The Primer of Karion Istomin

Karion Istomin’s Primer, printed at the Moscow Printing Yard in 1694, is the first illustrated Russian primer, with moralizing verses for every letter. Its full title is “Primer of Slavonic-Russian Letters, Uncial and Cursive, and also Greek, Latin and Polish”. The book is entirely engraved: the pictures and text for each leaf were cut in copper by Leonty Bunin, an engraver of the Silver Chamber and the Printing Yard.

Its compiler, Karion Istomin (late 1640s – 1717), was a hieromonk of the Chudov Monastery, a court poet, an editor at the Printing Yard and a tutor to the tsar’s children. The printed edition grew out of the illustrated manuscript primers he made for the royal family in the early 1690s; one of them was presented in 1693 to Tsaritsa Natalya Kirillovna for her grandson, Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich. The edition for a wider readership was paid for by the Moscow merchant Ivan Agapitovich Postnikov.

On 38 leaves each letter is shown in various forms, from semi-uncial to sweeping cursive flourishes. The initial letters are made up of figures of people, animals, birds, fish and fantastic creatures; below them are objects whose names begin with that letter, and couplets at the foot of the leaf explain the literal and symbolic meaning of the pictures.