About the people of the 16th century, who are five thousand years away from us, very often little is known for certain. The two pioneers of the Moscow printing press, who continued the work of the famous Francysk Skaryna, a native of Polotsk, are no exception. We even know a little more about Mstislavets: Peter was the son of Timothy and came from Belarusian Mstislavl. Ivan was the son of Fedor, and where he came from is unknown to this day, the nickname Moskvitin leaves a very wide field of interpretation.
There is also fairly reliable evidence that in 1532 Ivan Fedorov Moskvitin graduated from the University of Krakow with a bachelor’s degree. But it must have been a different person, because in the preface to the Lvov edition of the “Apostle” in 1574, the first printer wrote directly that the circumstances prevailing in Moscow “forced me to move to other countries unknown”. A graduate of the University of Krakow would certainly not have published such a thing, but spoke of returning to familiar places.
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p class=””>From the preface to the Moscow edition of the “Apostle” in 1564 we learn that Ivan Fedorov was a deacon of the St. Nicholas Gostunsky Church in the Moscow Kremlin. Ivan the Terrible ordered the Treasury to create a printing house on Nikolskaya Street in Kitai-Gorod, the first production of which was anonymous, without a specific imprint. “The Apostle” by Fedorov and Mstislavets became the first book printed in Moscow with clear and unambiguous identifying marks. Besides the Tsar, the head of the Russian church at the time, Metropolitan Macarius, who blessed the publication of the apostle, but did not live to see the publication of the book and died in 1563, was at the origin of book printing in Moscow. .
Where and when Fedorov and Mstislavets learned to print, we still do not know, but they mastered their art very worthily. “The Apostle” from 1564, testified to by more than 60 copies that have survived to the present day, was distinguished by magnificent decoration and, in particular, magnificent screensavers. As a result, the predilection for luxurious printing performance did not allow the first printers to enrich themselves at the expense of their pioneering craft at that time. If they had printed simpler books they would probably have become wealthy, otherwise they had to rely on wealthy patrons.
The first printer of the 16th century had to be a jack-of-all-trades. Fedorov and Mstislavets had many very different skills. As engravers-sculptors, they carve punches and engrave wood. As throwers, they throw letters. In the form of joiners and carpenters, they made wooden parts of the printing equipment of the time. They also performed the work of composers, printers, bookbinders, editors, commentators, authors of prefaces.
The unique books of the first printers played an important role in the written culture of the Eastern Slavs.
In 1565, Fedorov and Mstislavets published the second Moscow book, The Book of Hours, on which their work in the capital of Ivan the Terrible ended. Despite the interest and support of the Tsar and the Metropolitan, the early printers had enough malefactors among “many patrons”. Monks-scribes of church books with the advent of their printed versions were losing ground under their feet. The innovations of the 16th century were very often punishable, even fatal. Fedorov and Mstislavets were forced to leave Moscow for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Lithuanian Grand Hetman Grigory Khodkevich, a well-known fanatic of the Orthodox faith, cordially sheltered them in 1568 in his castle in Zabludovo near Bialystok. The printers, however, did not leave Moscow empty-handed, taking with them the most important thing at that time – the font and the engraved plates of the caps, endings and initial letters. The printing press was already made by local craftsmen in Zabludovo.
In 1569, the paths of the creators of the first books printed in Moscow diverged. Peter Mstislavets moved to Vilna, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and founded a printing house there. The further path of Ivan Fedorov was in Lviv and Ostrog, the heritage of another fanatic of Orthodoxy, Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich Ostrozhsky. According to one version, the first printers could have gathered in the late 1570s in Ostrog. The publications of the local printing house are distinguished by the use of type, plates, caps typical of the Vilna period of Mstislavets, but there is no direct evidence of Peter’s involvement in these publications, all this could have be brought to Ostrog and his students. The date of death of the pioneer printer, originally from Mstislavl, is still unknown.
His colleague Ivan Fedorov died in Lvov at the end of 1583, having managed to prove himself to be a versatile personality in the last years of his life. In 1581, in Ostrog, he published the first separate edition of poems in Cyrillic in the field of books. It was the work of Andrey Rimsha, a nobility from Baranovichi, with the conditional title “Chronology”. On a sheet in two parallel columns is a brief poetic calendar. Several of its names are given for each month: Latin, Church Slavonic, Hebrew and Old Belarusian.
And in the year of his death, in 1583, Ivan Fedorov went to Vienna and tried to present his inventions in the field of modern military technology to the court of Emperor Rudolf II. He proposed a gun that, for ease of movement, could be disassembled into 100 or even 200 parts, and then quickly assembled. At his own expense, the pioneer printer made a prototype weighing less than 300 kilograms, which pleased the Austrian emperor, but it did not lead to the sale of the invention.
And in history, the first printers remained their unique books, which played an important role in the written culture of the Eastern Slavs. They understood very well the importance of their work. When Hetman Khodkevich advised Ivan Fedorov to stay in Zabludovo and lead a prosperous life on earth, he proudly replied that “instead of bread, he should sow spiritual seeds throughout the universe and distribute this food spiritual to each according to his rank”.
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