BASIL THE GREAT, Saint.
OSTROG IMPRINT IN CONTEMPORARY KRAKOW BINDING
Kniga o postnichestve.
Ostrog, P.T. Mstislavets, 1594.£29,500.00
FIRST EDITION IN RUSSIAN. Folio. ff. [8], 160, 192, 142. Cyrillic letter, in red and black. Title within decorated border, woodcut arms of Prince Ostrogski to title verso, full-page woodcut portrait of Basil the Great to last leaf of prelims. A little finger-soiling to some lower outer blank corners, one leaf strengthened at gutter, light waterstaining to last dozen ll., a little softening at end. A very good, clean, well-margined copy in contemporary Polish calf over bevelled wooden boards, spine cracked and restored, two clasps, double blind ruled to a panel design, (upper cover) outer border with blind roll of half figures (King Sigismund and his family, Sigismund Augustus, Bona Sforza, and Catherine), central panel with blind-stamped Crucifixion surrounded by blind-stamped fleurons and blind roll of tendrils, (lower cover) blind roll with King Sigismund and his family to outer border and grille de St Laurent in central panel. A few repairs, lower cover scuffed. Ms annotations in two hands, a couple of words per page, to lower blank margins of first third of the book: dated 1635 (lighter ink) and 15 April 1658, and 9 lines of probably C17 ms notes at rear.
Handsome first edition in Russian of the works of St Basil the Great, with a fine full-page woodcut of the author. It was produced at the famous Ostrog printing press by Pyotr Mstislavets, former collaborator of Ivan Fëdorov, one of the fathers of Russian printing. Together they produced the first dated Russian printed book as well as the ‘Ostrog Bible’, the first bible in Church Slavonic. After founding the Moscow Pechatnyj Dvor (Printing Yard), Fëdorov and Mstislavets established several printing presses in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and eventually one in Ostrog, Ukraine. Funded by the prince Konstantin Ostrogski, the Ostrog press focused on the production of books that were important for the Eastern Orthodox Church. Among these imprints were also broadsides and calendars […] to increase the revenue of the press and fund the more expensive religious and academic publications for the students at the local monastery (Lobachev, p.3). Basil the Great (or Vasilij, d. 379AD), Bishop of Caesarea, was one of the most influential Byzantine Church Fathers, admired for his theological arguments against heresy, his preaching and exegetic skills, theorisation of communal monasticism and ideas on the value of classical education. St Basil has remained a major figure, one of the Great Hierarchs, of the Orthodox faith; his ‘Divine Liturgy’ continues to be used in the Orthodox services.
The attractive Polish binding employs a distinctive roll with King Sigismund I and his family which also appears in books bound for the Cracow Academy c.1600, by Wilhelm, a bookbinder who operated there from 1593 to 1623, with another craftsman named Benedykt (Płaszczyńska-Herman, pp.363-4). The bindings places this copy in Cracow at an early date. Though a Catholic area, Krakow hosted nonetheless numerous Orthodox believers, as a consequence of the establishment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. This ‘opened new opportunities for the Orthodox elite. Young offspring of the wealthy Orthodox families had pursued their intellectual endeavours in the most prestigious institutions including the Jagiellonian University’ (Zimmer, pp.158ff.). The 1635 ms ex-libris in Cyrillic says that the book was bequeathed to an Orthodox monastery. The rushed notes dated 1658 run through several blank margins of several gatherings, a few words per leaf, repeat the author’s name and occasionally others, perhaps priests or nuns at the monastery.
Harvard, Newberry, and NYPL copies recorded in the US. Kameneva, Ukrainskie knigi kirill. pechati XVI-XVIII, 7; Zapasko 31. K. Płaszczyńska-Herman, ‘Buying Bound Books in Sixteenth-Century Cracow’, in Print Culture at the Crossroads : The Book and Central Europe (2021); S. Zimmer et al., The Beginning of Cyrillic Printing in Crakow, 1491 (1983); S. Lobachev, ‘Indexers in Cyrillic imprints in early modern Ukraine and Russia’, The Indexer, 38 (2020), pp.11-28.