The Russian Graphosphere, 1450‐1850. By SIMON FRANKLIN

The word ‘graphosphere’ is not yet in the Oxford English Dictionary, but after the publication of this book it must get in soon. It is not quite a neologism. It was first used, but in a quite different sense, by Régis Debray in 2007. To Franklin the graphosphere is ‘the space of the written word, … formed wherever words are encoded, recorded, stored, disseminated and displayed through visible signs’. The words themselves may be home‐made or imported, their function social, cultural, economic or (incidentally) aesthetic, depending on how observers engage with them, reading in one sense of the word or another. Outmoded concepts like ‘material texts’ or ‘book history’ are all subsumed within the graphosphere.

What this meant in Russia (another concept needing redefinition) is the subject of this admirable book. The passsage that led from the earliest needs for documentation had already been set out in Franklin’s Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.5150‐1500 (Cambridge, 2002). We learned there that besides the familiar substrates, parchment and paper or inscriptions on wood or metal, there was a whole mass of writing, the more interesting because ephemeral, written on birch‐ bark, and only now capable of being read as the permafrost that has preserved it melts. It was not quite Oxyrhynchus redivivus, but it was a salutary warning that the graphosphere needs more means of interpretation than just the ability to read words.

The same is true of the chronological span implied in Franklin’s title. The same dates applied as they so often are to other European graphospheres would require acknowledgement of the impact of Gutenberg’s revolutionary discovery. Not in Rus. If books as such were largely produced in monasteries, written by scribes employed by them (and not necessarily themselves monks), change came not from mechanical or commercial influence, but the emergence of a new social class, d’iaki, scribes or secretaries, below the aristocracy (boiars) in the social scale, but employed by them and as such capable of owning land. Within a century, this relationship changed. From about 1560 chanceries (prikaz) became the spatial and administrative base of d’iaki; the records of courts and commerce changed from scrolls (stolbtsy) glued together vertically and became what we would now recognize as ledgers. Informal documents like letters expanded, unencumbered by such formalities.

Printing, which spread from Germany under mechanical and commercial pressures, did not follow suit in Rus. The Slavonic Church had no Bible, no one book, merely individual books and liturgical texts. It took a long time for the demand for such books to generate a market that could pay for their translation into printed form. It still did not exist in 1506 when the Greek scribe and scholar Michael Trivolis left Aldus Manutius for Vatopedi on Mount Athos and thence went to Moscow in 1516, where he spent the rest of his life translating commentaries on the Acts, Epistles, and Psalms into Latin for onward transmission into Slavonic. Prototypography in Rus suffered from the proliferation of languages: the prosta mova or ‘simple tongue’ was adopted for print, which also had to provide for Church Slavonic, Cyrillic, Latin, Polish, Ruthenian, and Greek. The work of Trivolis, now become ‘Maksim Grek’, took in the Church Slavonic translations produced by the

team hired by Archbishop Gennadii of Novgorod (1498‐99). This included several persons known elsewhere as printers who based their work on the extant Vulgate, Low German, or even Czech versions. Ivan Federov deserves the credit, if not as the first printer in Moscow, at least for the first dated book, Apostol (Acts and Epistles), in 1564 and the first book printed in the Ukraine, another Apostol, in 1574.

But the ‘start of the continuous institutionalized history of printing in Russia’ can only be dated to January 1615, when Nikita Fofanov put his name to the Psalter that he printed in the already extant Pechatnyi dvor (Print Yard) in Nikolskaia Street, just east of the Kremlin. The seventeenth century saw great but unpredictable growth. Alphabet books and primers poured out from the Print Y ard in runs of hundreds of thousands, but new titles were few, although some blackleg work infiltrated what was authorized. In the 1650s the religious reforms of the Patriarch Nikon added to the volume of print, mostly orthodox, although the Old Believers did not disdain the press even if they rejected its produce. The all‐embracing reforms of Peter the Great (1682‐1725) included the alphabet, in the new ‘civil’ letter‐form, but also promoted the use of Latin, script and language, aided and abetted by the polyglot Simeon Polotskii (1629‐80), poet and translator, who as head of the monastery of the Saviour set up a school and also his own press close to the Kremlin. Other languages found a foothold. The Swedish diplomat Count Sparwenfeld enabled Archil, the exiled King of Georgia, to commission types for that language cut by the great Hungarian genius, Nicholas Kis. Printing spread over the increasing Russian imperium. The number of actual presses in operation, released from control by Catherine Il’s decree of 15 January 1783, expanded throughout the eighteenth century, and the subject matter of books, imported as well as locally printed, diversified, if always under the watchful eye of authority.

So far the Russian graphosphere, apart from the absence of anything like ‘the Trade’, was not very different from its equivalent in Western Europe. Two aspects of it escape the occidental view, the ‘non‐book’ and ‘secondary writing’. ‘Jobbing work’, as printers distinguished what was not by their definition ‘book work’, was vital in Rus. The size of the country made the documents of government and administration dependent on print. The equivalents of identity cards and passports, as well as invoices and receipts, multiplied, creating as they did so a new demand for printed forms. As such they became the object of collectors’ interest. Chichikov, in Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), carries about a box full of ‘visiting cards, funeral invitations, theatre tickets, and the like, collected as mementos’. But live or dead (so to speak), print was only one of all the multifarious aspects of the graphosphere. Equally prevalent were coins, whose ‘image and superscription’ were secondary writing as universally legible, seen not only on coins but medals and ‘beard tokens’ (certificates that the wearer had paid the tax levied on those who persisted in wearing them). Besides coins were bricks and tiles, cannon, seals, glass goblets, a satiric print, words embroidered on vestments, painted or carved on a snuff‐box, embossed on an insurance company’s plaque, carved on a triumphal arch or a tomb. Bells were equally inscribed in bands of viaz’, woven script, curiously like their western equivalents and sometimes like them meaningless. Gold and silver plate, social and liturgical, was lettered too. From all these diverse sources a standard letter‐form, canonized as CSR (Contemporary Standard Russian), emerged from Church Slavonic and East Slavonic. In 1757 the polymath Mikhail Lomonosov

produced the first Russian grammar by a Russian, in Russian and in Russia.

Other languages, German and French, Polish and Dutch, had cultural or functional sway, with even vestiges of Arabic in Mongolia. Public inscriptions spread from triumphal arches to lettered street‐signs, established by decree of Catherine II on 21 April 1785, reversing her predecessor’s prohibition of advertising. In the private sector lettering flourished in the elaborate inscriptions on icons. Eugene Onegin is full of references to lettering, and it is easy to believe that the omnipresent Pushkin was responsible for the Bodoniesque typographic elegance of his works. That leads us to Franklin’s last point, the effect that he calls ‘reverse technology transfer’, the extent to which print led back to manuscript. It was most obvious in the ubiquitous forms that had to be filled in by hand, that so struck travellers to Russia, then and since. Before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, they were adscripti glebae, whence they could only escape if they held a hand‐written permit from the landowner, for which a printed form might exist. In the midst of such complexity in a multilingual society misunderstanding was frequent, forgery venial, and mistakes commonplace. Pushkin accidentally used the draft of one of his own poems as an order to supply horses, and it was accepted as such. Words and image merged in icons. So words and their form had a unique power in a constantly developing society. The full extent of the graphosphere, as Russia advanced from a medieval to modern society, has now been charted.