В 1851 г. родился Иван Дмитриевич Сытин

“Oh, may it come quickly

The time when the peasant

Will carry Belinsky

And Gogol from the market,

Not stupid Milord…”

Nikolay Nekrasov’s dreams were meant to come true thanks to Ivan Sytin, the poet’s contemporary. Sytin was lucky from the very beginning – when a boy, he found a job with a merchant who owned a bookstore. The youth proved to be bright-headed and observant. By the age of 25, he opened his own publishing house. By 1914, each fourth book in Russia was published by Sytin's company – Partnership for Printing, Publishing and Selling Books. Though Yankees boast of having invented pocketbooks, such cheap editions could be seen at the Russian markets half a century before. Sytin’s company published cheap books for ordinary people, encyclopedias and block calendars. As for Sytin’s newspaper Russkoye Slovo (Russian Word), even Prime Minister Vitte was envious of it. “Even the government cannot gather information so quickly,” he wrote. Moreover, Russian peasants finally started reading Gogol, as Sytin published the complete set of his works by an edition of 200,000 copies. Even the Soviet authorities valued the merits of the businessman. Well, the company was naturally taken away from him, yet Sytin became the first person receiving a merit pension in the Soviet Russia. It was a sort of acknowledgement of his contribution to public education.