Pictures in Your Primer: What Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich Should Have Known

The manuscripts that preceded the  edition of the Illustrated Primer by Karion Istomin and Leonty Bunin (1694), and the edition itself, intended for Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich, contain nearly four hundred illustrations, each accompanied by a caption. It is believed that the authors of this textbook implemented the principle of clarity formulated by Jan Amos Komenský. The illustrations form thematic series, each of which, however, is neither complete nor flawless: the names of exotic or mythical animals are few and far between, the names of planets and ancient deities are offered in either Greek or Roman versions; the animal names include full-vowel and half-vowel forms, rare loanwords, and dialectal names; Church Slavonic words coexist with common ones. In other words, it's impossible to discern a single system by which the lexemes were selected, especially since all existing versions of the ABC book differ from one another. At the same time, the specific features of the drawings suggest that they depict topical realities: the Kyiv five-line notation, a church in the Naryshkin Baroque style, and creatures from the books read at court. It is concluded that the authors wanted to present to the young student not just the world around him in all its diversity of forms and words, but actual reality.