Knygotyra ISSN 0204–2061 eISSN 2345-0053
2023, vol. 80, pp. 312–342 DOI: https://doi.org/10.15388/Knygotyra.2023.80.133

Commemorating Anniversaries of the Life and Work of Francysk Skaryna in Lithuania from the Viewpoint of Book Studies and Scholarly Communication

Aušra Navickienė
Vilniaus universiteto Komunikacijos fakulteto
Knygotyros, mediotyros ir leidybos tyrimų katedra
Saulėtekio al. 9, Universiteto 3, LT-10222, Vilnius, Lietuva
El. paštas ausra.navickiene@kf.vu.lt

Summary. The aim of this article is to reconstruct the history of how anniversaries of Francysk Skaryna’s life and work were commemorated in the Lithuanian academic environment. It looks for answers to questions of when these anniversaries began to be celebrated in Lithuania, which part of the academic community was involved in these activities, and how they have contributed to the dissemination of the knowledge of book studies.

The author analysed scholarly events and anniversary publications dedicated to Francysk Skaryna by discussing the authors and the content of scholarly publishing results, as well as the organizers, topics, and participant geography of scholarly events. Collection of data from written sources, such as various bibliographic resources, official documents, memoirs, and informational articles published in periodicals in various historical periods, was aided by examining informational and scholarly publications de visu and applying other methods of historical research. The collected historical facts were studied in the context of Skaryna studies and the historiography of the Lithuanian book, evaluated from the viewpoint of scholarly communication and systematized by using the already-established periodization of Lithuanian book studies.

Keywords: Francysk Skaryna, The Little Traveller’s Book (Malaya podorozhnaya knizhitsa), The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles (Apostol), commemoration of anniversaries, scholarly publishing, scholarly conferences, book studies, scholarly communication, Lithuania, Joachim Lelewel, Ludwik Abramowicz, Adam Stankiewicz, Vaclovas Biržiška, Vaclau Lastouski, Levas Vladimirovas, Sigitas Narbutas, Ilya Lemeshkin.

Pranciškaus Skorinos gyvenimo ir veiklos sukakčių minėjimai Lietuvoje knygotyros ir mokslinės komunikacijos požiūriais

Santrauka. Siekiant rekonstruoti Pranciškaus Skorinos gyvenimo ir veiklos sukakčių minėjimų Lietuvos akademinėje aplinkoje istoriją straipsnyje ieškoma atsakymų į klausimus, kada buvo pradėtos minėti Pranciškaus Skorinos gyvenimo ir veiklos sukaktys, kokia akademinės bendruomenės dalis įsitraukė į šias veiklas ir kaip jos pasitarnavo knygotyros žinijos sklaidai. Autorė išanalizavo Lietuvoje vykusius Skorinai dedikuotus mokslinius renginius ir išleistus jubiliejinius leidinius, atskleisdama mokslinės leidybos rezultatų autorius ir turinį, įvykusių mokslinių renginių organizatorius, tematiką ir dalyvių geografiją. Iš rašytinių šaltinių ‒ įvairių bibliografinių išteklių, informacinių leidinių, pačių jubiliejams dedikuotų leidinių, oficialiųjų dokumentų, atsiminimų, įvairiais istoriniais laikotarpiais periodikoje paskelbtų informacinių straipsnių ‒ duomenis sukaupti padėjo dokumentų analizės, mokslinės leidybos rezultatų tyrimo de visu ir kiti metodai, išaiškinta faktografija buvo išnagrinėta skorinistikos ir Lietuvos knygos istoriografijos kontekste, įvertinta mokslinės komunikacijos požiūriu ir sisteminta pasitelkiant literatūroje jau nusistovėjusią Lietuvos knygotyros periodizaciją.

Reikšminiai žodžiai: Pranciškus Skorina, Mažoji kelionių knygelė (Malaja podorožnaja knižica), Apaštalų laiškai ir darbai (Apostol), sukakčių minėjimai, mokslinė leidyba, mokslinės konferencijos, knygotyra, mokslinė komunikacija, Lietuva, Joachimas Lelewelis, Ludwikas Abramowiczius, Adamas Stankiewičius, Vaclovas Biržiška, Vaclavas Lastauskis, Levas Vladimirovas, Sigitas Narbutas, Ilja Lemeškinas.

Received: 2023 01 19. Accepted: 2023 04 20
Copyright © 2023 Aušra Navickienė. Published by Vilnius University Press. This is an Open Access journal distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Francysk Skaryna (1470–1551 (1552)), a Polotsk-born citizen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was one of the great European humanists of the Renaissance. Having obtained degrees in Liberal Arts and Medicine, as a physician, he extensively travelled to several European countries. For a longer period than elsewhere, he lived in Prague and Vilnius, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was a powerful European state during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Skaryna’s most important contributions were those to the written culture and book publishing in the Grand Duchy. He wrote liturgical poetry, translated and published the Holy Scripture intended for Ruthenian readers, established the first printing house and published the first printed books in the Grand Duchy. In 1517–1519, he published The Ruthenian Bible (Bibliya ruska) in individual parts. The book came out in Prague, but at the expense of Vilnius citizens. In 1522, in his Vilnius printing house, Skaryna published The Little Traveller’s Book (Malaya podorozhnaya knizhitsa), and, three years later, The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles (Apostol).

Francysk Skaryna is usually called Belarusian, but it would also be correct to call him Lithuanian. From the viewpoint of the multinational, multiconfessional and multilingual ethnopolitical nation of the Grand Duchy, Skaryna represented one of its ethnic groups, the Ruthenians. Just as the people of the then Vilnius, the Polotskians were Lithuanian citizens of their common state. The above-mentioned Little Traveller’s Book is hailed today as the first printed book in the Grand Duchy. For not just the culture of Lithuania, but for world culture in general, it is of equal importance with the first Lithuanian-language printed book, The Simple Words of Catechism by Martynas Mažvydas, which was published in Königsberg, the capital of Prussia, in 1547. This is why, when the year 2022 was declared the year of Francysk Skaryna in Lithuania, both the general public – including national minorities – and the scholarly community celebrated the 500-year anniversary of printing. The purpose of this article is to ascertain when Francysk Skaryna’s anniversaries began to be celebrated in Lithuania, how these commemorations were run in the academic environment, and how they served to the dissemination of the knowledge of book studies. In this context, the author took a closer look at the anniversary commemorations held in Lithuania by analysing the authors and the content of the scholarly publishing, as well as the topics and the participant geography of scholarly events dedicated to these commemorations and discussing the anniversary publications and events from the viewpoint of scholarly communication. The data collected are evaluated in the context of Skaryna studies and historiography of the Lithuanian book and systematized by using the already-established periodization of the Lithuanian book studies1.

To identify events and publications dedicated to Skaryna, the author used the following bibliographic sources: bibliographies on Skaryna himself, personal and institutional bibliographies on researchers of Skaryna and his times2, and other bibliographic resources in Skaryna studies3. The subsequent analysis of these publications and events was based on de visu examination of key scholarly and popular publications in Skaryna studies4, as well as on a study such informational publications as programs of scientific conferences and state (official) plans or programs of Skaryna anniversary commemorations5, informational articles published in periodicals in various historical periods and published memoirs6.

In putting together this article, the author relied on scholarly articles and studies presenting the results of research into the history and the present of book studies in Lithuanian by Eglė Akstinaitė, Nijolė Bliūdžiuvienė, Domas Kaunas, Aušra Navickienė, and Genovaitė Raguotienė7. In the article, the concept of formal scholarly communication is interpreted as scholarly publishing, including the publishing of monographs, studies, thematic collections of articles, volumes of scholarly journals and conference proceedings, while the concept of informal communication means the organization of scholarly conferences. The term ‘book studies’ describes an independent branch of scholarship which emerged in Lithuania in the environment of the early 19th-century Vilnius University and went through major institutionalization changes in the inter-war period of the first half of the 20th century, braved a rocky road in the later decades of the 20th century during the occupations of Lithuania and continues to develop in the 21st century as part of an interdisciplinary academic field within the group of communication and information sciences.

Commemorations of Skaryna anniversaries in the early period of book studies (pre-1940)

The early decades of the 19th century (before the closure of Vilnius Imperial University in 1832). In Lithuania, Skaryna’s publishing efforts became the object of scholarly studies in the 19th century. A new branch of academic interest dealing with the book, library, and bibliographical activities8 emerged in the humanities-friendly environment of Vilnius Imperial University, and a new academic discipline9 appeared in the university study plans. On top of that, retrospective and current bibliographies of multilingual publications issued in the State were compiled based on the territorial principle, theoretical works in book studies and treatises in book history were published for the first time (in Polish), and the first Lithuanian-language scholarly study in book history was written in 183110. One of the key 19th-century treatises in book studies, which included a discussion of Skaryna’s publishing activities, came out in Vilnius in 1823. In the first volume of his two-volume treatise entitled Two Bibliographic Books (Bibliograficznych ksiąg dwoje)11, Vilnius University professor Joachim Lelewel summed up the insights of his contemporaries regarding Skaryna’s Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, i.e. a Church-Slavonic-language publication of the letters of the Apostles from the New Testament printed in Vilnius in 1525. He based his discourse on the observations of the historian and linguist Jerzy Bandtkie (a staff member of the University of Cracow and a researcher of printing in Poland and the Grand Duchy) who wrote about The Acts and Epistles in his work of historical synthesis entitled The History of Cracow Printing Houses (Historia drukarń krakowskich)12; on the findings published by the pioneer of Russian bibliography Vassily Sopikov in his Essay on Russian Bibliography (Опыт российской библиографии)13 where he listed copies of The Acts and Epistles; and on the insights of the prominent bibliographer and the ‘new’ head of the Warsaw University Library, Samuel Linde, who published a review of Sopikov’s work in the Pamiętnik Warszawski periodical14. Lelewel drew attention to an error in Linde’s work (the year 1522 was incorrectly given instead of 1525), thus saving future bibliographers from having to search for two editions of The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, and concluded that “in the early 16th century, Cyrillic printing houses were established in the Czech city of Prague and in Vilnius. They printed Francysk Skaryna’s translations. <…> circa 1525, in Vilnius, the printing house established at the home of Jokūbas Babičius, issued The Apostle, or The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles”15. When ascertaining the place and date of publication of The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, both the 19th-century and later researchers drew from the information provided by Skaryna himself in the colophon who stated that “the book was prepared and printed in March of 1525, during the reign of His Most Gracious Majesty Sigismund, son of Casimir, the King of Poland, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, the Russians, the Samogitians, etc., in the Glorious City of Vilnius, by the toils and great efforts of Dr. Francysk Skaryna of Polotsk, seeking to honour the Lord <…> and to teach the common folk well”16. Even though the 300th anniversary of The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles in 1825 was not granted any attention by the Vilnius academic community, Lelewel’s two-volume Polish language-written treatise, which came out in 1823–1826, became a momentous achievement for the Central and Eastern European scholarly publishing and a landmark publication consolidating The Acts and Epistles in both historiography and the public memory as the first-born of Vilnius printing.

The two decades of the first Lithuanian independence. Commemorations of Francysk Skaryna’s anniversaries in Lithuania began in the first half of the 20th century. Scholars aimed to emphasise their findings by embracing the tradition of scholarly publishing. During the inter-war period, two important centres of Lithuanian books studies emerged in Vilnius and Kaunas. In Lithuania, which became an independent state in 1918 (even though it lost its capital for the period of 1920–1939 in the wake of the Polish occupation of Vilnius City and Vilnius Region), as well as in entire Western Europe, such relevant ideas as modernization, nationalism and national historiography endowed academic research with the national paradigm17. In Vilnius Region, occupied by Poland at that time, researchers focused on the development of Vilnius books. When the 400-year anniversary of Vilnius printing was being commemorated in 1925, two books dedicated to this occasion came out in Vilnius: a significant Polish-language synthesis of the history of printing by Ludwik Abramowicz, Four Centuries of Printing in Vilnius (Cztery wieki drukarstwa w Wilnie (1525–1925)18 and the Belarusian-language edition Doctor Francysk Skaryna, the First Belarusian Printer (Doktar Francišak Skaryna – pieršy drukar biełaruski)19 by Adam Stankiewič. Abramowicz began his history of Vilnius printing houses with a chapter about Skaryna based, as he himself noted in the introduction, on insights from the seminal monograph by Kiev University Professor Piotr Vladimirov Doctor Francysk Skaryna. His Translations, Publication, and Language20, which had come out in St. Petersburg back in 1888. Abramowicz discussed both publications by Skaryna, namely, The Little Traveller’s Book (Malaya podorozhnaya knizhitsa) and The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles (Apostol), and thereby identifying the problem faced by researchers attempting to reconstruct the publishing history of The Little Traveller’s Book as the inability to find a copy which would include all the parts because of the exceptional rarity of the book. He pointed out that finding a composite of The Little Traveller’s Book with Computus Paschalis and a colophon would clarify the date of printing and perhaps other valuable information on the publication21. As shown by the findings made in the 20th-century Skaryna studies, these suppositions were correct. The above-mentioned work by Adam Stankiewič became a target of criticism from Polish historian Henryk Łowmiański22 because of the attribution of the first name Georgiy to Skaryna, and, in this regard, it lost its relevance in the later historiography (Łowmiański’s point of view was particularly supported by the historians of Vilnius and Prague, including the Russian-born Slavicist Antony Florovsky who was working at Charles University in Prague, Levas Vladimirovas, a Soviet-time Vilnius University Professor, and others).

Having lost Vilnius in 1920, the young State of Lithuania established a university in Kaunas, the provisional capital, and thus created conditions for the emergence of a new centre of book studies. The greatest attention was devoted to Lithuanian national books, i.e. to books in the Lithuanian language, and the personalities, life and work of their authors. The Faculty of Humanities was set up at this University of Lithuania (later renamed as Vytautas Magnus University), where book history developed as a separate and independent study field. The two decades of the independence saw the emergence of publications of both retrospective and current bibliography which became groundwork for research into the Lithuanian-language book. This period was also notable for the development of book studies terminology and for the publication of the first Lithuanian-language scholarly works covering the history of the book which defined the fundamental and long-term research directions in book studies23. Even though at that time no Lithuanian-language works on Skaryna came out in Kaunas, the anniversary year of 1925 was still significant for book studies which were focused more on the Lithuanian realities. In that year, Vaclovas Biržiška began to teach the subject of book history at the University of Lithuania in Kaunas, which did away with the disconnection between the literary history and the book history as scholarly disciplines in Lithuania. Biržiška’s lectures on the Lithuanian book eventually developed into a coherent course on book history which included the history of both Lithuanian and world books24. As a circle of historians and literary scholars gathered around Biržiška, and the range of their research topics expanded, book history began to be perceived as an independent field of scholarship with its own research object, range of topics, sources, methods, and reliability indicators for research and generalizations. Due to focusing on research into the Lithuanian book, Biržiška did not leave us any specific work on Skaryna, but his own and his colleagues’ views on the pioneer of printing in Lithuania is made clear by the juxtaposition of Skaryna with Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable print, and with Martynas Mažvydas, the author of the first Lithuanian book, as of personalities of equal importance, as presented in the text of a short overview of the history of writing and printing included in one of the first inter-war textbooks in the Lithuanian language25.

To mark the 400-year anniversary of The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, the Belarusian-language History of Belarusian Book (Гiстория Беларускай (Крыўскай) кнiгi)26 by Vaclav Lastouski, a politician, historian, political writer and champion of the independent Belarusian State, was published in the provisional capital of Lithuania in 1926. As many as twenty-four pages in this book were dedicated to Francysk Skaryna27. The author discussed Skaryna’s Prague and Vilnius publications and supplied his biography while also recounting the facts known in the historiography of that time. This work had a great impact on the Belarusian book research within the following couple of decades and was used for the creation of historiography that would serve the national/totalitarian ideology. It described over 1000 most important texts written in the 10th–19th centuries28 on what once was the territory of the Grand Duchy; Lastouski perceived the Grand Duchy as the Belarusian state, and treated Skaryna as its prominent representative.

Commemoration of anniversaries in the Soviet times. Periodic scholarly events – the Skaryna Readings

The Soviet occupation, which befell to Lithuania in the wake of World War II, hindered the efforts started in the inter-war period. The work of academic and non-academic institutions of importance for book studies was halted, and prominent scholars were forced to leave Lithuania and to uphold the pre-war historiographic tradition in exile in the West. In Lithuania, research into the history of the book intensified only in the sixties when a new generation of scholars arose in the environment of Vilnius University, and the publishing of book research results became more active29. According to Levas Vladimirovas, there were several research groups interested in Skaryna studies in Lithuania in the early decades of the Soviet period in the Department of the Russian Language and the Department of Library Studies (founded in 1952) at Vilnius University. The former was involved in the research of vocabulary, grammar, and historiography of the Church Slavonic language, while the latter was engaged in the studies of Skaryna’s publishing activities and his contributions to the development of the book history in Lithuania30. The latter department also was the locus of congregation of the future professors who would later expand research into the history of the Lithuanian book and essentially contribute to the consolidation of communication and information sciences as an interdisciplinary group of scholarly fields in Lithuania upon the restoration of its independence in 1990. The head of the department at the time, Levas Vladimirovas, himself was interested in the 16th–18th-century book history. In 1956, he published his first work on Skaryna’s life and activities31, which was thus bound to become the first work on Skaryna in the Lithuanian language to come out as a separate publication. Although modest in length, the text was still important for Skaryna studies as it contributed to the argument for Francysk being Skaryna’s first name (The incorrect attribution of the name Georgy to Skaryna was still common in the scholarly literature of that time). Already a mature scholar, Professor Vladimirovas returned to the subject of Skaryna in his fundamental work The History of the Book: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the 16th–17th Centuries (Knygos istorija: Senovė. Viduramžiai. Renesansas. XVI–XVII amžius32) published in 1979, a Russian translation of which, structured so as to be more attractive for the Soviet ideology and in a representative edition, came out in Moscow in 198833. This treatise was the first and remains the only synthetic work on the history of the world book to have been published in Lithuania, the only one published regionally, and one of the very few in Eastern Europe. By setting off with an original concept, the author offered a historical synthesis from the emergence of writing to the late 17th century. This work expanded the Eurocentric book development model predominant in the works of Western European scholars by a range of issues pertaining to the history of Eastern European books and libraries and encompassing the research into 16th–17th-century books in the Prussian, Latvian, and Estonian lands and in the Grand Duchy; as well as into the 17th-century Russian, Ukrainian, and Transcaucasian books. The author extensively used copious and diverse literature in English, Belarusian, Czech, Polish, Russian, German and some other languages (notably, the reference list includes all the major 20th-century works on the universal book history published in Europe and the USA34). Vladimirovas had access to the most recent contemporary works of book historians in English when he was serving as the director of the Library of the United Nations Organization in 1964–1970. Vladimirovas was probably the first to show Skaryna’s publishing activities in the context of the European Renaissance book culture, and thus he greatly contributed to the formation of the traditions of the modern Lithuanian historiography. In 2005, the historian Alfredas Bumblauskas, while analysing research into the early history of Lithuania, made an apt observation that the multilingualism of the culture of the Grand Duchy was traditionally better covered by book historians35.

To mark the 450-year anniversary of printing and Skaryna’s 485-year anniversary of birth, the first scholarly conference dedicated to Skaryna was run in Lithuania on 21 November 1975. This scholarly event was called Francysk Skaryna and Some Issues of the Development of the Book in the Soviet Union (Pranciškus Skorina ir kai kurie knygos raidos Tarybų Sąjungoje klausimai). The main organizer was Vilnius University, while the Institute of History of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences participated as a partner. Both the name of the event and the institutional affiliation of its participants demonstrate that the conference was an all-Union event rather than merely a republican (in the sense of a republic of the Soviet Union; thus, in today’s terms, national-level) event which attracted not only lesser-known but also prominent scholars from the most important book centres of other Soviet republics. Beside Lithuanian historians Ingė Lukšaitė, Irena Petrauskienė (who defended her candidate’s thesis on the printing house of Vilnius University supervised by L. Vladimirovas in 1973), Bronius Vaitkevičius, Levas Vladimirovas, and Romas Šarmaitis, there were scholars from Belarus, Latvia, and Russia – Aleksejs Apīnis, Georgy Golenchenko, Yevgeny Nemirovsky, L. Ravnopolets and Yevgenia Umetskaya36 who gave presentations at the conference. In an brief article published in the December bulletin Library Work (Bibliotekų darbas; currently published as the journal Among Books (Tarp knygų) by Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania), it was noted37 that the participants had an opportunity to view the exhibition of old print publications displayed in the Vilnius University Library which boasted a copy of The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles that, owing to the efforts of Levas Vladimirovas, had been returned from Russia to the university library back in 1956. On the very same November 21, a memorial plaque in the memory of Skaryna’s printing house was unveiled in Vilnius Old Town (in the present-day Rotušės aikštė – City Hall Square). The conference participants were gifted a bibliography specially put together for this occasion38. To commemorate the anniversary, the Mokslas (Science) Publishers in Vilnius issued a concise biography of Skaryna written by L. Vladimirovas. This Russian-language work served to make the most recent research results accessible to the wider public39.

The first conference dedicated to Skaryna was a wide-scope event, especially if considering the conditions of that time. This is shown not only by the participant geography, but also by the language of the conference and by its format which combined scholarly and accompanying cultural events. The conference proceedings were to be published in a special volume of the scholarly journal Book Science (Knygotyra) dedicated to research into publishing and the book history which had already been published for several decades in Vilnius by that time. Unfortunately, it became possible only four years later40 since the controlling ideological agencies (Glavlit41 and others) imposed by the occupant authorities perceived this publication as a threat of the awakening nationalism42. It was owing to the great effort of the editor-in-chief L. Vladimirovas that the Russian-language volume eventually came out in 1979. When compiling the volume, the editor, naturally, had to follow the requirements enforced by the regime. The publication contained nine articles based on the conference presentations delivering the results of research into the early book, including two pieces by Lithuanian authors – L. Vladimirovas himself who wrote about Skaryna as the pioneer of Vilnius printing, and I. Petrauskienė who researched the printing house of Vilnius University as a centre of the Lithuanian print in the 16th–18th centuries. These papers were supplemented with the texts by researchers from the neighbouring Belarus who had not participated in the conference, A. Korshunov and A. Zhuravsky, as well as by ideological ballast, such as the opening remarks by B. Vaitkevičius, Deputy Director of the Institute of the Party History under the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party, as well as the papers by the director of the above-mentioned institute, P. Šarmaitis, and by the Belarusian scholar L. Ravnopolets concerning the publication of works of Vladimir Lenin. According to L. Vladimirovas43, the author of the idea and the main organizer of the conference dedicated to Skaryna and his publications, the participants wished for such conferences to be run regularly in Vilnius and to be called Skaryna Readings. Although the second Skaryna Readings event was non-anniversary, it also took place at Vilnius University on April 16–27, 1984, on the initiative of the Faculty of Philology, and therefore had a linguistic character to it rather than that of book studies. Speakers from Gomel, Moscow, Minsk and Vilnius were among the participants.

The anniversary of printing was celebrated in 1975 still following the tradition by which the anniversary year was associated with 1525, even though Vladimirovas himself, as early as in 1973, had described the discovered ‘Copenhagen copy’ of The Little Traveller’s Book in his paper entitled The First-Born of Vilnius Printing (Vilniaus spaudos pirmagimis) and offered an opinion that “the copy unearthed at the Royal Library indisputably proves that <...> 1522 should be considered the date of emergence of Vilnius printing”44. The Copenhagen discovery of 1957 which determined a breakthrough in Skaryna studies offered the researchers one of the world’s most complete extant copies of The Little Traveller’s Book consisting of Psalms; the Book of Hours (which lays out the daily order of church services); a set of Akathists and Canons (ecclesiastical hymns and prayers); Hexaemeron (the content of church rites for each day of the week); the Canon of Repentance; the daily cycle of church services with a short calendar; and the final part, Computus Paschalis (a list of Easter dates). The colophon of this copy contains information that the publication was put together “by Doctor Francysk Skaryna in the glorious city of Vilnius”45. Although the date of printing is not specified in the publication itself, the predominant view is that the booklet was published in 1522 because the list of Easter dates encompasses the period from 1523 to 1543. Therefore, The Little Traveller’s Book took the position of Vilnius first-born publication, and the date of emergence of printing in Vilnius and the Grand Duchy in general was shifted to 1522. This and other publications by Vladimirovas delivered in 1973–1975, the conference organized in 1975, and his later works on Skaryna46 made a significant contribution to the consolidation in the Lithuanian public memory of this discovery in Skaryna studies and the new date of the emergence of printing in Lithuania.

Anniversary commemorations during the decades of the restored independent State of Lithuania and the institutionalization of communication and information sciences

In the recent decades, Lithuania celebrated not only anniversaries of Skaryna publications, but also those of his birth. His 500-year jubilee was commemorated in 1990, a year of great political changes in Lithuania. To mark this occasion, a scholarly conference whose participants hailed from Grodno, Gomel, Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), Lublin, Moscow, Minsk, Šiauliai, Warsaw, and Vilnius was run on November 2–3 on the initiative of Lilija Sudavičienė, Head of the Department of the Russian Language at Vilnius University. As shown by the extant conference program, the event was dominated by Belarusian linguists47. The speakers’ articles were published as special proceedings in the Russian language, Francysk Skaryna and Vilnius (Францыск Скoрина и Вильнюс)48. Under the volatile historical circumstances and due to the restructuring of academic bodies of Vilnius University associated with the emergence of a new field, communication and information sciences, in 1990–1991 (as the Faculty of Communication49 was established at Vilnius University stemming from the Departments of Library Science, Information Systems, and Books Science and Bibliography, as well as from two Departments of Journalism, all of which previously were part of the Faculty of History), book studies experts made only a slight contribution to the organization of this conference. In 1990, Levas Vladimirovas cherished a plan to bring together Skaryna researchers to another Skaryna Readings event50, which lost its relevance for Lithuania as the country had just declared independence from the Soviet Union, and the researchers congregating at the new departments of the new Faculty of Communication set out to develop new channels of scholarly communication51. With the support of the new Faculty of Communication, a new study by Vladimirovas, this time written in the Lithuanian language and called Francysk Skaryna. The First Printer of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Pranciškus Skorina. Pirmasis Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės spaustuvininkas)52 came out in 1992. It turned out to be the last major work on the pioneer of printing written by the esteemed Professor, by then of a highly respectful age. Its appearance in part realized the author’s plans to publish a monograph on Skaryna for the jubilee (together with the Belarussian colleague G. Golenchenko) 53. Even though the publication offered no ground-breaking discoveries, it endowed the issues of Skaryna studies and their historiography with new relevance and served to enhance the public knowledge of them.

In the late 20th century, the Lithuanian research was characterized by novel manifestations of the institutionalization of book studies. A multigenerational research community that gathered together at the recently-restored academic body for book studies research at Vilnius University embarked on a more focused development of research into book history, present-day book publishing, book distribution and users. To fill the gaps in the historiography of the Lithuanian book, the third and the fourth generations of scholars (counting from L. Vladimirovas) at the Faculty of Communication expanded the research into the book media by producing doctoral theses, monographs, and hundreds of articles on the Latin book of the Grand Duchy, its manuscript books, the history of printing houses, the Lithuanian book of Lithuania Minor, Lithuania Major and of the Lithuanian diaspora, the history of libraries, bibliophilism, epigraphy, and the present-day publishing as an important sector of creative industries54. Projects in the retrospective bibliography of books in Polish and Hebrew published in Lithuania, as well as projects of periodical press which were carried out in Lithuanian memory institutions, stimulated research into multilingual publishing. When the opportunity arose to encompass all the book culture elements previously set apart by the national principle in historiography, the multicultural, multilingual (Ruthenian, Latin, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and Lithuanian), and multiconfessional (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Judaic, and Muslim) publications, the cultural heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania/Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth/Lithuania, and the book culture of the Grand Duchy began to be evaluated from the perspective of the totality of publications. This was reflected in the range of topics of doctoral research in book studies, and later in the monographs written based on these theses, as well as in the recent synthetic work on the history of publishing in Lithuania (from its origins to 1990)55 produced by the author team from the Faculty of Communication of Vilnius University for the benefit of the international reader. Some of the researchers who defended their theses in book studies at Vilnius University carried on their research at the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Folklore and at the largest academic libraries of Lithuania, thereby forming increasingly more capable research groups.

In 2017, the 500-year anniversary of The Ruthenian Bible, which was an occasion included into the UNESCO list of memorable dates, was celebrated in Lithuania. The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences brought together an international author team and published a book entitled The Ruthenian Bible of Francysk Skaryna turns 500 (Pranciškaus Skorinos Rusėniškajai Biblijai – 500)56. This commemorative publication reflected a broad approach to the culture of the Grand Duchy, thereby applying to research into this topic the principle of attribution previously tested in literary studies – to attribute everything that was reworked, otherwise assimilated, or created in the Grand Duchy, or by its citizens outside its borders57. This publication was presented on February 23 at Vilnius Book Fair. The event was attended by the editor of the publication, the leading scholar in early literature, Sigitas Narbutas, and the authors of the essays: the codicologist Rima Cicėnienė, the book studies expert Daiva Narbutienė, Sergejus Temčinas, a Slavicist from the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, and Ilya Lemeshkin, a Slavicist and Balticist working at Charles University in Prague and at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. By virtue of being intended for the general public, this publication overviews the development of the Lithuanian written culture before Skaryna, the key points of Skaryna’s biography, Skaryna’s Prague period, Skaryna’s editions that came out in Vilnius in 1522 and 1525, the enigmatic sunset period of his life spent in Prague, and the publishing in the Grand Duchy after Skaryna. The publication also takes a look at the efforts to preserve Skaryna’s memory in Lithuania, Belarus and the Czech Republic58. A month later, the book was presented at Jakub Kolas Central Scientific Library of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus in Minsk. This publication, along with the other commemorative efforts, was oriented towards the general public: both stationary and movable exhibitions (including virtual ones) were opened, and numerous lectures were given in Lithuania throughout the year. A Francysk Skaryna forum was held at Vilnius City Hall59.

A few years later Lithuanians and Czechs together celebrated the 550-year birth anniversary of Skaryna. Due to the revised date of his birth, this commemoration took place in 2020. The Slavicist Ilya Lemeshkin proved that Skaryna’s birthdate should be moved from 1490 to 1470. On that occasion, owing to the efforts of linguists of Prague and of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language in Vilnius, Lemeshkin’s well-known monograph, The Portrait of Francysk Skaryna, came out in Vilnius in the Russian language (its revised and supplemented Russian-language edition appeared in 2021, and a Lithuanian translation came into light in 202260). This monograph became important in the world of book studies and Skaryna studies. Having chosen an engraved portrait of Skaryna (an internal structural element of the Prague-printed Ruthenian Bible) as the research object, the scholar carried out an interdisciplinary study integrating art history, book history, and biographical studies. By using semiological and iconographic research methods in the broad context of the Western European culture, the author discovered four new facts of importance for Skaryna studies and book studies: Skaryna’s date of birth; the location of the Prague printing house where The Ruthenian Bible was printed; the portrait featuring a Renaissance fly, not a bee; and, lastly, this engraving being the first portrait of a publisher of European renown, the second correctly-dated portrait of a lay person, and the first portrait of a member of the Czech urban class61.

After the year 2022 was declared by the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania the year of Francysk Skaryna, the country celebrated the 500-year anniversary of the first book printed in the Grand Duchy. For the first time, a commemoration of a Skaryna anniversary was carried out as a state-planned activity. Earlier, when the 450-year anniversary of the catechism by Martynas Mažvydas was celebrated in 1997, a state commemoration commission was established, a long-term state programme for the commemoration of the anniversary was approved, and special funds were allocated for its implementation62. However, the state-level efforts towards the commemoration of the 500-year anniversary of printing in the Grand Duchy were limited, and they only amounted to a plan for the celebration of the year of Francysk Skaryna in 2022 which was approved by the Government of the Republic of Lithuania on 1 December 2021. Still, this plan became a means to mobilize the forces of the Lithuanian academic institutions, municipal institutions, associations of publishers and printers, memory institutions, and public organizations of national minorities in filling the year 2022 with various events, even though they were much more modest compared with the celebrations of 1997. Cultural and educational events, as well as publicity and publishing activities, were run from January through December63. Scholarly events reached their peak in September with the most important scholarly conference of the year called “Francysk Skaryna and the Renaissance Book Culture. Skaryna’s Little Traveller’s Book Turns 500,” organized by an international team of researchers and accompanied by two exhibitions and a Francysk Skaryna summer school64. For the first time in Lithuania, both the anniversary and the conference were associated not with The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, but with The Little Traveller’s Book. On September 12–18, the international summer school Physician, Publisher, and Gardener. 500 Years since the Move of Skaryna’s Activities from Prague to Vilnius65 was launched in Prague as a pre-conference event. It was attended by students and young scholars from Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus. On the eve of the conference, the exhibition Inspired by Skaryna: 500 Years of Vilnius Printings was opened at the Vilnius University Library, whereas another exhibition Skaryna’s Little Traveller’s Book Turns 500 was launched on the first day of the conference at the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. The international conference that took place on September 22–23 had the same format as the periodic Vilnius conferences in book studies organized by the book studies researchers representing Vilnius University together with the international Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP): guest speakers, parallel sections, several conference languages (with synchronous translation), various participation options (in-person participation, following the event online, or remote participation via ZOOM). The organizers managed to bring together scholars from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada, Croatia, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, France, Ukraine, Germany, etc. Because of the war against Ukraine launched by Russia on 24 February 2022, very few Russian and Belarusian independent experts, all of them siding with the opposition, were able to come to the conference. What concerns the Ukrainian scholars, for most of them, the life under conditions of war became an insurmountable obstacle to participating in the event. In the eight sections which were being implemented in the hybrid way, communication and information experts, researchers of the early literature, linguists and historians made 37 presentations delving into such issues as prominent Renaissance printers; creation, publishing, production, distribution, and reception of print media in Skaryna’s times; the first post-incunabula of the Grand Duchy; the culture of the manuscript book in the Grand Duchy and other European regions before and in the first centuries of printing; the development of the European printing and the peculiarities of the print media culture in the Grand Duchy; institutional and personal libraries of those times; reading and readers; dissemination of books in the society; the manuscript and print heritage in the Grand Duchy and the communication of this heritage66. This anniversary conference in book studies, compared to the Vilnius conference of the year 1975, reveals a fundamental change in the participant geography and the range of topics, as well as in the diversity of the disciplines represented. As it was emphasised during the final discussion, the conference participants managed to bring to light some of the previously undiscovered meanings and unanswered riddles of Francysk Skaryna’s life and publishing legacy, to highlight the importance of the interdisciplinary approach, the context of the European book culture, and the use of modern technologies in studying Skaryna’s times, and to actualize the humanistic source of Skaryna’s work along with the significance of research into the history, culture, literature, and the heritage of the Grand Duchy both for the modern European society and for the collective identity and memory67.

While laying groundwork for the conference of 2022, the organizers used the reliable practice of commemorating anniversaries developed over the several decades – which is the cooperation between research and memory institutions carrying out research into the early literature, language, and book culture of Lithuania. The event was organized by researchers from the Department of Book, Media and Publishing Studies at the Faculty of Communication of Vilnius University (where the majority of the representatives of the third generation of the Lithuanian book studies school are clustered today) and by scholars from the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with partners from Lithuania and other countries, such as the international Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), Charles University in Prague, the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, and the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. The experience in organizing international events, inter-institutional cooperation, and scholarly publishing68, together with the assistance of financial and informational sponsors69, served the organizers well in achieving their goals.

Just as in the case of the event of 1975, the organizers hope to spread the insights shared at the conference as widely as possible via a special volume of the scholarly journal Book Science (Knygotyra) which is still being published by Vilnius University. As the volume will contain peer-reviewed articles in English prepared on the grounds of the conference presentations, it should provide the conference participants with opportunities for formal scholarly communication, which is essential for the internationalization of scholarship.

Conclusions

Skaryna studies emerged in Lithuania together with the earliest works on the book history and have been ongoing for as long as several centuries. Commemorations of Skaryna anniversaries began a century ago and have been held regularly despite the changing situation of the book studies and the political circumstances exerting an impact on the Lithuanian academia in the turbulent 20th century, when the nation was first built an independent state over the period from 1918 to 1940, then had to survive the decades of the German and Soviet occupations, and finally re-joined the community of independent European states after restoring its independence in 1990. Even though those circumstances in some cases became incentives, whereas, in other cases, turned into obstacles for the organizers of the commemorations and for the communities of researchers of the early book, language and written culture, the 400-year anniversary of the Grand Duchy printing was nonetheless commemorated in 1925, the 450-year date was celebrated in 1975, and the 500-year anniversary was held in 2022; on top of that, Skaryna’s 500-year birth anniversary was celebrated in 1990, and 550-year birth anniversary event were held in 2020. All of these anniversary years were fruitful in terms of the results of scholarly publishing, and, since the 1970s, by scholarly conferences.

The commemorative monographs published in 1925 in Vilnius and Kaunas, the cities which were then separated by the state border, came out in an uncoordinated manner as a result of private initiatives. However, in the Polish and the Lithuanian historiographies, they became important facts of scholarly publishing which recorded and distributed the latest knowledge in Skaryna studies of that time and were later used in compiling historiographies that would serve the national ideology.

During the Soviet times, research in Skaryna studies became part of the Lithuanian language historiography which was enriched by the earliest individual publications discussing Skaryna’s life and book-related activities. That was the time of the first and only synthetic work on the history of the world book in Lithuanian and Russian which included a discussion of Skaryna’s life and publishing work in the context of the European book culture. The first scholarly conference dedicated to Skaryna that was held in Vilnius brought together Skaryna and book history experts of the Soviet Union. To disseminate the results of their research, the scholars of book studies of Vilnius University successfully used the opportunities for communication presented by the special volume of the scholarly journal Book Science (Knygotyra). The articles based on the conference presentations were turned into publications which could provide researchers with opportunities for formal scholarly communication. Even though the idea of scholarly conferences called Skaryna Readings to be turned into periodic Vilnius-based events was only partially realized, the very ambition of the first anniversary-related conference serves as a testimony to the fact that, already in the 1970s, the community of Vilnius book researchers was able to perform complex communication tasks and to use means of both informal and formal scholarly communication for the commemoration of the anniversary of 1975.

In the recent decades, i.e. the years after regaining independence, commemorative initiatives in Lithuania stemmed more from communities of researchers of the literature and languages of the Grand Duchy. The anniversary-related results of scholarly publishing that appeared at this time have enriched Skaryna studies with fundamental discoveries, whereas book studies have received contributions in terms of methodological innovations. The anniversary scholarly conference launched in 2022, the main Skaryna event of this period, brought together the European researchers interested in Skaryna studies and in the Renaissance book culture. The range of the topics examined at the conference was determined by the predominant Lithuanian view on the book culture of the Grand Duchy as a phenomenon of the European Renaissance and by the experience in the development of this approach. The decades-long activity of book studies experts in the global networks of researchers helped to expand the geography of the participants of the event, and new communication technologies provided participation options which could meet the diverse needs of the participants (a hybrid participation format of following the event online, reviewing the conference recording after its completion, etc.). As the main organizers of the conference represented the burgeoning Lithuanian school of book studies, the scholarly event in the honour of Skaryna carried over a certain feature of previous book studies conferences run at Vilnius University which have become a periodic international event since 1997: this is the aspiration to create a space of tolerant communication for the representatives of diverse scholarly schools worldwide, to combine means of both informal and formal communication, and to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Open Science practices.

The scholarly publications and events of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century commemorating the anniversaries of Skaryna’s life and work were important both for the Lithuanian and international academia. They helped the Lithuanian historiography to absorb the findings in Skaryna studies faster, to keep Skaryna as part of the identity of the Lithuanian society and to internationalize the achievements of the research into the culture of the Grand Duchy. The combination of formal and informal ways of communications adopted by the Lithuanian researchers contributed to bringing together communities of scholars from the Eastern and the Western European research schools and promoting the view of Skaryna’s publishing activities as those of a European humanist and as a phenomenon of the European Renaissance book culture. It was also instrumental for renewing historiography more actively, and for being able to specify the very dates of anniversaries, thereby moving the date of the emergence of printing in Lithuania from 1525 to 1522, and Skaryna’s date of birth from 1490 to 1470.

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Translated by Ana Venclovienė