or Ukraine, in Cracow, Prague, Venice, Montenegro and Romania. No article deals with the source of print technology in MuscovyordealswiththeItalianvocabularyofearlyMuscoviteprinting:M.N.Tikhomirov et al. (ed.), U istokov russkogo knigopechataniia. K trekhsot-semidesiatipiatiletiiu so dnia smeriti Ivana Fedorova...

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