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[FIRST BOOK IN GERMAN, PRINTED IN RUSSIA TOGETHER WITH AN EARLY GRAMMAR] Teutsh- Lateinisch- und Russisches Lexicon, samt denen anfangs-gründen der Russischen Sprache. Nemetsko-latinskiy i russkiy leksikon, kupno s pervymi nachalami russkogo yazika k obschey polze [i.e. The German-Latin-Russian Lexicon, With Russian Grammar for the Universal Benefit]

St. Petersburg: printed at the Academy of Science typography, 1731. Item #1074

[4], 788, 48 pp. 23x18 cm. One of 1200 copies printed. Full-leather period binding. Spine is restored. New endpapers. Occasional stains, more substantial stains on the pp. 140-141 (traces of wax). Occasional restoration of the margins. Overall a very good copy.
A poem in contemporary Russian on the title verso about the approach of the gloomy winter. Owner’s name on the title page and the first page of the preface, dated 1743: ‘John Edwards’ (possibly belonging to a Welsh).
First edition, based on Weismann’s ‘‘Lexicon Latino-Germanicum’’ of 1674. The Russian part was prepared by the trio of translators: Satarov, Gorlitskiy and Iliyinskiy. Trilingual.
The first book printed in Russia in German. The gothic fonts were specially prepared for the edition.
Addendum to the lexicon placed at the end (48 pp.) called ‘Anfangs-Gründe der russischen Sprache’. That’s allegedly the first, or one of the first, printed Grammar of colloquial Russian language (as opposed to Church Slavonic), that is complied by the native speaker to native speakers. The author of this text is Vassily Adodurov (1709-1780), the Russian pedagogue, educator and Lomonosov’s mentor.
The theory that this is the first ‘true’ Russian grammar was first made by Boris Uspenskiy in 1975, when he also has discovered the manuscript by Adodurov with his version of the similar grammar. Prior to that the classical grammar by Mikhail Lomonosov (1755) was considered the first, however Uspensky suggested otherwise. Before his discovery the 48-page addendum was considered the shortened version of the grammar by Meletii Smotritskii, printed in Moscow in 1648, which is considered to be the first grammar of Church Slavonic printed in Russia.
There are also historical data suggesting that the larger number of scholars in Academy of Science were preparing the edition of the Russian grammar in 1730s-40s that was never printed of which Adadurov was one of the authors. The ‘Anfangs-Gründe der russischen Sprache’ was reprinted with articles on the edition and 2 indexes in 2014.
The addendum is often missing.

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