SYTIN IVAN DMITRIEVICH. BOOK PATRON OF RUSSIA
The article analyzes the life of the founder of the largest publishing company in pre-revolutionary Russia, the outstanding Russian entrepreneur Ivan Dmitrievich Sytin. The main stages of his activity in the sphere of book publishing as the initiator of several dozens of publishing projects, such as textbooks and books for children, encyclopedias, collected works of classics of fiction, popular periodicals are defined. It was largely thanks to the publishing activities of I. D. Sytin that Russian society at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries gained access to domestic and foreign literature. The most important activity of I. D. Sytin was enlightenment-preparation and production of accessible universal reference books, textbooks, literature for children, specialists in various fields of activity. Making his goal in life to educate the people, I. D. Sytin achieved that by the beginning of the XX century his company produced a quarter of all printed publications in the country, and Russia - became the most reading country in the world. Such activities had no analogues in the world, which naturally raises I. D. Sytin to the rank of an outstanding Russian educator and philanthropist, who devoted himself to the noble cause of educating his people.