Abstract
In her important article ‘The Foundation of the Russian Educational System by Catherine II’,1 Isabel de Madariaga very properly begins with a discussion of Peter the Great’s attempt in 1716 to establish a network of ‘cipher schools’ in monasteries and diocesan centres, to be directed by the Admiralty College and staffed by students from the Naval Academy. Though ultimately perhaps a failure, this initiative serves to emphasise the significance for the wider cultural history of Russia of what could have been, and almost was, simply one of Peter’s many abortive schemes — the Moscow Mathematics and Navigation School. In fact, if the uneasy alliance of novices and navigators was reduced by the middle of the century to a mere handful of schools, this was not the fault of the Navigation School, which had provided the basis for the successful Naval Academy (1716), Russia’s first serious scientific centre, and the later Naval Cadet Corps (1752) in St Petersburg, and itself continued to offer in Moscow a basic and mainly secular education with a mathematical bias. The Navigation School and the Naval Academy not only helped to make possible the emergence of Russia as a naval power by creating an educated professional naval officer class, they were also the starting point for scientific publishing and a variety of technical and scientific enterprises in the first third of the eighteenth century, and provided the training ground for several generations of Russian explorers, cartographers, mathematicians, surveyors, astronomers and engineers — professions which had not existed before Peter’s reign and without which the modernisation of Russia could not have taken place.
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Notes
Isabel de Madariaga, ‘The Foundation of the Russian Educational System by Catherine II’, Slavonic and East European Review, LVII, 3 (1976) p. 370.
First described briefly in V. Raien [W. F. Ryan], ‘Russkii rukopisnyi uchebnik korablevozhdeniia 1703 goda’ in Trudy XIII Mezhdunarodnogo kongressa po istorii nauki, sektsiia VI (Moscow, 1974) pp. 233–6 (also published in Istoriko-astronomicheskie issledovaniia, XII (1975) 121–6.)
His surname has been variously spelt in English and Russian — it seems to have settled down now as Farquharson in English and Farvarson in Russian. His first name, having no common Russian equivalent, was usually rendered as Andrei, the nearest sounding Russian name. On Farquharson see N. Hans, ‘Henry Farquharson, Pioneer of Russian Education, 1698–1739’, Aberdeen University Review, XXXVIII (1959) 26–9;
A. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture. A History to 1860 (Stanford, 1963) pp. 52–5; Russkii biograficheskii slovar’, XXI (Moscow-St Petersburg, 1901) pp. 22–3;
A. P. Iushkevich, Istoriia matematiki v Rossii (Moscow, 1968) pp. 56–8;
V. Boss, Newton and Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1972) pp. 78–89;
Paul Dukes, ‘Some Aberdonian Influences on the Early Russian Enlightenment’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, XIII, 4 (1979) pp. 444–50.
On British expatriates in Russia see principally Geraldine M. Phipps, ‘Britons in Seventeenth-Century Russia: An Archival Search’ in Janet M. Hartley (ed.), The Study of Russian History from British Archival Sources (London and New York, 1986) pp. 27–50;
John H. Appleby, ‘Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great: British Formative Influence on the Russian Medico-Apothecary System’, Medical History, XXVII (1983) 289–304, and his ‘British Doctors in Russia 1657–1807, their Contribution to Anglo-Russian Medical and Natural History’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of East Anglia, 1978.)
For details see W. F. Ryan, ‘Peter the Great’s English Yacht: Admiral Lord Carmarthen and the Russian Tobacco Monopoly’, The Mariner’s Mirror, LXIX, 1 (1983) 65–87.
Carmarthen was described to the Russians by one British officer who had served under him as ‘the only man in Europe who really understands ship design’, and Adam Weide, Peter’s emissary sent to London to inspect the Royal Transport, reported to Peter that he had seen ships being built ‘in every way cleaner (chischche) and more imposing (statnee) than those of the Dutch … in short, London is worth a visit’: see S. Elagin, Istoriia russkogo flota. Period azovskii. Prilozheniia, ch. 1 (St Petersburg, 1864) pp. 476–81 (‘Svedeniia o iakhte, podarennoi Petru I angliiskim korolem Vil’gel’mom III v 1697’). For a biographical sketch of Carmarthen see Ryan, ‘Peter the Great’s English Yacht’ (note 5 above), especially pp. 77–81, also The Manning of the Royal Navy: Selected Public Pamphlets, 1693–1873, Publications of the Navy Record Society, CXIX (1974) pp. 374–6, and the Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Osborne.
Perry is often described as having been hired by Peter to build a navy. In fact he did build one or two ships but was mostly employed in building canals and docks; he was successful in these undertakings but always hampered by Peter’s chronic shortage of cash. Eventually, after failing to get the promised reward of 50000 ducats for finding a way of preventing Peter’s ships from rotting (by removing planks in dry dock for ventilation — a method actually adopted by Peter: see [John Deane] History of the Russian Fleet during the Reign of Peter the Great by a Contemporary Englishman (1724), ed. C. H. G. Bridge, Publications of the Navy Records Society, XV (London, 1899) p. 73) he was obliged to escape from Russia disguised as a servant and claiming that he had only once been paid any of his salary during his fourteen years’ service.
See John Perry, The State of Russia under the Present Czar (London, 1716) pp. 20–1, 37–8, 53–5.
He is commemorated in Samuel Smiles, The Lives of the Engineers (London, 1862) I, chap. V, pp. 69–82.
See N. Hans, ‘The Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation (1701)’, The Slavonic Review, XXIX(LXXIII) (1951) pp. 532–6. Unfortunately Hans does not give the sources of most of his information (it seems to have been Veselago) and some of his assertions are inaccurate.
See D. W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (London, 1958), passim (index, s.v. ‘mathematics’).
N. A. Bestuzhev, Opyt istorii russkogo flota, ed. I. A. Livshits and G. E. Pavlova (Leningrad, 1961) [written in 1825] p. 78.
For the history of this school see Hans, ‘The Moscow School’ (note 14 above); F. Veselago, Ocherk istorii Morskogo kadetskogo korpusa (St Petersburg, 1852);
P. Pekarskii, Nauka i literatura v Rossii pri Petre Velikom, 2 vols (St Petersburg, 1862); A. Viktorov, Opisanie zapisnykh knig i bumag starinnykh dvortsovykh prikazov (1616–1725), vyp. 2, ‘Zapisi o Navigatskoi shkole’ (Moscow, 1883); Kolybel’ flota. Navigatskaia shkola — Morskoi korpus. K 250-ti letiiu so dnia osnovaniia Shkoly matematicheskikh i navigatskikh nauk, 1701–1951 (Paris, 1951) pp. 12–37, 52–3;
see also M. Okenfuss, ‘Education in Russia in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1970).
E. H. Pearce, Annals of Christ’s Hospital (London, 1901) p. 283: a letter read to the governors from ‘Stephen Gwyn and Richard Grice, the two Mathematicall boyes that were lately into the Czar of Muscovy’s service, giving an acct. of their safe arrivall at Archangell of their being mightily well used there by Mr Woolfe’. In a document of the Armoury Chamber (TsGADA, fond 196, sobranie Mazurina, opis’ 3, no. 195, ff. 1–3) the merchant and entrepreneur Henry Stiles, who had handled Peter’s financial affairs in England, was repaid £100 he had advanced to Farquharson with other sums for his clothing, bedding and travel.
TsGADA, ibid., opis’ 3, no. 2297, ff. 1–9. The British teachers were at the time all living, and apparently teaching, in a small room in the house of the English merchant Andrew Crevet, who may even have been entrusted by Peter with the running of the School. They asked for a large house, high enough to make astronomical observations, enough rooms to house them and the teachers of Slavonic literature and a scribe, a room to store books, globes, telescopes and mathematical instruments, a room to teach in, another to receive guests in, and accommodation for pupils if that was intended. The books which were requested, in three copies, were a little surprising: Bibles, psalters, Russian grammars, the old Law Code of 1649, Slavonic and Latin dictionaries, gospel stories, Acts of the Apostles and works of Simeon Polotskii including the Bukvar’ (Moscow, 1664); the Vechernia dushevnaia (1683: sermons); the Obed dushevnyi (Moscow, 1681: sermons); Stikhi (there are various works with this title, unpublished); ‘Kniga Ioasafa Tsarevicha’ (probably the Povest’ o Varlaame i Ioasafe (Moscow, 1680); Zhezl pravleniia (1667: polemic against Old Believers); Venets very (Moscow, 1683: catechetical work); Mnogotsvetnyi vertograd (verse collection, unpublished); Psaltyr’ rifmotvornaia (Moscow, 1680); ‘arifmoslovie’ (perhaps the Rifmologion, verse collection, unpublished); a ‘besedoslovie’ (perhaps the ‘Besedy pastuskie’ or ‘besedy so planity’). It would be interesting to know who drew up this list — presumably not the British mathematicians — for Polotskii’s work had been anathematised and the two great verse collections mentioned existed only in manuscript! On the Navigation School from the point of view of book culture see S. L. Luppov, Kniga v Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII veka (Leningrad, 1973) pp. 12–19, 243.
S. Elagin, Materialy dlia istorii russkogo flota (St Petersburg, 1868) vol. III, p. 289.
V. L. Chenakal, ‘Iakov Vilimovich Brius, russkii astronom nachala XVIII veka’, Astronomicheskii zhurnal, XXVIII, 1 (1951) 1–14. Brius was born in Russia into a Scottish family in Russian service. He had been one of Peter’s ‘boy soldiers’ and was always close to Peter in his scientific interests. He was in England in 1697–98 studying mathematics and astronomy and acquiring instruments for Peter.
At his death his library contained 1500 books, with over a hundred on astronomy: on Brius’s library see most recently E. A. Savel’eva, ‘Biblioteka Ia. V. Briusa v sobranii BAN SSSR’, in Russkie biblioteki i ikh chitatel’ (Leningrad, 1983) pp. 123–34. He has been called Russia’s first Newtonian: see Boss, Newton and Russia (note 3 above) especially pp. 15–18 ‘Newton and Bruce’; pp. 29–32 ‘Bruce and “Ivan Kolsun”’; chapter 3 ‘Russia’s First Newtonian’; chapter 6 ‘Bruce as Translator and Instrument Maker’.
T. A. Bykova and M. M. Gurevich, Opisanie izdanii grazhdanskoi pechati 1708 — ianvar’ 1725 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1955) (hereafter BG) p. 380.
For a list of students and their intended duties in 1726 see Elagin, Materialy, vol. V (1875) pp. 418–19.
See M. Okenfuss, ‘Russian Students in Europe in the Age of Peter the Great’, in J. G. Garrard (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in Russia (Oxford, 1973)
and ‘On British Ships and in British Yards’, chapter six, in A. G. Cross, ‘By the Banks of the Thames’: Russians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Newtonville, 1980). In the period before the Great Embassy Russians had been sent to study navigation in Italy and Dalmatia: see A. V. Solov’ev, ‘Russkie navigatory sredi iuzhnykh slavian’, Iubileinyi sbornik Russkogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva v korolevste Iugoslavii (Belgrade, 1936) pp. 291–201;
A. Florovskii, ‘Moskovskie navigatory v Venetsii v 1697–1698 gg. i rimskaia tserkov” in Ost und West in der Geschichte des Denkens und der Kulturellen Beziehungen. Festschrift für Eduard Winter (Berlin, 1966) pp. 195–9.
Elagin, Materialy (note 23 above), p. 304. A Russian schoolteacher at this time would have a salary of only 36r p.a., and even that was often not paid: see M. Vladimirskii-Budanov, Gosudarstvo i narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii XVIII veka (Iaroslavl’, 1874) p. 39 (quoted in Madariaga (note 1 above), p. 370).
See Veselago, Ocherk (note 19 above), p. 22; A. G. Cross, ‘British Freemasons in Russia in the Reign of Catherine the Great’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s., IV (1971) p. 43; idem, The Bung College or British Monastery in Petrine Russia’, Newsletter of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, XII (1984) 12–24;
M. P. Alekseev, Russko-angliiskie literaturnye sviazi (XVIII vek — pervaia polovina XIX veka), Literaturnoe nasledstvo, XCI (Moscow, 1982) pp. 74–6.
From a Dutch book Shkhat kamer printed in Amsterdam in 1697: see BG, pp. 407–8, no. 733 (Dutch original unidentified here but possibly the source is the much larger Abraham de Graaf, Schatkamer of de konst der Stierlieden, 2nd augmented ed. (Amsterdam, J. Loots, 1697)).
A ‘translation’ by Farquharson, Gwynn and Magnitskii of the Tabulae sinuum … of Adrien Vlacq, first published in 1628 and based on Henry Briggs, Arithmetica Logarithmica of 1624. This, the second technical book to be printed in Russia, was produced specifically for the students of the Navigation School, as is stated on the title page. See BG, pp. 200–201, no. 220, and V. V. Danilevskii, Russkaia tekhnicheskaia literatura pervoi chetverti XVIII veka (Moscow-Leningrad, 1954) pp. 48–54, 305–6, 317.
It seems unlikely that Farquharson was a member of the Caspian hydrographic expedition (1719–20). This important published atlas is now credited, not altogether certainly, to Farquharson’s former student Soimonov, second-in-command of the expedition at the age of twenty-seven, with the rank of lieutenant. The atlas has been called ‘for its time a scientific sensation of world significance’: see L. A. Gol’denberg, Fedor Ivanovich Soimonov (1692–1780) (Moscow, 1966) p. 43;
A.I. Andreev, ‘Gidrograficheskie raboty i issledovatel’skie ekspeditsii russkogo flota v 1696–1725 gg.’ [written in 1947] in Puteshestviia i geograficheskie otkrytiia v XV–XIX vekakh (Moscow-Leningrad, 1965) pp. 35–6;
E. A. Kniazhetskaia, ‘Petr I — organizator issledovanii Kaspiiskogo moria’ in Voprosy geografii petrovskogo vremeni (Leningrad, 1975) pp. 24–38; see also S. P. Luppov, ‘Fedor Ivanovich Soimonov i ego biblioteka’, Russkie biblioteki i chastnye knizhnye sobraniia XVI–XIX vekov (Leningrad, 1979) pp. 13–28 and Boss, Newton and Russia (note 3 above), pp. 212–14. The Svodnyi katalog credits Farquharson only with supervision.
For example, in a letter dated 9 January 1706, V. V. Kiprianov, head of the Grazhdanskaia Tipografiia, was instructed by Brius, who supervised the Tipografiia for Peter, to consult Farquharson or one of his teachers in order to learn how to draw maps in stereographic projection for the publication in 1707 of the large engravings of the planispheres: see A. V. Borodin, ‘Moskovskaia grazhdanskaia tipografiia i bibliotekari Kiprianovy’ in Trudy Instituta knigi, dokumenta, pis’ma. V. Stat’i i materialy po istorii knigi v Rossii (Moscow Leningrad, 1936) p. 77. The reference given is Artilleriiskii arkhiv, sv. 6, fol. 184.
See M. I. Belov, ‘Rol’ Petra I v rasprostranenii geograficheskikh znanii v Rossii’ in Voprosy geografii petrovskogo vremeni (Leningrad, 1975) p. 20 (Belov speaks of ‘a pleiad of great names, among them Soimonov, Kirilov, Chirikov, Pronchishchev, Cheliuskin, and Malygin’ to which he might have added the astronomer N.G. Kurganov); V.L. Chenakal, ‘Prakticheskaia astronomiia v Rossii dopetrovskogo i petrovskogo vremeni’, ibid., pp. 56–7.
For a more up-to-date description see Ralph Cleminson, A Union Catalogue of Cyrillic Manuscripts in British and Irish Collections (London, 1988), s.v.
Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), President of the Royal Society, had an enormous collection of books, art, antiquities and curiosities, which formed the basis of the British Museum. Like other rich eighteenth-century polymaths he indulged wide interests which included Russia: the Royal Society archives, for example, contain letters to him from correspondents in Russia — see Janet M. Hartley, Guide to Documents and Manuscripts in the United Kingdom relating to Russia and the Soviet Union (London, 1987) nos 215.8, 11, 29. Sloane’s letters to scientists in Russia are described in M. I. Radovskii, ‘U istokov anglo-russkikh nauchnykh sviazei’, Istoricheskii arkhiv (1956) no. 3, 139–55. Sloane also collected Russian manuscripts: on one occasion he intended buying a ‘Russian Prayer Book’ and a ‘Slavonian Liturgy’ but was persuaded to relinquish them to Lord Harley by Harley’s librarian Humphrey Wanley.
See G. R. de Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum (Oxford, 1953) p. 151. Interestingly enough in this context, Sloane’s will stipulated that if the King or Parliament refused to buy his collection for the nation it was to be offered to foreign academies, with right of first refusal to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences to which Sloane had been elected the first English member in 1734.
For Sloane and the Russian Academy see Christine G. Thomas, ‘Sir Hans Sloane and the Russian Academy of Sciences’, The British Library Journal, XIV, 1 (1988) 21–37.
V. V. Bobynin, Ocherki razvitiia fiziko-matematicheskikh znanii v Rossii. Prepodavanie geometrii v Shkole matematicheskikh i navigatskikh nauk (Fiziko-matematicheskie nauki v ikh nastoiashchem i proshedshem), vol. IX (Moscow, 1892).
V. P. Zubov, ‘V. V. Bobynin i ego trudy po istorii matematiki’, Trudy Instituta istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki XV (1956) p. 313.
A. P. Denisov, Leontii Filippovich Magnitskii, 1669–1739 (Moscow, 1967) p. 44.
T. G. Kupriianova, ‘Novye arkhivnye svedeniia po istorii sozdaniia “Arifmetiki” L. Magnitskogo’ in Estestvennonauchnye predstavleniia Drevnei Rusi. Schislenie let, simvolika chisel, ‘otrechennye’ knigi, astrologiia, mineralogiia, ed. R. A. Simonov (Moscow, 1988) pp. 279–82.
On Leontii Filippovich Magnitskii, 1669–1739, see Denisov, Leontii Filippovich Magnitskii (note 64 above); I. K. Andronov, ‘Pervyi uchitel’ matematiki rossiiskogo iunoshestva Leontii Filippovich Magnitskii’, Matematika v shkole (1969) no. 6, pp. 75–8; T.N. Kameneva, ‘K istorii izdaniia “Arifmetiki” Magnitskogo’, Kniga. Issledovaniia i materialy, XLVIII (1984) pp. 72–81; Kupriianova, ‘Novye arkhivnye svedeniia’. Magnitskii’s mathematical competence seems to have been submitted to the British teachers for approval: see Borodin ‘Moskovskaia grazhdans-kaia tipografii’ (note 50 above), p. 56.
On the Arifmetika see BG (1958) pp. 83–7; Danilevskii, Russkaia tekhnicheskaia literatura (note 45 above), pp. 32–48; Iushkevich, Istoriia (note 3 above), pp. 58–71; Kupriianova, ‘Novye arkhivnye svedeniia’ (note 66 above). It is in fact, by the Russian standards of the time, a fine piece of fairly elaborate two-colour printing with many illustrations and shows some ingenuity in presentation, explanatory notes, and in adapting examples to the Russian scene. On the sources see Kameneva, ‘K istorii izdaniia “Arifmetiki”’,: Kameneva draws attention to the lack of information on Magnitskii’s sources, despite the now considerable literature, and indicates G. A. Böckler, Arithmetica nova militaris (Nuremberg, 1661) as a source of illustrations and perhaps part of the text.
Declination tables for the same period are given in Nathaniel Colson, The Mariner’s New Kalendar (London, 1697).
Perhaps partly from Samuel Sturmy, The Seaman’s Magazine (London, 1684; first ed. 1669).
Western numerals reached Russia fairly late. Although probably in use in Cyrillic texts in Byelorussia and the Ukraine from the sixteenth century, and in one or two manuscripts and printed books in Muscovy in the seventeenth, they finally superseded the older Greek-style alphabetic numerals for all but religious works in kirillitsa only at the beginning of the eighteenth century: see Iushkevich, Istoriia (note 3 above), pp. 24–5. The older system, however, was still in use in several books even of a popular or technical nature printed in kirillitsa in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, especially for certain purposes such as page numbers and dates, e.g. Magnitskii’s Arifmetika (1703).
See E. G. R. Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art (London, 1956) pp. 201–2 and Waters, The Art of Navigation (note 15 above), pp. 426–8 and passim.
It appears that the first description of the method is found in William Bourne, A Regiment for the Sea (1574 and later editions) and that it is the first original English contribution to navigation.
This work continued to be printed into the eighteenth century. Others using the same formula are Thomas Ratcliffe, Pocket Companion for Seamen (London, 1684);
J. Seller, Practical Navigation, seventh edition (London, 1694). British naval ships’ logs were still manuscript in the eighteenth century. The first use of commercially available log sheets appears to be an East India Company voyage of 1702–3: see Waters, Art of Navigation (note 15 above), p. 203, and passim on the history of log books in general.
The first geometrical text in Russia was a manuscript of 1625 of which the greater part is a barely comprehensible literal translation of parts of Aaron Rathborne’s The Surveyor (London, 1616) with an engraved title page cut from Een nieu constich boeck (Rees, 1608),
which in turn was copied roughly from Peter Apian’s Instrumentbuch (Ingolstadt, 1533):
see W. F. Ryan, ‘Rathborne’s Surveyor (1616/1625): the first Russian Translation from English?’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, XI (1964) 1–7.
Despite the absolutely literal nature of this translation, right down to the dedication of the book to the Prince of Wales and the misreading of typographical peculiarities, the identification is nevertheless thought to be still doubtful by two Russian scholars who, one must assume, were unable to inspect a copy of Rathborne: see O.E. Kosheleva, R. Simonov, ‘Novoe o pervoi russkoi knige po teoreticheskoi geometrii XVII veka i ego avtore’, Kniga. Issledovaniia i materialy, XLII (Moscow, 1981) 63–73 (these two authors do, however, add valuable information , especially about the translator, a Greek with an English wife, known in England as ‘Lord John Albertus’).
The engraving has also been ascribed to another source — Apian’s Instrumentbuch itself — despite obvious differences: see Iu. A. Belyi, ‘Ob istochnike izobrazheniia astronomicheskikh instrumentov v russkoi matematicheskoi rukopisi nachala XVII veka’, Istoriko-astronomicheskie issledovaniia, XXV (1982) 18–5. Belyi considers the manuscript to be a Russian work based on Euclid, Archimedes, Petrus Ramus and John Speidell, but offers no evidence.
M. I. Belov, O. V. Ovsiannikov, V. F. Starkov, Mangazeia. Mangazeiskii morskoi khod, ch. 1 (Leningrad, 1980) pp. 126–7.
V. L. Chenakal, ‘Prakticheskaia astronomiia v Rossii dopetrovskogo i petrovskogo vremeni’ in Voprosy geografii petrovskogo vremeni, ed. M.I. Belova (Leningrad, 1975) pp. 42–3, discusses the undoubted use of compasses for navigation in Russian waters in the seventeenth century;
M. I. Belov, Arkticheskoe moreplavanie s drevneishikh vremen do serediny XIX veka (Moscow, 1956) p. 214, records the purchase of eight ‘boat compasses’ by the Solovetskii Monastery in 1645.
D. O. Sviatskii, ‘Zvezdnoe nebo arkhangelogorodskikh moreplavatelei’, Izvestiia Russkogo obshchestva liubitelei mirovedeniia, VI, 4(28) (1917); V. V. Bobynin, Ocherki istorii razvitiia fiziko-matematicheskikh znanii v Rossii, vol. I, 2 (Moscow, 1893) pp. 12–21.
For some further analysis and discussion see W. F. Ryan, ‘Astronomical and Astrological Terminology in Old Russian Literature’ (unpublished D.Phil, dissertation, Oxford, 1969) pp. 79–86.
On matka see W. F. Ryan, ‘Some Observations on the History of the Astrolabe and of Two Russian Words: astrolabija and matka’ in Studies in Slavic Linguistics and Poetics in Honor of Boris O. Unbegaun (New York and London, 1968) pp. 155–64.
See P. Antonio Sartori, ‘Regesto Coronelliano’, Miscellaneo Francescana, LI, 1–4 (1951) pp. 253–4, letter to Magliabecchi. Coronelli’s survey of the ships of the world Navi ed altre sorti di barche usate da nazione differenti (1697) was written, as it says on the title-page ‘Per Instruzione della Nazione Moscovita’.
See also B. L. Bogorodskii, ‘Starshaia sistema morskoi terminologii v epokhu Petra I-go’, Uchenye zapiski Leningrad-skogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta im. Gertsena, LIX (1948) 15–50; Florovskii, ‘Moskovskie navigatory’; Solov’ev, ‘Russkie navigatory’ (note 33 above).
See R. Avery, ‘Foreign Influence on the Nautical Terminology of Russian in the Eighteenth Century’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s., XIV (1981) pp. 74–77. For a description of the galley fleet in Peter’s time see [Deane], History of the Russian Fleet (note 10 above), pp. 94–6.
For an excellent survey of the spheres of influence of Italian, Dutch, and English see Avery, ‘Foreign Influence’. See also Fred Otten, Untersuchungen zu den Fremd- und Lehnwörtern bei Peter dem Grossen, Slavistische Forschungen L (Cologne-Vienna, 1985);
Sarah Whittal, A Study of English Nautical Loanwords in the Russian Language of the Eighteenth Century (Frankfurt, 1985),
and C. A. Davids, ‘On the Diffusion of Nautical Knowledge from the Netherlands to North-East Europe 1550–1850’ in From Dunkirk to Danzig. Shipping and Trade in the North Sea and the Baltic, 1350–1850. Essays in Honour of J. A. Faber (Hilversum, 1988) passim.
Older studies are: N. A. Smirnov, ‘Zapadnoe vliianie na russkii iazyk v petrovskuiu epokhu’, Sbornik Otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imp. Akademii nauk, 88 (1910) 2;
I. K. Smorgonskii, Korablestroitel’nye i nekotorye morskie terminy nerusskogo proiskhozhdeniia (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936);
B.L. Bogorodskii, ‘Star-shaia sistema morskoi terminologii v epokhu Petra I-go’, Uchenye zapiski Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta im. Gertsena, LIX (1948) pp. 15–50;
and more specifically for Dutch terms A.A. Kruaze van der Kop, ‘K voprosu o gollandskikh terminakh po morskomu delu v russkom iazyke’, Izvestiia Otdeleniia russkogo iazyka Imp. Akademii nauk, XV, 4 (1910) 1–72. In all these studies the paucity of navigation terms is very evident.
For example asansion dret for French ascension droite ‘right ascension’: S. I. Mordvinov, Kniga polnago sobraniia o navigatsii (St Petersburg, 1748–53, printed by the Naval Academy printing house).
French influence, and in particular Peter’s considerable purchases of French instruments at the time of his visit to Paris in 1717, should not be forgotten when discussing Peter’s scientific and technical contacts: see E.A. Kniazhetskaia, ‘Nauchnye sviazi Rossii i Frantsii pri Petre I’, Voprosy istorii (1981) 5, p. 96;
E.A. Kniajetskaia et V.L. Chenakal, ‘Pierre le Grand et les fabricants français d’instruments scientifiques’, Revue d’histoire des sciences, XXVIII, 3 (1975) 243–58.
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Ryan, W.F. (1990). Navigation and the Modernisation of Petrine Russia: Teachers, Textbooks, Terminology. In: Bartlett, R., Hartley, J. (eds) Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20897-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20897-5_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-20899-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-20897-5
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