Fedorov, Ivan

Date of birth unknown; died 1733. Russian navigator.

As a member of the expedition of the vessel Sv. Gavriil, Fedorov crossed the Kamchatka Peninsula overland from Bol’sheretsk to Nizhnekamchatsk in the spring of 1731. In 1732 he took command of the Sv. Gavriil. Fedorov and his companions, among them the geodesist M. S. Gvozdev, later reached the Dezhnev Cape and explored the Diomede Islands. Fedorov was the first to map the American shore of the Bering Strait.

(Ivan Fedorov Moskvitin). Born circa 1510; died Dec. 5 (14), 1583, in L’vov; buried at the Onufrii Monastery. Founder of book printing in Russia and the Ukraine.

Fedorov was a deacon of the Church of Nikola Gostunskii in the Kremlin in Moscow. He probably worked at the “anonymous” printing house in Moscow in the 1550’s. From Apr. 19, 1563, through Mar. 1, 1564, Fedorov and Petr Mstislavets printed the Acts of the Apostles, the first precisely dated Russian printed book. Fedorov analyzed and edited the text extensively before printing the book, which was richly ornamented. Adapting the ornamental techniques used by the school of Feodosii the Isographer, Fedorov created the Old Russian typeface, which he also based on the Muscovite poluustav (seePOLUUSTAV) of the mid-16th century.

Fedorov and Mstislavets printed two editions of a Breviary in Moscow in 1565. In 1566, persecuted by the Josephite church authorities, they left Russia and went to Lithuania, where they founded a new printing house in Zabludovo on the estate of the hetman G. A. Khodkevich. In 1569, Fedorov printed the book An Instructive Gospel there, and in 1570, the Psalter and the Prayer Book. Fedorov then moved to L’vov, where in 1574 he printed a new edition of the Acts of the Apostles with his own afterword, entitled “The Story of How This Printing House Began and How It Developed.” That year he also printed a Primer, the first Russian printed textbook.

Fedorov founded a fourth printing house in Ostrog, on the estate of Prince K. K. Ostrozhskii. There he printed another primer (1578), the New Testament with the Psalter (1580), an alphabetical index entitled A Book That Lists Necessary Things (1580), the Ostrog Bible, which was the first complete Slavonic Bible (1580–81), and Andrei Rymsha’s Chronology (1581).

Fedorov was a versatile metalworker; he cast cannons and invented a mortar with several barrels. A monument to Fedorov (sculptor S. M. Volnukhin) was unveiled in Moscow in 1909.