Our Notes & References

“The finest map of the Moscow to appear during the celebrated reign of Empress Catherine the Great” (Stanford University, online): a finely hand-coloured example of this rather large and attractive plan of the Russian city towards the end of Catherine the Great’s reign.

This is the first printing; the city plan would be reissued in 1796.

Very rare: we are not aware of any other example of this first edition passing through the trade or at auction outside Russia in recent decades, and we could trace only two copies in libraries outside Russia (in LoC, possibly uncoloured, and in the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, with poor colour).

The plan provides a detailed view of the part of Moscow within the Kamer-Kolezhskii rampart (‘val’), and is complete with its extensive captions. Marchenkov’s plan “can be called the first truly modern map of Moscow. [It] shows all for the city’s inner and outer wards, military constructions, streets, squares, parks, rivers, canals and major buildings (all as built or proposed). While many of the details shown had not yet been constructed, Marchenkov’s plan is the first to depict what would become many of the city’s most prominent features in the coming decades. For instance, it is the first printed map to show the Garden and Boulevard rings, which eventually became two of the city’s most prominent features” (Stanford, our underlining).

The plan is particularly decorative, in the Italo-European manner: the title integrates an Imperial eagle bearing a laurel branch, with the coat of arms of Moscow in an oval shield below, and to the right-hand corner of the map (which opens like a torn sheet of paper in a trompe-l’oeil manner) classical Romanesque ruins can be seen, with a tablet in the foreground showing the symbols of the fourteen wards of Moscow.

As indicated at the end of the captions, the plan was compiled and drawn by lieutenant Marchenkov and engraved by Lavrentii Florov. It is also states that the publishing was financed by the Moscow merchant Nikita Kalchugin. This could be an interesting case of clear self-promotion by a Moscow bourgeois, unusually not aristocratic; but it isn’t only this, as it appears that Nikita Kolchugin (1753-1827) was especially involved in the booktrade. Raised in an Old Believer family in the Chernigov governorate, he moved to Moscow in the 1770s, converted to classic Orthodoxy and became a freemason. He founded a booktrade company,and owned already a few bookshops in the city when the celebrated publisher and fellow freemason Nikolai Novikov moved to Moscow in 1779. Kolchiugin became his chief commissioner, and in the next decade he managed the bookselling activities of Novikov’s Printing Company. When Catherine the Great attacked Novikov in th 1790s, Kolchugin also became a target, his shops were sealed by the authorities and most of the books were destroyed. He could however restore parts of the business after 1796.

Bibliography

Klepikov N65; Florov not in Rovinskii Slovar graverov; Simoni P.K., Knizhnaia torgovlia v Moskve XVIII—XIX st. Moskovskie knigoprodavtsy Kolchuginy v ikh knigotorgovoi deiatelnosti i v bytovoi obstanovke, L., 1927; Entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik, M.: Bolshaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia, 1992.