Granat Brothers, (1861-1933)

GRANAT Brothers, publishers. Originating from a merchant family.

Aleksandr Naumovich Granat (1861, Odessa – 1933, Moscow) graduated from the Realschule in Kharkov and later from Riga Polytechnic Institute (1886). During his student years, he was involved in the revolutionary underground. After graduating, he worked as a mechanical engineer on the construction of the Gomel–Bryansk railway. From 1888, he was employed as a mechanical engineer in Moscow. In the 1900s, he owned a paper-dyeing and finishing factory in the village of Pokrovskoe-Glebovo, Moscow Governorate. From 1910, he was a member of the Council of the Moscow Commercial and Industrial Mutual Credit Society.

Ignaty Naumovich Granat (1865, Mogilev – 1941, Moscow) graduated from the Faculty of Law at Moscow University in 1886 and remained at the university to prepare for a professorial career. In 1906, he published the book The Labour Question and Land Reform under the pseudonym I. Grey. He spent several years in the United Kingdom gathering material for his dissertation On the Question of Peasant Dispossession in England, which he defended in 1908. From 1910 until his death, he was Professor of Political Economy at Moscow University.

In 1892, the Granat brothers founded a publishing house under the name Granat Brothers & Co. Aleksandr Granat managed the financial and economic affairs of the partnership, while Ignaty Granat oversaw the scholarly organisation of publications. They published the Desk Encyclopaedic Dictionary (first edition: vols. 1–8, 1891–95; second and third stereotyped editions, fourth revised edition: vols. 1–9, 1899–1903; fifth and sixth expanded editions, 1901, 1903). The publishing house also issued popular science and educational literature as well as major works on history, art, and the labour movement (History of the 19th Century by Lavisse and Rambaud, History of Russia in the 19th Century, History of Our Time, Class Struggle in the 19th Century, and others).

The Granat brothers’ principal publishing project was the multi-volume Universal Encyclopaedic Dictionary (vols. 1–55, 57–58, 1910–48; 7th edition, completely revised), produced with contributions from leading scholars. By October 1917, volumes 1–33 had been published, with volumes 37–39 and 42 prepared for publication. The dictionary was characterised by extensive, comprehensive articles with reference appendices; shorter entries served primarily as cross-references.

A distinctive feature of the dictionary was its “textual supplements”: biographical dictionaries, statistical surveys, chronological and biographical indexes with separate page numbering, and occasionally entire monographs, such as Members of the First, Second and Third State Dumas (vol. 17), Members of the State Council since 1801 (vol. 23), Chronology of Russia (vol. 36, part 6), Autobiographies of Figures in the Russian Socialist Movement of the 1870s–80s (vol. 40), and Figures of the USSR and the October Revolution (vol. 41). The last two were reprinted in 1989 by Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya under the title Figures of the USSR and Revolutionary Russia.

The editorial board of the encyclopaedia included Y. S. Gambarov, V. Ya. Zheleznov, M. M. Kovalevsky, K. A. Timiryazev, M. A. Menzbir, I. I. Mechnikov, E. V. Tarle, and P. N. Sakulin. In 1917, the Granat Brothers’ publishing house was restructured as the Russian Bibliographical Institute of the Granat Brothers, which in 1939 became part of the state institute Soviet Encyclopaedia.

Sources:

Album Academicum des Polytechnikums zu Riga 1862–1912. Riga, 1912, p. 117.

БСЭ (Great Soviet Encyclopaedia) / Гл. ред. О.Ю. Шмидт. М., 1930. С. 800.

Белов С.В.. Братья Гранат. М. : Книга, 1982.