Ivan Fyodorov

Printer and inventor
Ivan Fyodorov was the founder of book printing and book publishing in Russia and Ukraine. He was also a skilled cannon maker and the inventor of a multi-barreled mortar.

Fyodorov’s date of birth is unknown and it is variously given between the years 1510-1525. In 1532 he graduated from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland with a bachelor's degree. It is believed that until 1550 he lived in Ukraine, where he became known as a cannon maker and he is said to be the inventor of a multi-barreled mortar. From the early 1550s he was deacon of Saint Nicholas Gostunsky Church in Moscow, where, from 1553, he oversaw the construction of a printing house commissioned by Tsar Ivan IV (r. 1530 – 1584). Together with his assistant Peter Timofeevich Mstislavets, on 19 April 1563 he began on a book called Acts and Epistles of the Saint Apostles or simply Apostle. It was the first printed Russian book that can be dated and it set basic rules for Russian book printing - new Cyrillic fonts and other standards which defined the appearance of Slavonic books for centuries to come.

Possibly because of protests from the traditional scribes Fyodorov and his assistant left Moscow and opened a new printing shop in Zabludovo (then Grand Duchy of Lithuania, now Hrodna region in Belarus) on the premises of the estate of hetman Jeremi Chodkiewicz. In 1572 Fyodorov he set out for Lvov, Ukraine’s largest economic and cultural center at the time, and resumed his work as a printer with his son at the St. Onuphrius Monastery the following year. In 1565 he was in service of Konstantin Ostrozhsky, the owner of the large Ostrog (or Ostrih) Estate and the foremost magnate of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth., and was placed in charge of the Derman Monastery. In 1577–9 he established the Ostrog Press, where, in 1581, he published the Ostrog Bible, the first complete printed Slavonic Bible, which remains of prime historical, textual, and confessional importance. After a quarrel with Ostrozhsky, he moved to Lvov where he died on 5 December 1583.