Alexander Smirdin

Alexander Filippovich Smirdin was a Russian publisher and editor. Smirdin was the first in Russia to start selling books cheap enough to make them accessible to wide readership, and to develop the standard set of financial criteria for paying authors. He maintained strong links with the country's literary elite and, in retrospect, played a key role in the development of Russian literature in the early 19th century. Smirdin published all the best known works by Nikolai Karamzin, Vasily Zhukovsky, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Krylov as well as numerous textbooks and seminal books on history and science.