ABSTRACT
The first Russian books explicitly addressed to children were primers, with Ivan Fyodorov's ABC-Book (1571) as the earliest sample. The birth of the picture book was The Illustrated Primer (1694), in which Karion Istomin with the help of poems and pictures gave young people maxims and scattered facts about the surrounding world. Peter the Great favoured books on courtesy, like A True Mirror for Youth (1717), which served the Europeanising process of Russia. Correspondingly foreign literature dominated children's reading all through the eighteenth century.
