Первые русские печатные учебники

Вопросы образования. 2022. № 2. С. 140–154.

Ю.П. Зарецкий

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 Fedo- rovich 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 Thes- sing (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 ba- sics of scientific knowledge in history, geography, mathematics, astronomy, na- vigation, 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 re- pertoire 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.

Keywords: учебная литература, история образования, history of education, Peter the Great, Петр Первый, book printing, книгопечатание, Educational literature, Ilya Kopievsky, Jan Thessing, Илья Копиевский, Иван Тессинг