“Ivan the Terrible, the Orthodox Church and the Printing Press”

“Ivan the Terrible, the Orthodox Church and the Printing Press” (an illustrated lecture by Sergei Bogatyrev)

Print shops appeared in Russia during the reign of Tsar Ivan the Terrible (1547-1584). The most famous among them was the press of Ivan Fedorov, whose books set standards for many subsequent editions. However the overall number of books printed in Russia before Peter the Great remained disappointingly small in comparison with the West. Is this a sign of Russia’s technological backwardness? Did Ivan the Terrible and the Orthodox church persecute Ivan Fedorov, who had to leave Moscow for the territory of modern Ukraine? In this illustrated talk Dr. Sergei Bogatyrev will discuss the relationship between the printer, the Tsar and the church. Ivan the Terrible and Orthodox hierarchs acted as patrons of printing. The Tsar and the church had different attitudes to the printing press, but there was no hate towards the printed book in Muscovy. On the basis of his study of Ivan Fedorov’s unique editions held in British collections, Dr. Bogatyrev will offer a new explanation for Ivan Fedorov’s departure from Moscow and for the uneven development of printing in Russia.

Dr. Sergei Bogatyrev is Senior Lecturer in Early Russian History at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University College London . He was granted a core fellowship by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in 2014-2015. Bogatyrev is a leading specialist on early Russian culture, with particular focus on Ivan the Terrible. His publications include The Sovereign and His Counsellors (2000), a chapter on Ivan the Terrible in The Cambridge History of Russia and a chapter on medieval Novgorod in Europe. A Literary History 1348-1418 (Oxford University Press, 2016). Bogatyrev is the editor of Ivan Vasil’evich Receives a Profession: Studies of Ivan the Terrible in Post-Soviet Russia (2014). Bogatyrev acted as the principal investigator in the international project “Revisiting Ivan Fedorov’s Legacy in Early Modern Europe” and edited “The Journeys of Ivan Fedorov: New Perspectives on Early Cyrillic Printing (special issue of Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 2017, vol.51, issue 2-3). He is also one of the editors of “History and Literature in 18th Century Russia” (2013) and the author of numerous articles in leading international journals.

Thursday 30 November, UCL SSEES at 16 Taviton Street, WC1H 0BW. Wine at 6.30. Talk at 7.00pm.

Wine reception in the 4th Floor Senior Common Room 437. Lecture in 3rd Floor Room 347

Source

Photo © “Metropolitan Philip refuses to bless Ivan the Terrible” by Vassily Pukirev