Solanus, New Series, Vol 19

2005·11.5 MB·English

ISSN 0038-0903
SOLANUS
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR RUSSIAN & EAST EUROPEAN
BIBLIOGRAPHIC, LIBRARY & PUBLISHING STUDIES

SOLANUS
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR RUSSIAN & EAST EUROPEAN
BIBLIOGRAPHIC, LIBRARY & PUBLISHING STUDIES
New Series Vol. 19 2005
CONTENTS - , >
W F. Ryan, Russia and the Magic of Cats page 7
A. Kh. GorfunkeV, Zhiznennaia udacha: znakomstvo i perepiska s Dzhonom
Simmonson 14
Villi Petritskii, Pobornik knigi i slavianskoi kul'tury. Nechto vrode memuara 22
James H. Billington, Tribute to John Simmons, on the Occasion of a
Milestone Birthday 30
Iaroslav Isaievych, Fedir Maksymenko: The Fate of a Bibliologist in the
Context of Good, Bad and ‘Mixed’ Periods in the History of Ukrainian
Scholarship 32
Gary Marker, Plach Smirennogo Knigoveda, or the Tale of a Document Worth
Publishing 41
A. A. Guseva, Izdaniia moskovskogo Pechatnogo dvora v period
patriarshestva Nikona 48
A. V Voznesenskii, K voprosu o retseptsii Ostrozhskoi Biblii na moskovskom
Pechatnom dvore (na materiale Psaltiri) 55
Ralph Cleminson, John Joseph De Camillis and his Italian book 61
E. L. Nemirovskii, Dzhon Simmons i mirovoi fond izdanii Ivana Fedorova 67
I. V Pozdeeva, Regional'nye opisaniia rannepechatnoi kirillicheskoi knigi i
ikh istoriko-kurturnoe znachenie 73
N. A. Kopanev, Peterburgskie podpischiki na pervoe londonskoe izdanie
‘Magasin des enfans’ M. Leprens de Bomon 84
C. L. Drage, Model Conversations in P. I. Zhdanov’s Angliska Grammatika 92
W E. Butler, Thomas Baston and Peter the Great 104
Anthony Cross, Sir Arthur Helps’s Oulita the Serf (1858) 107
Edward Kasinec, with Robert H. Davis, Jr, The 1866 ‘Russian Souvenirs’ of
Gustavus Vasa Fox 113
Marianna Tax Choldin, E. Iu. Genieva and I. A. Bordachenkov, Pis'mo L. I.
Rylova v TsK KPSS i ego posledstviia dlia VGBIL i samogo Rylova 120
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Tracing ‘Trophy’ Books in Russia 131
Gregory Walker, Three Thousand Theses: The Bibliography of British
Theses in Slavonic Studies 146
Contributors 152
Price of this volume: £10.00 sterling or SI 5 U.S., including postage. Sterling
payment should be sent to the Solanus Business Manager (address below)
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Solanus Business Manager
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Other enquiries should be sent to the Editor (e-mail: [email protected]).
Solanus is published by the School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London (SSEES UCL), Senate House, Malet Street,
London WC1E7HU
© SSEES 2005
The views expressed in Solanus are not necessarily those of SSEES
or of the Editorial Board
Typeset in Plantin and Times Cyrillic at Oxford University Computing Services
by Stephen Ashworth Typesetting, Oxford.
Cover motif: Detail from I. A. Bilibin, ‘Kot uchenyi’, frontispiece to A. S. Pushkin,
Skazka o zolotom petushke, St Petersburg, Ekspeditsiia zagotovleniia
gosudarstvennykh bumag, 1910.
Editorial Board
Professor C. L. Drage, Imperial College, University of London
Professor W. Gareth Jones, Professor Emeritus, University of Wales, Bangor
Dr Martyn Rady, School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London
Dr W. F. Ryan, Emeritus Professor of Russian Studies, The Warburg
Institute, University of London
Mr Ray Scrivens, Cambridge University Library
Dr Kate Sealey-Rahman, School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London
Dr Christine Thomas, London, Editor
Dr Gregory Walker, Oxford
Business Manager
Milan Grba, The British Library
International Advisory Panel
Dr J. J. Brine, Lancaster
Professor W. E. Butler, The Vinogradoff Institute, University College London
The Very Rev. Alexander Nadson, Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library,
London
John S. G. Simmons, Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford
Dr Miranda Beaven Remnek, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor Jeffrey Brooks, John Hopkins University, Baltimore
Professor Marianna Tax Choldin, Mortenson Distinguished Professor
Emerita, Chicago
Edward Kasinec, Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library
Professor Gary Marker, University of New York at Stony Brook
Dr Wojciech Zalewski, Stanford University Libraries
Dr Horst Rohling, Bochum
Dr Jurgen Warmbrunn, Herder-Institut, Marburg
Dedication to John Simmons
The editors and contributors offer this volume (not a Festschrift) to John Sim¬
mons on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, and hope its contents will leave
him in no doubt of our deep affection for him and our gratitude for the inspi¬
ration, help and encouragement he has given to two generations of Slavonic
scholars, especially bibliographers, librarians, and historians of the book.
J. S. G. Simmons
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)
https://archive.org/details/solanusnewseries_0019
Russia and the Magic of Cats
W. F. Ryan
The variety of books on a surprising range of subjects which contain expres¬
sions of gratitude to John Simmons is a testimony to his erudition, to his gen¬
erosity, and to his strongly held belief that it is the duty of librarians to be
helpful. Being helpful, in John’s case, meant not only maintaining a vast inter¬
national correspondence and an information service which alerted his many
contacts to new, usually Russian, publications in their subject, but also himself
editing books and writing articles on a wide range of subjects encompassing
Russian history, abecediaries, printing history, paper and watermark history
(on which he is a world authority), All Souls College and other English an¬
tiquities. In fact John Simmons is an outstanding example of that now endan¬
gered species, the scholar librarian.
In all this scholarly activity there is, however, no mention of one other im¬
portant aspect of John’s life—and since this is a non-Festschrift I venture to
offer a non-bibliothecary tribute to it. As anyone will know who was ever
taught by John at Oxford (he did that too, excellently), visited him, or has
been privileged to be on his extensive Christmas card list, John is a self-
confessed ailurophile—indeed, he introduced most of us to this relatively un¬
familiar word (not in the old OED but now flourishing on the internet). Some
have suspected that at least one of the Cs on the Simmons Tie Club tie really
stands for ‘cat-loving’. The Christmas cards, usually on feline themes, and
annotated, alas, are not listed in the Simmons Autobibliography} They are,
nevertheless, amusing and very collectable occasional pieces which linger in
the memory. We shall surely not forget the sad spectacle of the Hanged Cat,
or the ingenious escape of the Macchiavellian Feline from the Comic Lion in
E. C. Bentley’s fable (with the bonus of the cat watermark of Hermann Katz,
1805), or the imaginative reconstruction of Nelson’s cat, which would have
been a credit to Gerasimov himself, had he ever thought of it, or the supposi¬
titious cat of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (‘Le vray portrait du chat du grand
Due de Muscouie’, 1663) or the explication of the Kot kazanskii, or the Mice
burying the Cat, all of which have at one time or another graced our festive
mantelpieces and excited the curiosity of our friends and family.
As one of many grateful recipients over the years of much wisdom and guid¬
ance, not to mention Christmas cards, I therefore offer on this occasion a few
observations on cats in Russia, from the perspective of one of my own current
1 J. S. G. Simmons, An Autobibliography 1933-1974 (Oxford, 1975), 18 pp. Portrait fron¬
tispiece, no index (in the Russian manner). Idem, An Autobibliography: Supplement 1975-1984
(Oxford, 1985), vi, 10 pp. Portrait frontispiece. ISBN 0-9504373-8-7.
8 Solanus 2005
interests, Russian magic, one of the few topics to which John has not, as far as
I can discover, turned his scholarly attention.
The references to cats in the earlier Russian literature are not numerous;
there is nothing, for example, to match the ninth-century Irish monk’s po¬
etic tribute to his cat Pangur Ban.2 In fact the earliest Russian reference to
cats appears to be in the Laurentian Chronicle, sub anno 1096, where a quo¬
tation from the apocalyptic Methodius of Patara mentions cats among the
disgusting things eaten by the race of Japheth, a practice later condemned in
a fourteenth-century penitential.3 The Nikonian Chronicle, sub anno 1230,
records the famine of that year and describes how the starving Russians re¬
sorted to cannibalism and eating cats, dogs and horses. This evident unease
about cats re-emerges later in folk beliefs about the uncleanness of cats and
hints at their demonic associations. For example, to prevent a dead koldun
(magician) from returning to haunt a house as a revenant (which in Rus¬
sian belief he might easily do), it was necessary to leave a roast cat for him
in the stove.4 No less distressing to cat-lovers than the evidence of medieval
ailurophagy,5 but closer to our theme and to more recent folk belief, is a ref¬
erence to devils taking the form of cats, their transmogrification as it were, in
the seventeenth-century Zhitie of Sergei Nuromskii.6
Russian popular beliefs about cats are as ambivalent as their often similar
English equivalents, but their magical and otherwordly associations are unmis¬
takable.7 The cat is associated with the domovoi, the house goblin in East Slav
popular demonology who may actually take the form of a cat, and the cat is the
first animal to be sent into a new house.8 From ancient times the behaviour of
2 I know this to be a favourite poem of John’s because he once treated me to a mini-lecture
on the first translator of the poem, Kuno Meyer, the great German Celtologist and at one time
Professor of Celtic at Liverpool.
3 Slovar' russkogo iazyka XI—XVII vv. (Moscow, 1975-)? s.v. kotka.
4 A. N. Afanas'ev, Poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu, 3 vols (Moscow, 1865-69), vol. I,
p. 650.
5 Also not in the OED, or other dictionaries of English, but its existence is established by
the internet Wikipedia in a comment on an election press release (12 September 2003) from
the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, which referred to rival Ontario Liberal Party leader
Dalton McGuinty as an ‘evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet’.
6 Slovar' russkogo iazyka XI-XVII vv. (note 3), s.v. kotka.
1 O. V. Belova, ‘Narodnaia Bibliia’: Vostochnoslavianskie etiologicheskie legendy (Moscow, 2004),
pp. 178-79, notes the East Slavonic legend of the cat being created from the fur glove of the
Virgin Mary, and the belief that the cat is either a clean animal because it is the first to welcome
the newly dead into heaven, or an unclean animal because it ate mice and rats which were devils
in animal form. Belova also charts the widespread belief that cats and dogs had to be fed with the
first bread made from the first corn of the season (ibid., IV.2.). More generally see Stith Thomson,
Motif-Index of Folk Literature, rev. edn (Bloomington, 1955-58): G303.3.3 (devil as cat); G.252
and D702.1.1 (witch as cat).
8 For some discussion and bibliography of this, and of the role of the cat as the functional
equivalent of the bear in several folklore contexts see B. A. Uspenskii, Filologicheskie razyskaniia v
oblasti slavianskikh drevnostei (Moscow, 1982), p. 102, n. 141. In Finland too the cat may be the