The Russian Graphosphere, 1450–1850 by Simon Franklin (review)

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. 950–1300 (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...