he reform of Cyrillic type took place in Russia during the reign of Tsar Peter (1689–1725). The old poluustav type was preserved only for religious literature, while for all other publications, Peter introduced a new style that imitated the forms of contemporary Western type; in later days, the new type became known as Civil Type (grazhdanskiy shrift). The reform partially altered the structure of the Russian alphabet, too: the use of European (Arabic) numerals was introduced, and punctuation and caps usage were put in order. Thus, Cyrillic took on the form of roman serif type, in much the same way that Muscovy was dressed up in European clothes. In fact, the introduction of Civil Type meant the revision of the Cyrillic alphabet’s structure and the restyling of its letterforms based on the shapes of Western (Latin) letters. Nevertheless, from the point of view of modern type design, the reformed Cyrillic type introduced by Peter could have been of a higher quality, had the developers of the Civil Type relied on the best examples of Western typefaces of the 17th and early 18th centuries.
Tsar Peter and the Prerequisites of the Reform of Cyrillic Type
In 1689 the seventeen-year-old Peter was declared sole tsar and ruler of all Russia. From the very beginning of his reign, all his unbelievable energy was directed to reforming the Russian state: its army, its economy, its governance, its culture. As a result of these superhuman efforts, over a reign of more than 30 years, Peter managed to change the course of Russian history completely, transforming Russia from a closed, self-contained Asian country into a more open state that was oriented toward Europe. Although these reforms were forcibly spread from the top, and they cost a lot of victims, the Russian Empire became a fact of European history. Peter’s reform of Cyrillic type of 1708–10, which brought the Cyrillic alphabet closer to the form of roman, played a very important role in this orientation of Russia to the culture of the most developed countries.
Peter I in Holland. Unknown engraver. Etching. 1717. The National Library of Russia.
At the end of the 17th century, poluustav was the only style of Cyrillic printing type. It had changed very little since the middle of the 16th century, from the time of the Russian printing pioneer Ivan Fedorov. In its structure it was a form of medieval handwriting. Poluustav was rather black in colour and very ornamental, but not very useful for the needs of the new era. The character set of the alphabet no longer matched the phonetics of the living Russian language, and it contained a lot of additional diacritical marks (stresses, marks of aspiration, abbreviations), which considerably complicated the work of the compositor. In addition, numerals were traditionally denoted by letters with special marks (titlos), which made reading scientific and technical texts difficult. Publications printed in poluustav looked like medieval hand-written books, and in their appearance they were very different from European books of the 17th century. However, in the absence of any other type, poluustav was being used for printing both religious and secular literature, including primers and text books, as well as the first Russian newspaper, Vedomosty, which was published at the very beginning of 1703.
Cyrillic printing type of XVII century—poluustav. Tablet. Moscow. Printing House. 1655. Russian State Library.
The newspaper Vedomosti on January 4 1704. Moscow. Printing House. NLR. Electronic copy—Library ImWerden.
Page from Meletius Smotrytsky’s Grammar. Moscow. Printing House. February 2, 1648. RSL.
In 1703, Leontiy Magnitsky’s Arifmetika (Arithmetic) was published; it included information on algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and tables of logarithms. In that publication, European (so-called Arabic) figures were used for the first time instead of Slavic tsifir’ (denotation of numerals by letters). The main text was composed in poluustav, but for mathematical terms Latin and Greek fonts were used. None of these fonts matched with each other in either colour or style. It was probably in comparing this book with Western ones that Peter got the idea of reforming Cyrillic and bringing it closer to the Latin alphabet, i.e., to abandon poluustav and create a “clearer”, lighter style of typeface, which came to be called Civil Type.
Page from Leontiy Magnitsky’s Arifmetika (Arithmetic). Moscow. 1703. Moscow University Library. Electronic copy—Library of MCCME.
In his reform of printing type, Peter I had an august predecessor, who was probably also an exemplary model. The French king Louis, le Roi Soleil, in the second part of his reign also dealt with typographic reform. He ordered the establishment of a Royal Commission for the standardisation of craft, which at its first meeting in January 1693 began with the regulation of typography. For this purpose the engineer Jacques Jaugeon designed, and the punchcutter Philippe Grandjean de Fouchy cut, the so-called Romain du Roi (the King’s Roman) as an “ideal alphabet”. In 1702 that font was used for the luxurious illustrated book Médailles sur les prin-cipaux évènements du règne de Louis le Grand at the Royal Printing House in Paris. Peter had a copy of this book in his library; perhaps these activities of Louis’s served as a model for the Russian tsar. But in its shapes the Romain du Roi was not as different from earlier types as the Civil Type was; it was a variation of contemporary serif type, an “old-style”.
Besides, the French king was not thinking of changing all the fonts in France at once: he just wanted a distinctive new type for his own printing house. The Russian emperor had more holistic intentions.
The title page of the book Medailles sur les principaux evenements du regne entier de Louis le Grand, printed in royal antiqua (Romain de Roi). Paris. 1723. National Library of France, BnF.
Nevertheless, Peter’s typographic reform in Russia was not as natural as, for example, the introduction of roman type in Italy at the end of the 15th century. Roman type was based on the humanist minuscule—the handwriting of educated people of that time. Civil Type had no unified, settled handwriting as its basis. There were several kinds of hands in use at that time: a traditional cursive writing with flourishes, a slower writing (the so-called civil hand) used for official documents, and a lot of transitional forms. The development of Russian cursive handwriting styles was connected to, and influenced by, the Ukrainian and West-Russian hands, not to mention the Latin ones; however, there was as yet no commonly accepted unified style. The type reform was based on royal fancy, which could not be argued with, rather than on mature public necessity. The same ideological motives underlay Peter’s decrees that men should shave their beards, smoke tobacco, and wear Dutch clothes, his construction of a European-style capital in the middle of forests and swamps, and his publishing of books composed in a Cyrillic equivalent of roman type: the tsar wanted his country to look European. And maybe the forced reform of Russian type was caused by his desire to have Russian books, in form and structure, imitate the books published in Europe.
The civil hand. 1703.
Cursive. Certified Charter Confirming the Election of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov as Tsar of Moscow State. XVII century. RSL.
The type reform of 1708–1710 was not Peter’s first attempt to latinise the Cyrillic alphabet. The forms of Civil Type were preechoed by the engraved lettering on book titles, geographical maps, and other print, as well as by the types of Dutch printers, who at Peter’s request printed Russian books and maps in the late 17th—early 18th centuries. Both prototypes presented an uneasy combination of certain Latin capital letters, whose shape was similar to the Cyrillic ones, and specific Cyrillic glyphs taken from the lowercase poluustav of the 17th century.
Amsterdam Cyrillic caps of Thesing’s printshop, 1699-1707.
The lowercase letters of the Dutch typefaces were related to both the civil hand and poluustav. This was probably the reason why Peter finally took a dislike to Dutch printing and made the decision to move the design of the new type to Russia.
The Number and the Form of Petrine Civil Type Characters
As a result of Peter’s reform, the number of characters in the Russian alphabet decreased from 45 to 38. Characters inherited from the Greek alphabet like w (omega) and j (psi) and ligatures o (ot) and n (os); h (yus, large) and m (yus, small), and also a variant of the z (zemlya), were dropped. Instead of the є character (open e) the letter э was introduced, and the character y (ya) was replaced by the letter я. Diacritical marks, abbreviation marks, and Slavic tsifir’ (denotation of the figures by letters) were abandoned; European ((“old-style”) figures and punctuation marks were introduced; and the use of capital letters was systematised. In the books set in Civil Type, standard (roman-style) caps mark the beginning of sentences, names, and some important notions; the use of poluustav caps became limited to the initial capitals. Compositors could divide the long words (and they are many in the Russian language!) with hyphens. Thus, the appearance of the Petrine book became very similar to that of the European one.
The forms of the type approved by Peter are fairly consistent in both its variants (1708 and 1710). The proportion of its characters, the contrast, the relationship of the cap-height and the x-height, the character of round forms, the shape of serifs, and other details are all clearly influenced by the old-style Dutch (Baroque) roman, especially when compared to poluustav. It becomes especially clear in the characters common to both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets and in the initial versions of n, p, m. Most of the characters that are specific to the Cyrillic alphabet are also styled after Western models. Some glyphs of the new type, or their details, have a shape very close to the letters of Russian cursive and “civil” hands. The legs of К, к and Я, я have a softly curved sinuous shape resembling the form of the similar stroke of the Romain du Roi R. Several glyphs of the new typeface retained the general form of the poluustav, though even these glyphs have somewhat Westernised shapes.
However, in spite of the apparent similarity to the Baroque Dutch roman, on closer examination the Civil Type is significantly different; some researchers even regard it as a kind of Transitional style (or Réale). In its colour it is a bit lighter than most of the contemporary Dutch types; its serifs are rather fine and almost unbracketed, like the serifs of the Romain du Roi. In the large size, only some of the letters resemble the construction of their Dutch roman counterparts, and even these have considerable differences in the details. The new à, without a ball terminal and with the top of the bowl bulging, does not resemble its typical Western relative at all; such a shape only occurs in handwritten samples of Giovanni Francesco Cresci, dated 1570.
Civil Type, large size, 1708.
In the Dutch roman of the late 17th—early 18th century, the M (similar to Capitalis Monumentalis) almost always has inclined lateral stems, and its middle diagonals meet at the base line. In the Petrine type, the side stems of the M are absolutely vertical, and the diagonals meet almost in the middle of the character height. Such a structure can be found only in the M of Jan Thesing’s printshop in Amsterdam, where Russian books were printed at the request of Peter the Great, and in Russian geographical maps, engraved book titles, and calendars of the period. Forms of C without the beak on the bottom terminal and double-sided beaks of C, S, s could be found in Western romans from the beginning of the 18th century, but they are not very typical of those types, and they have, again, analogues in the engraved inscriptions on Russian maps and calendars. In roman type, the double-sided beaks in C and especially in S first appear in earnest at the end of the first third of the 18th century, and a form of M with vertical side stems can be found only in the mid-18th century.
On closer examination, the design of some letters in the Civil Type is different from the structure of similar Latin characters. For example, in the letters А, У, у, Х, х there are no internal serifs at the ends of diagonal strokes. And the end of the left top stroke in the initial variants of П, n, P, p, m is not at all similar to the Latin analogues. A person familiar with Latin script would never draw letters of such a shape. One can imagine that the desire to draw those letters in the style of a Latin type, with a triangular entry serif, ran into an absolute ignorance of its design pattern.
These deviations from the conventional Western glyph pattern cannot be just accidental. For the Dutch craftsmen who engraved punches for the Russian tsar, it would have been much easier to use the familiar forms of Latin letters. Apparently, the reason had to do with the original design models of those glyphs.
All of this applies to the large size of the Civil Type (equal to approximately 36 point). In the fonts of the medium size (approximately 12 point) and the small size (approximately 10 point), A, П, P, T, n, p, m show the well-known forms of the Dutch roman. The shape of a and y in the medium and small sizes is also very close to the roman. Only X, x persistently has no serifs. It is interesting to note that К, к in the large size has an upper diagonal stroke ending with a double-sided horizontal serif (like the one in the corresponding roman character), while similar letters in the medium and small sizes at this point have drop-shaped endings.
These deviations from the conventional Western glyph pattern cannot be just accidental. For the Dutch craftsmen who engraved punches for the Russian tsar, it would have been much easier to use the familiar forms of Latin letters. Apparently, the reason had to do with the original design models of those glyphs.
A Brief History of Cyrillic Type
Based on Peter’s surviving correspondence with his associates, the first drawings of the new Russian letters, in three sizes, were made in January 1707 by a military engineer and draftsman whose name was Kuhlenbach; he was serving at the Russian military headquarters under the command of Prince Menshikov. This was during the Great Northern War against Sweden, when the headquarters was constantly relocating, depending on where military operations were taking place. The sketches of the new letters were handed to Kuhlenbach by Peter himself at the end of 1706, when he arrived at headquarters, which was then located at Zholkva near Lvov. It is quite possible that Peter made the sketches himself. Despite a very wide range of design references for the Civil Type (Western romans, the Russian “civil hand”, poluustav), its author showed remarkable creativity and inventiveness in devising the characters that were specific to the Cyrillic alphabet, and achieved considerable visual integrity. None of the known engraving artists contemporary with Peter could have been the author of the sketches, although the form of some letters in the Civil Type resembles the legends on etchings by Adriaan Schoonebeeck, Peter Piquart, Alexey Zubov, and other engravers of the Petrine period. These engravers certainly knew the structure of the letterforms, and would have placed the serifs in the right places. Of course no one would have dared correct the drawings of the tsar himself: that is why Kuhlenbach copied them most carefully. The similarities to the Dutch roman in the small sizes of the Civil Type can be explained by the fact that in small sizes, differences of form are harder to notice, so Kuhlenbach drew them in a more conventional style.
Detail of the title page of Bruce’s Calendar. Engraving, 1709.
Working from the sketches he received, Kuhlenbach prepared artwork for 32 lowercase letters and four capitals (А, Д, Е, Т) in three sizes. Artwork for the other capitals was never completed—most likely for lack of time—and they had to be produced based on sketches of the lowercase letters, blown up to the cap-height. Initially Peter wanted to invite Dutch craftsmen over to Moscow, so they would both produce a new type on the spot, and set up a printing operation modelled on Western practices, and then train Russian printers. However, having a punchcutter move to Russia proved too expensive: at the time there were only two such specialists in Amsterdam, both of whom were overloaded with work and not eager to go to faraway Moscow. So the decision was made to have the entire set of punches and matrices in three sizes manufactured in Amsterdam, based on Kuhlenbach’s drawings. Simultaneously, copies of the drawings were given to the craftsmen of the Moscow Printing Yard for parallel manufacture of the new letters.
Amsterdam Civil Type lowercase, 1707.
According to the information contained in Peter’s letters, in June 1707 he received a printed specimen of the medium-size type, and in September the proofs of the large and small sizes. The speed of manufacturing and the technical quality of the punches, matrices, and sorts of the new type speak well of the Dutch punchcutter’s skills (we do not know his name). However, the craftsman did not even try to make sense of the letter shapes he was cutting: he carefully reproduced Kuhlenbach’s patterns, retaining all the absurdities of the originals, including the absence of serifs in some glyphs, and the strange shapes of a, p, n and m: he might have thought those forms were specific to Cyrillic alphabet.
At the same time, at the Moscow Printing Yard, the letter-founders Mikhail Yefremov, Grigory Alexandrov, and Vasily Petrov were making their own variant of the new type according to the drawings they had been sent. But when the Moscow letter-founders’ effort was compared with the specimen sent from Amsterdam, it seemed less successful, and their work was stopped until the Dutch fonts could arrive in Russia. At the end of 1707, three specially invited Dutch printers, together with the type and their printing press, reached Moscow via Arkhangelsk. The first book composed with the new Civil Type, Geometria Slavensky Zemlemerie, was printed in March 1708; it was followed by several others.
But the development of the new type was not finished. After some hand composition tests, the tsar decided to change the form of a few letters, and to add several missing letters from the traditional Russian alphabet. But when Peter sent sketches of the additional letters to Mogilev (where the Army headquarters had moved) in April 1708, Kuhlenbach failed to notice any difference between them and the original letters, so he simply repeated the original designs of these characters, based on the old sketches. Unsatisfied, Peter sent the sketches back again and ordered him to do the work anew. Finally, based on new drawings that Kuhlenbach made in July 1708, Peter ordered that additional letters should be cut in Moscow (at the Printing Yard) and simultaneously in Amsterdam.
The title page of Geometria Slavensky Zemlemerie. Moscow. 1708.
In Moscow, in the autumn of 1708, 21 uppercase letters and 21 lowercase letters were cut in the medium size, and 17 lowercase letters in the small size. They were manufactured by Grigory Alexandrov and Vasily Petrov, letter-founders at the Printing Yard—the best craftsman, Mikhail Yefremov, having died the previous spring. In Amsterdam in 1709, 18 additional lowercase letters were cut in all three sizes. Some of these letters were variants of existing ones; others were letters that had been missing earlier. In the new variants, most of the odder features of the letterforms were made less eccentric, and in general the type became more placid. But in the process, some of the letterforms lost a part of their expressiveness. For example, the lowercase д now simply repeated the upper case, and a charming handwritten form with a loop at the bottom was rejected. If at the start the capital letters had been based on the lowercase letterforms, then after the proofreading some lowercase letters (д, и, п, т) ended up based on the uppercase letterforms. And lowercase letters from the medium size were simply used as capitals for the small size (25 letters out of 34 are the same in their form).
In Petrine books, among the lowercase letters in the large size one can also find capital А, Б, Д, Е, Т made in Moscow that are equal in height to the lowercase letters. Some researchers presume that they were small caps. But I believe that these are the remnants of Peter’s experiments aimed at increasing the number of type sizes. (It is unlikely that at that time the tsar understood the need for small caps, if indeed he had any concept of them at all). As a result of all these changes, the Cyrillic roman included mainly rectangular forms, and its lowercase letters became hardly different from the uppercase ones.
Additional Amsterdam Civil Type lowercase, 1709.
It took the craftsmen in Holland about a year to manufacture the additional letters. During the same period, the Moscow letters were redone several times: there were at least four such rounds of proofing and correction. Peter was engaged in correcting the Civil Type during the most dramatic events of the Great Northern War, in which the land forces of the Swedish king Carl were defeated on 27 June 1709 at the Battle of Poltava. The Dutch punches of the additional letters finally arrived in Moscow in September 1709. It was probably in October that the last proof of the new alphabet, with all the final, corrected letters from both Amsterdam and Moscow, was printed. On 18 January 1710, Peter visited the Printing Yard and approved imprints of the alphabet. Then he did the final proof—crossing out the poluustav characters and the characters o (ot), w (omega), and j (psi), and the first versions of the new type characters—and wrote with his own hand on the inner side of the case: “Симы литеры печатать исторические и манифактурныя книги. А которыя подчернены, тех вышеписанных книгах не употреблять” (Use these letters for printing historical and technical books. And those which are crossed out do not use [in] the above described books). The first page of this model alphabet is dated: “Дано лета Господня 1710, Генваря в 29 день” (29 January 1710). The reform of the Cyrillic alphabet was finally complete—although the early forms of the new letters, rejected by the reforming tsar, were still in use alongside the approved ones up until the 1740s, when new Cyrillic types were developed.
Since European old-style numerals were in use in Russian books even before the Petrine reform, it is quite possible that they were not specially ordered. More likely, the tsar’s agents in Europe purchased punches and matrices of numerals and punctuation marks, together with fonts of roman type, along with other equipment, materials, books, and luxury products. It is also possible that Western merchants brought them, at Peter’s request. We know that the letter-founder Mikhail Yefremov was casting roman fonts, which must have been of foreign origin, as early as 1703. In the first books composed in the new fonts, at least three sizes of minuscule numerals from several types were used, as well as roman periods, commas, colons, semicolons, hyphens, brackets, and braces. The fact that in the earliest publications they do not always match the size of the rest of the text and do not always align to the baseline proves that in the early days, numerals from other roman fonts of similar sizes were used. Although this has never been properly investigated, one can suppose, judging from later publications, that by the end of Peter’s reign, when there were already several printshops in St. Petersburg, the new capital of the country, Russian craftsmen had learned how to manufacture their own numerals and punctuation marks.
First page of final Azbuka with Peter’s corrections, 1710.
Peter’s reformed Cyrillic type was later called grazhdanskiy shrift (Civil Type) because it was used for the composition of secular literature. During the reign of Peter the Great, the Civil Type was used in the printing of over 400 books; the Church Slavonic poluustav in its pre-reform shape was used only for the printing needs of the church.
Since the Petrine type reform, the latinised form of Cyrillic has been traditional in Russia for nearly 300 years, and Cyrillic type has developed in parallel to Latin, repeating virtually all the stages of its development and changes of style: Classical, Romantic, Art Nouveau, Constructivist, Post-Modernist, etc.
To be continued.
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