Attribution of authenticity to Peter the Great’s letter to Georg Wilhelm de Hennin. Expert opinion

Abstract

The article examines the historical background of the letter written by Peter I to the founder of the city of Yekaterinburg, Major General Georg Wilhelm de Hennin, on the eve of the Nativity of Christ, granting him the rights to ownership of the Pyskor Ural factories. Of particular interest is the note at the end of the letter about pencils. It is generally accepted in literature that pencil production in Russia was first organized by M. V. Lomonosov, but the letter reveals that interest in the mineral as a means for drawing and sketching, and the experiments in making pencils from it, date back to the reign of Peter the Great. A textual and orthographic analysis of the letter submitted for examination, and its comparison with the draft copy and other surviving copies of the document, leads to the conclusion that the letter is a prototype and forms the basis for other copies. The letter is written in a clerical hand, and only the signature is Peter I’s autograph. A comparative analysis of this autograph of Peter I with other autographs of the Russian Tsar gives grounds to assert that we are dealing with an authentic autograph of Peter I. The presence of N. P. Likhachev’s expert opinion, along with the “Autograph of Peter I,” is an additional argument in favor of the thesis that this is the very same authentic document of Peter I’s letter to Georg Wilhelm de Gennin, which was sold in Paris in 1903.