Our Notes & References

First edition of collected letters by Peter the Great’s father; containing the first Russian book on falcon hunting, edited by the Tsar himself.

Rare on the market: we could not find any copy at auctions in the West.

“The Letters of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich are among the most remarkable monuments of ancient Russian literature. They are extremely lively and directly introduce the reader into the range of concepts and activities of the old time and better than all other historical evidence depict the face and character of the writer”, notes Petr Bartenev (1829-1912), a Russian historian and the main author of the famous 19th-century periodical Russkii Arkhiv [Russian Archive] (our translation here and below).

Bartenev published here a significant part of the tsar’s epistolary legacy, arguing that it still had been “not fully accessible to most readers”. The book is divided in four parts, each accompanied by an introduction, notes and explanations, by Bartenev but also by Sergei Aksakov.

Importantly, it includes the Uriadnik, the Tsar’s own instructions on falcon hunting, and therefore the first Russian work on the theme. Written in 1656, it remained unpublished during more than a century, seeing light first in 1773. Its full title reads: Kniga glagolemaia Uriadnik: Novoe ulozhenie i ustroenie china sokolnichia puti [The New Statute and Arrangement of the Falconer’s Way]. It follows in our edition the Tsar’s 25 letters to Afanasii Matiushkin, his distant relative and childhood playmate who later became the head of the Tsar’s hunting.

Bartenev additionally presents four tsar’s letters to patriarch Nikon, one of which containing a curious and detailed account of the death and funerals of Patriarch Iosif I, two letters to Prince Nikita Ivanovich Odoevskii, a prominent statesman in charge of foreign affairs and one of the richest Russian landowners in the 17th century, and a few letters to the tsar’s family members. In a special appendix, there are also two letters to the Cyril Belozersky monastery, containing notes about the tsar’s uncle, boyar Morozov, and a list of the tsar’s birds of prey with their lovely nicknames.

The book was published at the expense of a wealthy industrialist, collector and publisher Kozma Soldatenkov, whose name is mentioned on the title page. The lithographic frontispiece shows the sovereign’s own handwriting below the portrait; a copy of the last lines of the 6th letter to Matiushkin is attached at the end. Interestingly, the book appeared during the heated discourse between Russian slavophiles and westernizers about the directions of the country’s development: the publication fosters an idyllic image of Russia and its sovereign before Peter the Great’s reforms.

Aleksei Mikhailovich (1629-76), the second tsar from the Romanov dynasty and the father of Peter I, acquired the moniker Tishaishii, or the “most peaceful” of the Russian monarchs for his quiet and sensible nature. In his History of Russian Literature, Dmitri Sviatopolk-Mirskii notes: “The essence of Alexei’s personality is a certain spiritual Epicureanism, manifested in an optimistic Christian faith, in a profound, but unfanatical, attachment to the traditions and ritual of the Church, in a desire to see everyone round him happy and at peace, and in a highly developed capacity to extract a quiet and mellow enjoyment from all things.”

Sviatopolk-Mirskii adds: “A few private letters and an instruction to his falconers is all we have of him.”

Provenance

Unidentified pre-revolutionary shelf label to upper pastedown and small ink bookseller stamps to rear pastedown.

Bibliography

Tumanova O. I. Pisma tsaria Alekseia Mikhailovicha. Serpukhovskii Musei (online); Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Dmitrii. A History of Russian Literature. Northwestern University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8101-1679-0. Page 27; «Kniga, glagolemaia Uriadnik. Novoe Ulozheniia i ustroeniia chinu sokolnichiia puti» s zapisiami tsaria Alekseia Mihailovicha. 400-letie doma Romanovykh (online); Shunkov, Aleksandr. Literaturnoe tvorchestvo tsaria Alekseia Mihailovicha: Epistoliarnoe nasledie, “Uriadnik sokolnichiia puti”. (online)