The First Russian Printed Textbooks

Abstract

The article presents materials indicating the need to return to the question of the place of the first secular printed textbooks in the history of Russian education and culture. These textbooks were compiled and published abroad by Ilya Fedorovich Kopievsky (c. 1651 — 1714) on the initiative of Peter the Great. The first seven of them came out from the printing shop of the Amsterdam merchant Jan Thessing (1659 — 1701) who received the tzar’s privilege to sell his printed materials in Russia. Two succeeding were published in other Amsterdam printing shops, and the last one was printed in Polish Stolzenberg. Thanks to these textbooks, the general Russian reader was able to get acquainted for the first time with the basics of scientific knowledge in history, geography, mathematics, astronomy, navigation, warfare, and linguistics. Five interrelated matters support the need to return to the topic in question: 1) the historical circumstances of the appearance of Kopievsky-Thessing’s books; 2) their topics and content; 3) their place in the repertoire of the early 18th-century Russian readers; 4) their distribution in Russia; 5) the number of their copies preserved in libraries today. The article concludes that contrary to common opinion these books played a noteworthy role in the Petrine reforms of education and culture.