Handwritten books on naval tactics by Admiral S. I. Mordvinov from the collection of the Russian Academy of Sciences Library

The study is devoted to the early stage of the development of maritime training literature in Russia in the 18th century. The article deals with the archaeographic, textual and linguistic features of two handwritten works preserved in the manuscript collections of the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences — the anonymous essay “ABook on the Establishment of a Fleet” (1735) and “ABook on the Evolution of a Fleet” by Admiral S. Mordvinov (1764). As to the 1735 essay, the study also attributes it to Admiral Mordvinov, with both works representing different stages in the preparation of a single textbook on naval tactics, evidently based on the French edition of “L’art des armées navales” (1697) by Professor Paul Hoste. S. Mordvinov gradually improved his textbook in terms of its general structure by reordering its parts, chapters and paragraphs, eliminating structural inconsistencies or omissions found in the earlier versions, and refined its language and style. In a most consistent way, S. Mordvinov conducted lexical editing of the then existing marine terminology in an effort to bring it closer to the reputable French terminological system at the lexical and phonetic levels. In addition, M. was keen to streamline his style by eliminating, albeit inconsistently, certain colloquialisms such as the pronoun drug drushku ‘each other’ or overly bookish words like dokole ‘until’ or paki ‘again’, marked in the “Dictionary of the Russian Academy” as Slavicisms.

Separately, the study considered the illustrations used in the manuscripts. In “A Book on the Establishment of a Navy”, they are largely conventional and even decorative. In “A Book on the Evolution of a Navy”, the illustrations almost completely mirror the engravings found in the French edition of “L’art des armées navales”. The fact that Mordvinov presented his manuscript, started three decades earlier, to the ten-year-old Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich in 1764, i.e. in the same year when the long-awaited publication of the translation of Paul Hoste’s volume was expected to appear in print, suggests that he did this with a purpose. In that way, the admiral obviously aimed to emphasize his own primacy in the preparation of the manual as well as demonstrate his deep understanding of the naval education needs.