Russia and the “Printing Revolution”: Notes and Observations

Abstract

In recent years the history of early printing in Western Europe has received renewed attention from scholars with an interest not only in elucidating the internal evolution of printing, but also in demonstrating the relevance of this development for history in general. Indeed, some historians of printing now argue that the advent of movable type was a major landmark of the centuries between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. This proposition has given rise to the still bolder hypothesis that a “printing” or “typographical” revolution visibly altered European culture in the post-Gutenberg era.While Western scholarship has directed considerable attention to printing in early modern Europe, the history of communications outside the West has gone relatively unnoticed. The failure to consider even those societies that stood on the periphery of European experience — Russia, Byzantium, the Balkans — is especially surprising since in many ways these societies were part of European culture. In the case of Russia, at least, the neglect of theoretical issues does not stem from a lack of published information, since the study of the Russian book has a long and rich past among Russian and Soviet bibliographers and literary historians.

1 Three Print Revolutions

“…Again, in discussing the consequences of print in particular communities at particular moments, one needs to ask how many people were literate. In seventeenth-century Europe, there was enormous variation between Sweden, where almost every man, woman and child could read (though most were unable to write), and Russia, where virtually no one could read except the clergy (Johansson 1973;Marker 1982).…”