Memorial Day of Ivan Yakovlevich Yakovlev

On October 23, many people gathered in the square in front of the National Library of the Chuvash Republic to pay tribute to Ivan Yakovlev, the great Chuvash enlightener, whose heart stopped beating on this day in 1930.
Konstantin Yakovlev, Minister of Culture, Nationalities and Archival Affairs of the Chuvash Republic, Anatoly Ukhtiyarov, Vice President of the Chuvash National Congress, Lidia Filippova, Chairman of the Union of Professional Writers, Anatoly Kibech, People's Writer of Chuvashia, schoolchildren, students and professors of I. Yakovlev ChSPU, representatives of the creative intelligentsia attended the ceremony of laying flowers at the monument to Ivan Yakovlev.
Ivan Yakovlevich Yakovlev (1848-1930) was an educator of the Chuvash people, creator of the alphabet for the modern Chuvash written language.
Born in a peasant family, he graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of Kazan University in 1875.
In 1868, while studying at the Simbirsk gymnasium, he opened a private school in Simbirsk, which later became the first national school, the first professional educational institution of the Chuvash people - the Simbirsk Chuvash teacher’s school (1890), the seminary (1918), then the first university - the Institute of Public Education (1920).
Yakovlev contributed to the opening of the Chuvash and other national schools in the Volga region. He developed a teaching methodology for Chuvash schools, creatively using the pedagogical heritage of K. D. Ushinsky and his followers.
In 1871 Yakovlev composed the Chuvash alphabet on the basis of Russian graphics and a primer, which were further improved. The new “Primer for Chuvash with the joint Russian alphabet” was edited more than 30 times during Yakovlev’s life and was intended not only to teach the basics of literacy, but also to instill the necessary norms of behavior.
Books for reading were compiled by him on the basis of stories from folk life and samples of oral folk art, the collector of which he was; his translations of the classics of Russian fiction (A.S. Pushkin, I.A. Krylov, L.N. Tolstoy, N.A. Nekrasov, etc.), as well as popular science books published by him, contributed to the formation of the Chuvash literary language and the formation of national literature.
In the period of 1875-1903 Ivan Yakovlevich served as inspector of the Chuvash schools of the Kazan educational district, until 1919 he continued to supervise the Chuvash pedagogical educational institution created by him in Simbirsk.
In September 1919 he retired and moved to his son in Moscow. He died on October 23, 1930 and was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery.
In 1958 the Chuvash State Pedagogical University was named after Ivan Yakovlevich Yakovlev. His museum is open to the public on its premises.

Photo by N. Burmistrova from the website of the Ministry of Culture, Nationalities and Archival Affairs of the Chuvash Republic.