DAL VLADIMIR IVANOVYCH Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (1801–1872) (pseudonym Kazak Lugansky). Russian lexicographer, ethnographer, writer, poet, playwright. Creator of the famous “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” in four volumes, author of the collection “Russian Proverbs”

2. Every word in the title of the dictionary is no coincidence

From the very beginning, Dahl's dictionary was a polemical enterprise—the author contrasted it with dictionaries that were prepared by scientists of the Russian Academy (since 1841 - the Academy of Sciences). The famous title “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” reads a combat program, partly deciphered by the author himself in the preface.

a) an explanatory dictionary, that is, “explaining and interpreting” words using specific examples (often a successful example replaces the element of interpretation). Dahl contrasted the “dry and useless” definitions of the academic dictionary, which are “the more sophisticated the simpler the subject is,” with thesaurus-type descriptions: instead of defining the word “table,” he lists the components of the table, types of tables, etc.;

b) a dictionary of a “living” language, without vocabulary peculiar only to church books(in contrast to the Academy’s dictionary, which, in accordance with the regulations, was called “Dictionary of Church Slavonic and Russian Language”), with careful use of borrowed and calque words, but with the active involvement of dialect material;

c) a dictionary of the “Great Russian” language, that is, not claiming to cover Ukrainian and Belarusian material (although, under the guise of “southern” and “western” dialect words, the dictionary included a lot from these territories). Dahl regarded the adverbs of “Little and White Rus'” as something “completely alien” and incomprehensible to native speakers of the Russian language itself.

According to the plan, Dahl’s dictionary is not only and not so much literary (“the compiler did not like dead” book words), but also dialectal, and not describing some local dialect or group of dialects, but covering a variety of dialects of a language widespread over a vast territory . At the same time, Dal, although he was an ethnographer, traveled a lot and was interested in various aspects of Russian life, did not specifically go on dialectological expeditions, did not develop questionnaires and did not write down entire texts. He communicated with people while passing through on other business (this is how the legendary grinds-lives) or listened to the speech of visitors in large cities (this is how the last four words of the dictionary were collected, written down from the servants on behalf of the dying Dahl).

The well-known method of collecting material “for testing” in our time is described in his memoirs by Pyotr Boborykin:

“...teachers from the gymnasium came to see him [Dahl]. Through one of them, L-n, a grammar teacher, he obtained from the schoolchildren all kinds of sayings and jokes from common areas. Whoever provided L. with a certain number of new proverbs and sayings, he gave him five from the grammar. That’s what they said, at least, both in the city [Nizhny Novgorod] and in the gymnasium.”

3. Dahl compiled the dictionary alone

Perhaps the most impressive thing in the history of the creation of the dictionary is how its author, who was not a professional linguist, collected material and wrote all the articles alone. Large, authoritative dictionaries were made and are being made independently not only in the 19th century, in the era of universal talents, but also in times closer to us - remember Ozhegov’s “Dictionary of the Russian Language” However, Ozhegov very actively used the developments of Ushakov’s collective dictionary, in the preparation of which he himself participated., “Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language” by Vasmer or “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language” by Zaliznyak. Such dictionaries are, perhaps, even more holistic and more successful than the cumbersome products of multi-headed teams whose projects are not limited by deadlines human life, no one is in a hurry, the plan is constantly changing, some work better, some worse, and everyone is different.

Dal still used some external sources, including those collected by the Academy (remember how the gymnasium teacher wrote down “proverbs and jokes” for him), although he constantly complained about their unreliability, tried to double-check every word, and marked the unchecked ones with a question mark. The burden of the enormous work of collecting, preparing for printing and proofreading material constantly caused him to burst into lamentations that burst onto the pages of the dictionary (see below).

However, the material he collected turned out to be generally reliable, quite complete and necessary for a modern researcher; this is a testament to how keen his ear for language and instinct were - despite the lack of scientific information.

4. As Dahl’s main work, the dictionary was appreciated only after his death

Dal became known as a lexicographer late: he made his debut in prose back in 1830, and the first issue of the first volume of the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” was published only in 1861 Moreover, if we take the bound first volume of the first edition, then title page costs 1863. Few people know that the dictionary, like many other publications of the 19th century, was published in separate issues (with their own covers and title pages), which were then bound into volumes; at the same time, the covers and titles of the issues were usually simply thrown away, and only a few copies survived..

Despite the prize that Dalev’s dictionary was awarded during his lifetime, and the extensive controversy in the press, contemporaries, judging by his memoirs, often perceived his interest in language and the compilation of the Russian lexicon as only one of Dalev’s versatile talents and eccentricities. Other, previously manifested aspects of his bright personality were visible - a writer, author of popular fairy tales and stories from folk life under the pseudonym Cossack Lugansky, military doctor, engineer, public figure, eccentric, sophisticated ethnographer. In 1847 Belinsky wrote with warm praise:

“...from his writings it is clear that he is an experienced man in Rus'; his memories and stories relate to the west and the east, the north and the south, and the borders and center of Russia; Of all our writers, not excluding Gogol, he pays special attention to the common people, and it is clear that he studied them for a long time and with participation, knows their life to the smallest detail, knows how the Vladimir peasant differs from the Tver peasant, and in relation to shades of morals, and in relation to ways of life and trades.”

Here Belinsky should have spoken about the language of Dalev’s prose, about popular words - but no.

Dahl, of course, was part of the gallery of “Russian eccentrics”, “originals” of the 19th century, who were fond of various unusual and impractical things. Among them were spiritualism (Dahl started a “mediumistic circle”) and homeopathy, which Dahl first passionately criticized and then became its apologist. In a narrow circle of fellow doctors who met at Dahl’s in Nizhny Novgorod, the four of them spoke Latin and played chess. According to fellow surgeon Nikolai Pirogov, Dahl “had the rare ability to imitate the voice, gestures, and expressions of other persons; with extraordinary calm and the most serious expression, he conveyed the most comic scenes, imitated sounds (the buzzing of a fly, a mosquito, etc.) with incredible accuracy,” and also played the organ (harmonica) masterfully. In this he resembled Prince Vladimir Odoevsky - also a prose writer, approved by Pushkin, also fairy tales, also music, spiritualism and elixirs.

That Dahl’s main work was a dictionary was noticed, in fact, after his death The first edition of the dictionary was completed in 1866. Vladimir Ivanovich Dal died in 1872, and in 1880-1882 a second, posthumous edition prepared by the author was published. It was typed from a special author's copy of the first edition, in which each spread had a blank sheet sewn into it, where Dahl wrote down his additions and corrections. This copy has been preserved and is in the manuscript department of the Russian National (Public) Library in St. Petersburg.. Thus, in 1877, in “The Diary of a Writer,” Dostoevsky, discussing the meaning of words, uses the combination “future Dahl” in an almost common sense. In the next era this understanding will become generally accepted.

5. Dahl believed that literacy was dangerous for peasants

Dahl's social position caused great resonance among his contemporaries: in the era of great reforms, he saw the danger in teaching peasants to read and write - without other measures of “moral and mental development” and real familiarization with culture.

“... Literacy in itself is not enlightenment, but only a means to achieving it; if it is used for something other than this, then it is harmful.<…>Allow a person to express his conviction, without being embarrassed by exclamations, zealots of education, although in respect of the fact that this person has 37 thousand peasants in nine districts and nine rural schools at his disposal.<…>Mental and moral education can be achieved to a considerable degree without literacy; on the contrary, literacy, without any mental and moral education and with the most unsuitable examples, almost always leads to bad things. Having made a person literate, you have aroused in him needs that you do not satisfy with anything, but leave him at a crossroads.<…>

What will you answer me if I prove it to you? named lists, that out of the 500 people who studied at the age of 10 in nine rural schools, 200 people became famous scoundrels?

Vladimir Dal. "Note on Literacy" (1858)

This idea of ​​Dahl is mentioned by many publicists and writers of the era. Democrat Nekrasov ironically wrote: “The venerable Dal attacked literacy, not without art - / And discovered a lot of feeling, / And nobility, and morality,” and the vengeful Shchedrin, as usual, recalled this more than once, for example: “...Dal at that time defended the right of the Russian peasant to be illiterate, on the grounds that if you teach a locksmith to read and write, he will immediately begin to counterfeit the keys to other people’s boxes.” Years later, the philosopher Konstantin Leontyev recalled with sympathy Dahl’s anti-pedagogical pathos in an article with the eloquent title “How and how is our liberalism harmful?”, where he complained about liberals responding with “laughter or silence” to “a straightforward person or not afraid of original thought.”

The lifetime reputation of an obscurantist is remarkable both for its wide spread and for how quickly it was forgotten - already at the turn of the century, not to mention the Soviet era, Dal was perceived as an educator and populist.

6. Dahl wrote the word “Russian” with one “s”

The full name of Dahl's dictionary is quite widely known, and many will remember that according to the old spelling, the words “Zhivago Great Russian” are written with an “a”. But few people notice that Dahl actually wrote the second of these words with one “s”. Yes, the collector of the Russian word insisted that it was “Russian”. The dictionary itself provides the following explanation:

“Once upon a time they wrote Pravda Ruskaya; Only Poland nicknamed us Russia, Russians, Russians, according to Latin spelling, and we adopted this, transferred it to our Cyrillic alphabet and write Russian!

Dahl’s historical and linguistic judgments are often incorrect: of course, the name Russia is historically not Polish or Latin, but Greek, and even in the ancient Russian word russian, with the second “s” in the suffix, it was quite possible. Dal did not favor double consonants in general (as we see from the word Cyrillic).

Only at the beginning of the 20th century did the linguist Ivan Baudouin de Courtenay, who was preparing the third edition of the dictionary, introduce standard spelling (with two “s”) into the text.

7. Dahl’s dictionary actually contains words he invented, but very few

Among the popular ideas about Dahl’s dictionary there is this: Dahl invented everything (or many things), he composed it, people don’t really say that. It is quite widespread; let us recall at least a vivid episode from “My Century...” by Mariengof:

“In my father’s library, of course, there was also Dahl’s explanatory dictionary. In my opinion, this book has no price. What a wealth of words! What sayings! Proverbs! Sayings and riddles! Of course, about one third of them were invented by Dahl. But so what? Nothing. It is important that they are well thought out. This explanatory dictionary, bound in gold embossed cover, was not just Nastenka’s favorite book, but some kind of her treasure. She kept it under her pillow. I read and re-read it every day. Like an Old Believer the Bible. From him, from Dal, Nastya’s wonderful Russian speech came. And when she first came to Penza straight from her Saransk village of Chernye Bugry, there was nothing like that,” Nastenka said usually, grayishly, like everyone else.”

In Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago there is a less enthusiastic expression of the same thought: “This is a kind of new Dahl, just as fictitious, a linguistic graphomania of verbal incontinence.”

How much did Dahl really come up with? Is everything in his dictionary “living Great Russian”? Of course, the dictionary also contains book neologisms, and very recent ones: for example, the expression in March, as “they say in memory of Gogol,” and the word Decembrist, as “former state criminals were called.” But what did the lexicographer himself write?

The ethnographic department of the Russian Geographical Society, awarding Dahl’s dictionary with the Golden Constantine Medal, asked the compiler to include words in the dictionary “with the reservation of where and how they were communicated to the compiler” in order to avoid the criticism “that he places in the dictionary of the popular language words and speeches that are contrary his spirit, and therefore apparently fictitious." Responding to this remark (in the article “Response to the Verdict,” published in the first volume of the dictionary), Dahl admitted that he occasionally introduces words into the dictionary that “have not been used before,” for example dexterity, as a replacement interpretation for foreign words ( gymnastics). But he does not place them as independent articles, but only among interpretations, and with a question mark, as if “offering” them for discussion. Another similar technique was the use of a word that actually exists in some dialect to interpret a foreign one (for example, lively — machine ZIVULYA, tenacious, and. Vologda carnivorous insect, flea, louse, etc. || Everything is alive, but unreasonable. Sitting, a living little thing, on a living chair, tugging at a living meat?|| Baby. || Machine?"), “in a meaning in which it may not have been accepted before” (that is, a new meaning is invented for a really existing word - the so-called semantic neologism). Justifying the inclusion in the dictionary of a variety of unusual-sounding verbal names ( posablivanier, allowance, method And allowance), Dahl referred to the fact that they are formed “according to the living composition of our language” and that he had nothing to refer to except the “Russian ear.” On this path he had a most authoritative predecessor - Pushkin, who wrote almost the same:

“The magazines condemned the words: clap, rumor And top as a failed innovation. These words are native Russian. “Bova came out of the tent to cool off and heard people’s rumors and a horse’s tramp in the open field” (The Tale of Bova Korolevich). Clap used colloquially instead of clapping, How thorn instead of hissing:

He shot out a thorn like a snake.
(Ancient Russian poems)

The freedom of our rich and beautiful language should not be interfered with.”

"Eugene Onegin", note 31

In general, the percentage of Dahl’s “invented” is very low, and researchers identify such words without difficulty: Dahl himself indicated what types they belong to.

A large number of words noted by Dahl are not only confirmed by modern dialectological studies, but also convincingly demonstrate their reality through comparison with ancient Russian monuments, including those inaccessible to Dahl even theoretically. For example, in Novgorod birch bark letters, which have been found since 1951 (including in the most ancient ones - XI-XIII centuries), there are parallels with the words known from Dahl: buy in- become a partner in business, Vizsla- beagle puppy, finishing- inquiry, investigation, boat- fish, whitefish breed, warrior- women's clothing, the same as a warrior, poloh- commotion, popred- at first, mail- an honorary gift, estimate- add, inquire- inquire if necessary, saying- bad reputation, pull off- take off, be able to- arrange the matter, sta-current- property, Tula- discreet place, cavitary fish - not gutted; as well as with phraseological units out of sight, bow to your money(the latter was found almost verbatim in a letter from the 13th century).

8. The order in the dictionary is not strictly alphabetical

In Dahl's dictionary there are about 200 thousand words and about 80 thousand “nests”: single-root non-prefixed words are not in alphabetical order, replacing each other, but occupy a common large entry from a separate paragraph, within which they are sometimes additionally grouped according to semantic connections. In a similar way, only even more radically, the first “Dictionary of the Russian Academy” was built. The “nesting” principle may not be very convenient for searching for words, but it turns dictionary entries into exciting reading.

On the other hand, as separate articles, which is also unusual for our time, there are prepositional-case combinations that “fell out” of the nest (obviously, Dahl recognized them as adverbs written separately). These include one of the most memorable entries in the dictionary:

FOR VODKA, for wine, for tea, for tea, a gift in small money for a service, beyond the ranks. When God created a German, a Frenchman, an Englishman, etc., and asked them if they were satisfied, they responded satisfied; Russian too, but asked for vodka. The clerk asks for wine from death (popular painting). If you pull a guy out of the water, he asks for vodka for that too. Tip money, initial data for vodka.

9. Dahl was a bad etymologist

In establishing the relationship of words and their belonging to a common nest, Dahl was often mistaken. He had no linguistic education However, in that era it was still rare, and was not an indispensable attribute of a professional: for example, the great Slavist (and also the compiler of an invaluable dictionary, only Old Russian) Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky was a lawyer., and in general, the scientific approach to language was alien to Dahl - perhaps even deliberately. In the “Instructive Word” to the dictionary, he admitted that with grammar

“from time immemorial he was in some kind of discord, not knowing how to apply it to our language and alienating it, not so much by reason, but by some dark feeling, so that it would not confuse ...”

On the second page we see, albeit with a question mark, a convergence of words abrek(although it would seem to be marked as Caucasian!) and be doomed. Further, Dahl unites in one nest drawbar(borrowing from German) and breathe, space And simple and many others, but a number of cognate words, on the contrary, do not add up. Subsequently, the erroneous division into nests was corrected, if possible, in the edition edited by I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay (see below).

10. Dahl’s dictionary can be read in a row, like a work of fiction

Dahl created a dictionary that can not only be used as a reference book, but also read as a collection of essays. The reader is presented with a wealth of ethnographic information: of course, it does not relate to dictionary interpretation in the narrow sense, but without it it is difficult to imagine the everyday context of the terms themselves.

That's what it is handshake- you can’t say it in two or three words:

“beating the hands of the fathers of the bride and groom, usually covering their hands with the hem of their caftans, as a sign of final consent; the end of matchmaking and the beginning of wedding rituals: engagement, conspiracy, blessing, betrothal, betrothal, big singalong..."

Here is another example that vividly depicts the atmosphere of a wedding:

“The matchmaker was in a hurry to the wedding, she was drying her shirt on a whorl, and the warrior was rolling on the doorstep!”

The reader can learn about the epistolary etiquette of previous generations:

"In the old days sovereign or sir used indifferently, vm. lord, master, landowner, nobleman; To this day we say and write to the Tsar: Most Gracious Sovereign; great to the princes: Most Gracious Sovereign; to all individuals: Your Majesty[our fathers wrote to the highest: your Majesty; to equal: my dear sir; to the lowest: my lord]».

An encyclopedic article of amazing detail is given at the word bast shoe(which fell into the nest paw). Let us note the involvement of not only “living Great Russian”, but also “Little Russian” (Ukrainian, more specifically, Chernigov) material:

LAPOT, m. bast shoes; bast shoes, bast shoes, m. posts, south zap. (German Vasteln), short wicker footwear, ankle-length, made from bast (lychniki), bast (mochalyzhniki, ploshe), less often from the bark of willow, willow (verzni, ivnyaki), tala (shelyuzhniki), elm (vyazoviki), birch ( birch bark), oak (ouboviki), from thin roots (korenniki), from young oak shingles (oubachi, Chernigovsk), from hemp combs, broken old ropes (kurpa, krutsy, chuni, whisperers), from horse manes and tails (volosyaniki), finally, from straw (strawmen, Kursk). The bast shoe is woven in 5-12 rows, bunches, on a block, with a kochedykom, a kotochikom (iron hook, pile) and consists of a wattle (sole), a head, heads (front), an earpiece, an earband (borders on the sides) and a heel; but the bast shoes are bad, simply woven, without a collar, and fragile; The obushnik or border meets at the ends of the heel and, tied together, forms an obornik, a kind of loop into which the frills are threaded. The transverse basts that are bent on the ear guard are called kurts; there are usually ten kurts in the fence. Sometimes they also pick up the bast shoes and pass along the fence with bast or tow; and the painted bast shoes are decorated with a patterned undercut. The bast shoes are put on with tailor and woolen wraps and tied with frills in a binding crosswise to the knee; bast shoes without frills for home and yard, weave higher than usual and are called: kaptsy, kakoty, kalti, shoe covers, koverzni, chuyki, postoliki, whisperers, bahors, feet, barefoot boots, topygi, etc.

11. Dahl has two articles with pictures

Modern lexicography, especially foreign ones, has come to the conclusion that the interpretation of many words cannot (or is unreasonably difficult) be given without graphic illustration. But, unfortunately, a full-fledged authoritative illustrated Russian explanatory dictionary has not yet appeared (one can only name “picture dictionaries” for foreigners and recent dictionaries of foreign words for Russians). In this, Dahl was far ahead of not only his time, but also ours: he provided two articles with pictures. In the article hat drawn, what types of hats there are, and can be distinguished by silhouette Moscow hairpin from straight hairpin, A kashnik from verkhovka. And in the article beef(nest beef) depicts a pensive cow, divided into parts indicated by numbers - among them, in addition to the usual breastbone, shank and fillet, there is, for example, a flank and a curl.

Russian State Library

Russian State Library

12. Dahl complained about the difficulty of work directly in his articles

On the pages of his dictionary, Dahl often complains about the severity of the work undertaken. The lexicographer's complaints are an old and venerable genre, begun on Russian soil by Feofan Prokopovich, who translated the poems of the 16th century French humanist Scaliger as follows:

If someone is condemned to the tormentor's hands,
The poor head of sadness and torment awaits.
They did not order him to be tormented by the work of difficult forges,
nor send to hard work in ore deposits.
Let the vocabulary do: then one thing prevails,
This labor alone contains all the pains of childbirth.

But Dahl’s work is notable for the fact that the complaints are not included in the preface, but are scattered throughout the articles (and their number naturally increases in the last volumes of the dictionary):

Volume. The volume of the dictionary is large, it is beyond the power of one person.

Define. The simpler and more commonplace a thing is, the more difficult it is to define it in a general and abstract manner; define, for example, what is a table?

P. This is the favorite consonant of Russians, especially at the beginning of a word (as in the middle O), and takes up (prepositions) a quarter of the entire dictionary.

Accomplice(in the nest Together). Grim had many accomplices in compiling the dictionary.

Inquire. Edit typesetting for printing, keep proofreading. You won’t be able to read more than a page of this dictionary in a day, your eyes will be gone.

As a kind of “offering of descendants” to Dahl’s feat, one can consider an example from the fourth volume of the dictionary compiled by G. O. Vinokur and S. I. Ozhegov, edited by Ushakov:

Employee. Dahl compiled his dictionary alone, without collaborators.

13. Dahl's dictionary has experienced a rebirth

A major role in the history of Dahl's dictionary was played by Ivan Aleksandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay, one of the greatest linguists in the history of science Suffice it to say that basic linguistic concepts phonemes And morphemes were invented by his collaborator, Nikolai Krushevsky, who died early (Baudouin introduced them into scientific circulation), and the founder of the new Western linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, read Baudouin’s works carefully and referred to them.. Ivan (Jan) Alexandrovich was a Pole whose family boldly claimed descent from the royal house of the Capetians: his namesake, also Baudouin de Courtenay, sat on the throne of Constantinople conquered by the crusaders in the 13th century. According to legend, when the professor, who had come out for a political demonstration, was taken along with the students to the police station, Ivan Aleksandrovich wrote in the police questionnaire: “King of Jerusalem.” His passion for politics did not leave him later: having moved to independent Poland after the revolution, Baudouin defended national minorities, including Russians, and almost became the first president of Poland. And it’s good that I didn’t: elected president Five days later, he was shot dead by a right-wing extremist.

In 1903-1909, a new (third) edition of Dahl's dictionary was published, edited by Baudouin, replenished with 20 thousand new words (missed by Dahl or that appeared in the language after him). Of course, a professional linguist could not leave in place a bold hypothesis about the relationship of words abrek And be doomed; etymologies were corrected, nests were ordered, unified, the dictionary became more convenient for searching, and the “Russian” language became “Russian”. Ivan Aleksandrovich carefully marked his additions with square brackets, showing respect and sensitivity to Dahl’s original plan.

However, during Soviet times this version of the dictionary was not republished, in particular due to risky additions (see below).

14. Russian swearing was well known to Dahl, but was added to the dictionary after his death

Baudouin de Courtenay's edition entered the mass consciousness not because of its scientific side: for the first time (and almost the last time) in the history of mass Russian lexicography, obscene vocabulary was included in the dictionary. Baudouin justified it this way:

“The lexicographer has no right to curtail and castrate a “living language.” Since well-known words exist in the minds of the vast majority of the people and are constantly pouring out, the lexicographer is obliged to enter them into the dictionary, even if all the hypocrites and Tartuffes, who are usually great lovers of secret salacious things, rebelled against this and feigned indignation ... "

Of course, Dahl himself was well aware of Russian obscenities, but due to traditional delicacy, the corresponding lexemes and phraseological units were not included in his dictionary. Only in the article motherly Dahl outlined dialectological views on this subject:

MATERIALLY, I'll smear swear, use foul language, swear, curse obscenely. This abuse is characteristic of the tall, acacia, southern. and zap. adverb, and in the low region, north. and east it is less common, and in some places it is not there at all.

Professor Baudouin approached the plot more thoroughly and included all the main, as he put it, “vulgar language” in his alphabetical places, noting, in particular, that the three-letter word “becomes almost a pronoun.” This became an event, and references to the Baudouin dictionary, which was not republished in the USSR, became a popular euphemism:

Alexey Krylov, shipbuilder. "My memories"

“And all these professors and academicians began to bend such expressions that there was no Dahl dictionary from 1909 It was in 1909 that the 4th volume of the dictionary with the letter “X” was published. No need".

Mikhail Uspensky."Red Tomatoes"

15. According to Dahl’s dictionary, both Russian people and foreigners learned the language

From about the 1880s to the 1930s, Dahl's dictionary (in the original or Baudouin edition) was the standard reference book on the Russian language for all writers or readers. There was nowhere else to “check the word”, not counting the numerous dictionaries of foreign words (the old lexicons from the time of Dashkova or Shishkov became the property of history, and the new academic dictionary, edited by Grot and Shakhmatov, which was being prepared just in these years, remained unfinished) . Surprisingly, a huge dictionary, no less than half consisting of dialectisms, was also used by foreigners studying the Russian language. In 1909, after the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese, who had reconciled with Russia, with their characteristic thoroughness, placed an order for a batch of copies of the Explanatory Dictionary, which were supplied to “all regimental libraries and all military educational institutions in Japan.”

16. Yesenin and Remizov took the “richness of folk speech” from Dahl’s dictionary

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, writers of various directions actively turned to Dahl: some wanted to diversify their own vocabulary and saturate it with unusual-sounding words, others wanted to appear close to the people, to give their works a dialectal flavor. Chekhov also ironically talked about “one populist writer” who took words “from Dahl and Ostrovsky”; later this image would appear in other authors.

The philistine and peasant lyricists of the 19th century - from Koltsov to Drozhzhin - have very few dialecticisms; they try to write “like gentlemen”, passing the exam for mastery of a large culture. But the new peasant modernist poets, led by Klyuev and Yesenin, exaggerate their lexical colors to the utmost. But not everything they take from their native dialects, and an important source for them is, of course, Dal (which Professor I. N. Rozanov used to catch an embarrassed Yesenin reading).

The way for the peasants, of course, was shown by intellectuals. Klyuev’s predecessors were urban folklore stylists and pagan reenactors Alexei Remizov, Sergei Gorodetsky and Alexey N. Tolstoy, who carefully studied the Explanatory Dictionary. And later, the “Kiev Mallarmé” Vladimir Makkaveisky regretted “that Dahl has not yet been bought second-hand for a dusty shelf” (mentioning Remizov and Gorodets), and the Moscow futurist Boris Pasternak in 1914 wrote three inspired by Dahl poems about “drinking water over the water of the barrel” and sometimes returned to this technique in the future.

Undeclared Dalevian subtexts and sources among Russian poets and writers have yet to be fully revealed. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in Mandelstam’s “Poems in Memory of Andrei Bely” the word “gogolyok” (inspired, in turn, by the surname of Gogol) is adjacent to the word “finch” - “gogolyok” is interpreted by Dahl as “dandy”.

17. Dahl's dictionary has become a mythological symbol of Russian cultural identity

This understanding dates back to the era of modernism. In Andrei Bely’s symphony “The Cup of Blizzards,” one of the phantom characters “grabbed Dahl’s dictionary and obsequiously handed it to the golden-bearded mystic,” and for Benedict Livshits, “the vast, dense Dal became cozy” in comparison with the primitive element of futuristic word creation.

Already during the years of the collapse of traditional Russian culture, Osip Mandelstam wrote:

“We don’t have an Acropolis. Our culture still wanders and does not find its walls. But every word of Dahl’s dictionary is a nut of the Acropolis, a small Kremlin, a winged fortress of nominalism, equipped with the Hellenic spirit for a tireless struggle against the formless elements, the non-existence that threatens our history from everywhere.”

"On the nature of words"

For the Russian emigration, of course, the Explanatory Dictionary was even more strongly interpreted as a “little Kremlin” and salvation from oblivion. Vladimir Nabokov twice recalled, in poetry and in prose, how as a student he came across Dahl’s dictionary at a flea market in Cambridge and eagerly re-read it: “...once, sorting through this rubbish, - on a winter day, / when, an exile of sadness, / it was snowing, like in a Russian town, / I found Pushkin and Dahl / on an enchanted tray.” “I bought it for half a crown and read it, several pages every night, noting the lovely words and expressions: “olial” - a booth on barges (now it’s too late, it will never be useful). The fear of forgetting or littering the only thing that I managed to scratch out, however, with rather strong claws, from Russia, became a real disease.”

Among emigrants, the sentimental popular popular poem by hussar Evgeny Vadimov (Lisovsky) “Russian Culture”, which had lost its authorship, was popular, in which Dal became a characteristic feature: “Russian culture is the brush of Makovsky, / Antokolsky’s marble, Lermontov and Dal, / Terema and churches, the ringing of the Moscow Kremlin, / Tchaikovsky’s music sweet sadness.”

18. Solzhenitsyn’s Dictionary: based on extracts from Dalevsky

In Soviet Russia, the canonization of Dahl, including by writers, only intensified. Although in the 20th century new explanatory dictionaries of the modern literary language appeared - Ushakov, Ozhegov, Bolshoi and Maly academic - the “outdated regionalist” dictionary still continued to retain the aura of the “main”, “real” and “most complete” monument of “Russia, which we have lost." Patriotic writers like Alexei Yugov accused modern dictionaries of “throwing out of the Russian language” about one hundred thousand words in comparison with Dalevsky (“forgetting,” however, that the vast majority of these words are non-literary dialectisms) . The culmination of this tradition was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Russian Dictionary of Language Expansion,” which is an extensive extract of rare words from Dahl that may be useful to a writer (a careful note “sometimes one can say” was introduced). To them are added relatively few words in comparison with the bulk of Dalev’s mass, taken from Russian writers of the 19th-20th centuries and from some other sources. The very linguistic manner of Solzhenitsyn the writer, especially the late one - the replacement of foreign words with original neologisms composed of original roots, a large number of verbal nouns with a zero suffix like “nakhlyn” - goes back precisely to Dahl.

19. Soviet censors threw out an entry from the dictionary Jew

In 1955, Dahl's dictionary was republished in the USSR as a reprint of the second (posthumous) edition of the 1880s. This was one of the first examples of a Soviet reprint (and it was not a reprint, but an extremely labor-intensive complete retype) of an old book in the pre-reform spelling, almost forgotten for 37 years, with all the “ers” and “yats”. The exclusivity of such an action, in addition to philological accuracy, also indicated the special sacred status given to the dictionary. This reproduction tried to be as accurate as possible - but it was still not quite so. In particular, the number of pages in it does not correspond to the original publication, and most importantly, due to censorship conditions, part of the text was excluded.

In the first volume, page 541 has a strange appearance - it has much less text than its neighbors, and at first glance you can see that the lines are unusually sparse. In the appropriate place Dahl had the word Jew and its derivatives (in the second posthumous edition - page 557). Probably, initially the dictionary was completely retyped, and then from ready set nest Jew they threw it away, once again retyping the page with increased spacing and leaving for the Soviet reader such an obvious indication of censorship as just a blank spot (in addition, from its location it would be completely obvious which word was deleted). However, examples with this word scattered throughout other entries in the dictionary remain (for example, “The Jews write and read backwards, from right to left” in the nest wrap).

Generally speaking, Dahl did not include the names of ethnic groups as such on a general basis: in his dictionary there is no Englishman, nor Frenchman, and indeed Jew(there is only jewish stone). In those days, ethnonyms were often considered proper names; many other authors wrote them with a capital letter. Such vocabulary penetrates into Dahl's dictionary only in connection with figurative meanings. Article Tatar there is, but it opens with the definition of a plant (tartar), and in the nest hare The article about the brown hare takes up approximately the same amount of space as all the figurative meanings associated with the ethnonym itself. Redacted article Jew was no exception: it begins with a definition of the figurative meaning - “miserly, miser, selfish miser,” and it contains many proverbs and sayings from which exactly this image of a Jew emerges. They are also found in Dalev’s “Proverbs of the Russian People.” Although if you open, for example, an article hare, then we find out that Russian mind- “hindsight, belated” Russian God- “maybe, I suppose, somehow”, and in the article Tatar we read: Tatar eyes- “arrogant, shameless rogue.”

It is unclear whether the lexicographer himself was, by the standards of that time, an ardent anti-Semite. Dahl, an official of the Ministry of the Interior who was involved in particular with religious movements, is credited with the “Note on Ritual Murders,” a compilation of German and Polish texts sympathetically expounding the blood libel against the Jews. This work “surfaced” only during the Beilis case in 1913, and its affiliation with Dahl has not been proven. Of course, neither Soviet national policy, nor even state Soviet anti-Semitism, built on bashful and hypocritical omissions, allowed these subjects to be discussed by Russian classics in any way. It also played a role that the word “Jew”, since the time of Dahl, sharply strengthened the negative connotation that was present then, and in Soviet times it became officially taboo. It seemed unthinkable that the treasury of the national spirit, which Lenin highly valued, would contain the now “Black Hundred-pogrom” characteristics (according to Ushakov’s dictionary). All this led to such an unusual censorship of the dictionary, and then made the “Russian prophet,” whose lines “the Bolsheviks are hiding from the people,” an icon of the anti-Semitic nationalists of the 1970s-1980s.

20. Modern dictionaries of “thieves’ jargon” are Dahl distorted

Several years ago, linguist Viktor Shapoval, working on dictionaries of Russian slang, discovered that in two large dictionaries of Russian criminal jargon, published in the early 1990s, there was a large layer of outlandish words, not confirmed by any real texts, marked “international” or "foreign". Allegedly, these words are part of some international criminal jargon and are described in departmental dictionaries with the stamp “for official use.” Among them, for example, the word screen, which supposedly means “night”, and the word unit, which means “surveillance.”

Shapoval noticed that these words and their interpretations suspiciously coincide with the words from the two outer volumes of Dahl’s dictionary - the first and last. Moreover, words that Dahl himself was especially unsure of and marked them with a question mark are especially readily taken into “international” ones. That is, either Dahl, writing down and taking such dubious words from other sources, did not make a single mistake, and then these words exactly in this form ended up in the international argot of criminals, or some smart compiler of a police dictionary “for official use” (maybe , a criminal himself, who was promised leniency for such work) saw Dahl’s dictionary on the shelf, armed himself with the two outer volumes and began to make extracts, turning Special attention to outlandish words with questions. Judge for yourself which version is more likely.

The anonymous “departmental” lexicographer arbitrarily interpreted completely innocent words as criminal terms, and also had an unsteady understanding of the old spelling and abbreviations made by Dahl. Yes, word unit came to mean “surveillance” (in the sense of police surveillance), although Dahl’s context is as follows: “something that is either whole in appearance, but incoherent, composite; collection, selection, selection, accumulation; sleep, surveillance, snatch.” What we have here is a typical Dahl attempt to select among native words synonyms-replacements for a foreign one, and surveillance (through e) here means “something compacted” (a surveillance from the word keep track written with “yat”). The imaginary argotism is completely anecdotal screen- "night"; The plagiarist did not understand Dalev’s note screen, screen, night, that is, “screen, screen or screen”. And this word means not “night”, but “chest”.

Words written down by someone from Dahl, misunderstood and additionally falsified, went for a walk in numerous dictionaries of criminal jargon published and republished in our time. Real secret languages ​​(Dal, by the way, also worked on them), in general, are quite poor - they need a code for a relatively limited range of concepts, and the public understands the word “dictionary” as a “thick and thorough book”, which is why numerous lexicographical phantoms in such publications are always in demand.

Reports and messages on the Russian language

On topic: HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

"He opened a verbal mine"

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal entered the history of our culture primarily as the creator of the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language,” which reflected with exceptional completeness the vocabulary of the language of the 19th century. The wealth of material Dahl's work exceeds anything that has ever been done by one person. Without any exaggeration, we can say that Dahl accomplished a feat in science, creating a dictionary in 50 years, the compilation of which would have required “an entire academy and a whole century” (Melnikov-Pechersky). But Dahl was also a writer, ethnographer, physician, botanist, geographer, sailor, engineer, and called himself (in highest degree modestly) “a student who throughout his entire life collected bit by bit what he heard from his teacher, the living Russian language.”

“He knows a Russian person,” Turgenev said about Dala, “like his own pocket, like the back of his hand.”

Everywhere, wherever he was, Dahl greedily grabbed words and phrases on the fly when they came off the tongue in a simple conversation of people of all classes, all outskirts... And he collected 30 thousand proverbs (almost 6 times more than in the then known collection of Knyazhevich), 200 thousand words (83 thousand more than in the just published Academic Dictionary).

Dahl's dictionary is not only a lexicon, a vocabulary book, it is a one-of-a-kind encyclopedia of broad folk life. This is a book for study: it contains such a mass of information from the most diverse areas of life, human activity, and everyday life.

Dahl lived to be 71 years old. Of these, more than 50 years were devoted to language research. The life of this amazing man was not calm. He participated in 2 military campaigns: Turkish and Polish, was an official, an oculist surgeon, a veterinarian, a writer, even the author of textbooks “Botany” and “Zoology”, but most of all he loved the Russian word. In this huge piggy bank he put living Russian words, and with them - proverbs, sayings, songs, fairy tales, legends, beliefs, traditions, sayings, fables, even games. Dahl's biography does not fit into any framework, because it resembles a real novel by a traveler and a tireless worker.

From the biography of V. Dahl

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was born on November 10, 1801 in Russia, in a small town in Ukraine, in Lugan (now the city of Lugansk), in the family of a doctor, a native of Denmark. His father came to Russia at the invitation of Empress Catherine II and accepted Russian citizenship. He passed on his love for his second homeland, for Russia, to his son. Mother is a Russified German, the daughter of the famous translator and writer M. Freytag. Dahl's parents knew many languages ​​and were educated people. Dahl also received a good education at home. At the age of 13, he was assigned to the Naval Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg, and after 2 years (in 1816) he was promoted to midshipman. This was his first military rank. At that time, the rank of midshipman was considered an officer. Among the 12 best young men on the brig "Phoenix", together with P. Nakhimov and D. Zavalishin (the future Decembrist), he visited his father's homeland, Denmark (Copenhagen), but even then he came to the conclusion that he had only one homeland - Russia.

In 1818, Dahl was promoted to midshipman. Having completed his training, the young midshipman went to serve in the fleet, in the city of Nikolaev. In the same year, he began collecting words that were later included in his “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.”

First word

Young Dal graduated from the St. Petersburg Naval Corps and went to serve on Black Sea Fleet. The sleigh rolled easily across the snow field. The wind was howling. The coachman, wrapped in a heavy sheepskin coat, urging the horses on, looked over his shoulder at the rider. He shrank from the cold, raised his collar, and put his hands in his sleeves. The new, brand new midshipman's uniform does not warm well. The coachman pointed his whip at the sky and boomed, consoling:

Rejuvenates...
- How does this “rejuvenate”?

“It’s getting cloudy,” the driver explained briefly. - To the warmth. Dahl pulled out a notebook and a pencil from his pocket, blew on his numb fingers and carefully wrote: “Rejuvenates, rejuvenates - otherwise, to become cloudy in the Novgorod province means to be covered with clouds, speaking of the sky, to tend towards bad weather.”

This frosty March day turned out to be the most important in Dahl’s life. On the road, lost in the Novgorod snows, he made a decision that turned his life upside down. Since then, no matter where fate took him, he always found time to write down an apt word, expression, song, fairy tale, riddle he heard somewhere.

Dahl served in the navy for 7 years (this period was mandatory for graduates of the Naval Corps). All this time he was enthusiastically engaged in literature and collecting words. Having served the required term and received a promotion, Dahl served for another year and a half in the Baltic, in Kronstadt, and resigned: he decided to follow in the footsteps of his father and entered the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Dorpat (Dorpat is the former Russian city of Yuryev, now Tartu). Dahl called this period of his life “the time of delight.” Among the people with whom he communicated in Dorpat were the poets N. Yazykov, V. Zhukovsky, and the sons of N. Karamzin. In the house of his mentor and friend, professor of surgery A. Moyer, Dahl gathered friends, they thought about the future, read poems by A. Pushkin. In Dorpat, Dahl first published his poems in the magazine "Slav". Friends remembered him as a witty young man, a brilliant storyteller, and a cheerful joker. Studying at the university was interrupted by the outbreak of the Russian-Turkish war. Dahl defended his dissertation ahead of schedule and went to the banks of the Danube, in the thick of hostilities, where he operated on the wounded and fought against plague and cholera. Communicating with soldiers gathered from all over Russia, military doctor Dal did not forget about his hobby - collecting words.

At war. "Golden" camel

Dahl's reserves grew by leaps and bounds. He spent every free moment during the war among the soldiers - soon there were so many notebooks with written words that they did not fit into any suitcase. Dahl folded the notebooks into bales and loaded them onto the camel. Once, after one of the skirmishes with the enemy, the camel ended up in the enemy camp. Dahl was very sad: how many of his works were lost with him! Fortunately, a few days later our soldiers recaptured the camel from the enemy and returned it to its owner. The enemy did not set his sights on Dalev’s notebooks. Words are of little value! And for Dahl, his recordings were more valuable than gold.

In the spring of 1831, the corps where Dahl served was sent to Poland to suppress the uprising. To cross the Vistula, it was necessary to build a bridge and then immediately destroy it (to prevent the enemy from passing). Then they remembered Dahl’s other profession and entrusted him with this operation. For her excellent performance, Dahl received the Order of St. Vladimir and a diamond ring.

Since 1832, Dahl worked in a military hospital in St. Petersburg and gained fame as an oculist surgeon (he successfully performed eye surgeries with both his right and left hands).

Beginning of literary activity

The beginning of Dahl's literary activity dates back to 1830. His first story, “The Gypsy,” was called “an excellent work” by the publisher, but the general public did not notice it. Dahl's works appeared under the pseudonym Kazak Lugansky (taken from his place of birth), and "Russian Fairy Tales" brought fame to Kazak Lugansky. This is what this famous collection was called: “Russian fairy tales, translated from oral folk tradition into civil literacy, adapted to everyday experience and embellished with wandering sayings by the Cossack Vladimir Lugansky. First heel.”

In these satirical tales, Dahl ridiculed the “dish-licking courtiers” and the stupidity of officials, using well-known folklore stories. The collection was banned and withdrawn from sale - it was regarded as “a mockery of the government.” The author of the scandalous tales was even taken under arrest in the Third Department, but was released on the same day: Emperor Nicholas I remembered Dahl’s services in the Polish campaign, and V. Zhukovsky also asked for him. The reading public greeted the fairy tales with delight; never before have there been books written in such a rich Russian dialect, with such an abundance of proverbs and sayings. This story brought Dahl fame among writers. However, the fairy tales were republished only 30 years later.

Meetings with A. Pushkin

Fairy tales became the reason for Dahl’s acquaintance with Pushkin, which happened in 1832. Dahl came to Pushkin with his collection like a writer to a writer. What did Pushkin and Dahl talk about? There is no exact information about this conversation, but it is known that Pushkin liked “The First Heel”, and was especially delighted by Dahl’s language.

In 1833, another memorable meeting between Pushkin and Dahl took place in the Orenburg province. Pushkin followed the paths of Pugachev, collecting materials for The Captain's Daughter. Dahl accompanied him. He recalled the Orenburg years as “a golden time for preparing words.” This is not difficult to explain: the region was filled with settlers and former residents of 20 provinces were gathered in 1 district! On the way, Pushkin told Dahl a fairy tale about George the Brave and the Wolf (later Dahl published it), and Dahl responded with the plot of “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish.” A month later, Pushkin sent his friend Dahl the manuscript of this fairy tale with the inscription: “Yours from yours! To the storyteller Cossack Lugansky - the storyteller Alexander Pushkin.”

One day, in January 1837, Pushkin dropped in to see Dahl, rummaged through his notes with cheerful impatience, loudly rejoicing at every word and amusing expression. Who would have thought? Within a few days, Dal was at Moika, 12, sitting at the bedside of the poet mortally wounded in a duel, trying to ease his suffering, giving medicine, changing compresses, and hearing Pushkin’s dying words. In memory of Pushkin, Dahl was given a black frock coat shot through in a duel and the poet’s ring with a radiant green emerald, his talisman. Dahl often repeated that he took up the dictionary at the insistence of Pushkin.

Life goes on

Dahl worked a lot, he is an official of special assignments under the governor of Orenburg. In the Orenburg region, Dahl organized a zoological museum, collected collections of local flora and fauna, published articles on medical issues, and wrote textbooks “Botany” and “Zoology” for military educational institutions. In 1838, the Academy elected Dahl a corresponding member in the department of natural sciences.

Since 1841, Dahl has been the head of the office of the Minister of Internal Affairs. Official Dahl was busy with work. Cossack Lugansky wrote stories. What about the dictionary? Have the treasured notebooks been replenished with words? Dahl continued to collect words. It is estimated that with even work on the spruce maker, Dahl wrote down 1 word per hour. That's a lot. But while all the words were hidden in his notebooks, Dahl’s priceless treasure belonged to him alone. But he wanted to preserve the living language of the people for everyone. Dahl called his work “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.” He joked: “The dictionary is called “explanatory” not because it could turn out to be stupid, but because it explains the words, interprets them.” The notes in this dictionary are small stories about the life of the people, their works, folk customs, beliefs and morals. From these notes we learn today what kind of houses Russian people built, what clothes they wore, what kind of stoves they built and how they were heated, how they plowed the fields, how they harvested bread, how they matched brides, how they taught children, how they cooked porridge.

About porridge (from Dalev's dictionary)

“PORRIDGE,” explains Dahl, “a thick food, cereal boiled in water or milk. Steep porridge, buckwheat, millet, spelled, egg, oatmeal, rye... is prepared in a pot and in the oven, baked on top; liquid, gruel; a mess, in thickness, between steep and mush" (spelling and punctuation of the 19th century. - Ed.). But porridge is not only food. This is also an artel that gathers for common work (artel members sometimes say: “He and I are in the same mess”). During the harvest, peasants help each other; such help is also sometimes called porridge. Finally, we all understand that the proverb “brew the porridge yourself, and clear it up yourself” is also not about food: here porridge is a mess, turmoil, misunderstanding.

"Man is born to work"

Over the course of 50 years, one person collected more than 200 thousand words into a dictionary of 4 volumes. If these words are simply written out in columns, you will need 450 lined student notebooks. And in Dahl’s dictionary, every word is explained and examples are given for each. In addition to constantly working with words, Dahl made wooden caskets, cut horned reels for yarn, and worked on lathes and metalworking machines.

Dahl did not have an easy-going character, he was an independent person, and never sought influential patrons. He got up early and immediately got to work. Until noon, Dahl worked on the dictionary without stopping, had lunch at one o'clock and, regardless of the weather, went for a walk. After rest, he sat down at his desk again, in the evenings he no longer wrote, but only made corrections. Exactly at 11 pm he went to bed. Involuntarily, having learned about Dahl’s routine, you will remember the proverb: “A man is born to work.”

They say before last days he made corrections and additions to the dictionary with a quill pen so that the letters were rounder and clearer, while muttering: “When will there be leisure? And when we won’t be.” Even before his death, Dahl asked his daughter to write down a new word.

Just one word of course

When Dahl served as an official in St. Petersburg, his work took him a lot of time, but he still managed to write. One day his story “The Sorceress” appeared in a magazine. The story was about how a clever fortune teller robbed a gullible peasant woman and this incident was reported to the authorities. According to Dahl, “that, of course, was the end of the matter.” It's not over. The word, of course, outraged the authorities, because it meant that the authorities were always inactive and did not want to understand anything. The king read Dahl's dangerous story. The Minister of Internal Affairs summoned the writer and conveyed to him the words of the Tsar: “To write is not to serve, to serve is not to write.” Dahl had no choice. The service brought income, he had a large family (11 souls!), and besides, without a salary he could not complete the work on the dictionary. Dahl had to promise that he would not write stories in the future. That’s how dearly one word cost him, of course.

"A proverb is an assistant to all matters"

From 1849 to 1859, Dahl served as manager of a specific office in Nizhny Novgorod. This city was famous for many things, but one of the most striking events here was the annual fair. This is how Dahl’s contemporaries described this fair: “For a month and 10 days, the fair moves, hums, shimmers with colors. A thin, big-nosed man, Nizhny Novgorod official Dal, walks through the fair. He doesn’t buy anything. He listens to the noise of the fair. He pulls out words, jokes, proverbs from the noise - exactly goldfish from the pool. And every day Dahl brings home countless treasures, the only ones for which they don’t charge money at the fair - just pick them up. At home, he puts the words on shelves in his storage rooms. He rewrites each proverb twice on narrow strips of paper (Dahl calls them "straps"). One "strap" will be used as an example to explain words, the other is pasted into a notebook intended for collecting proverbs. There are already 180 such notebooks..."

Dahl took folk proverbs as examples for almost every word in his dictionary. There were also a lot of them collected - more than 30 thousand. In 1853, Dahl presented his collection “Proverbs of the Russian People” to the Academy of Sciences. On the title page there was an epigraph: “The proverb is not judged.” In the preface, the author addressed his readers: “What if every lover of our language, skimming through my collection at leisure, made notes, corrections and additions... and handed them over to the collector - isn’t it true that the next edition, if needed , could leave the first far behind? Together - not burdensome, but one will die at the porridge."

But the censorship opposed the publication of the collection, saying that it “encroaches on the corruption of morals.” “Proverbs of the Russian People” were published only in 1861-1862, after the death of Emperor Nicholas I.

A living word is more valuable than a dead letter - Dahl loved this proverb and throughout his life he collected words and folk expressions, trying to show the richness of a living language, and through it, to reveal various aspects of folk life more fully and brightly.

"My ship has been launched!"

Neither service nor studies in science and literature could interrupt Dahl’s persistent and painstaking work on compiling the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.” But Dahl was able to fully devote himself to this main work of his life only after his retirement. In 1859, due to a conflict with the new minister, he resigned and settled in Moscow, having served the rank of full state councilor. Here, in Moscow, Dahl completed his great work.

The first volume of the dictionary was published in 1863. Emperor Alexander II covered the costs of publishing all the following volumes (4 in total) and awarded Dahl a sash.

The last volume of the dictionary was published in 1866. The Academy of Sciences awarded Dahl the Lomonosov Prize for the dictionary and elected him an honorary member. The Geographical Society awarded the author a gold Constantine medal, and the University of Dorpat sent a diploma and a prize. Dahl rejoiced: “My ship has been launched!” But he did not consider the work on the dictionary finished; in subsequent years he prepared its second edition.

So, the “ship”, “Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language”, went on a Russian voyage, and today on a world voyage - there is Dahl’s dictionary on the Internet.

Two house-museums of V. Dahl

The memory of Dal is preserved by 2 house-museums: one - in which he was born, the other - in which he lived in recent years. The house where Dahl was born is well preserved. It is located in a city that often changed its name: Lugansk - Voroshilovgrad. However, in that distant time (more than 2 centuries ago), the town in Ukraine was called Luganya, and the house at number 12 stood on Angliyskaya Street (later it became known as Young Spartak Street). Today everyone in the city knows and reveres Dahl. Since 1983, Dalevsky readings have been held regularly. The local intelligentsia gathers in the literary living room of the house-museum. Regional television conducts Dalevsky "Thursdays". In 1981, the country’s first monument to Dahl was inaugurated in the city, and his bust was installed on the hospital grounds (after all, he was also a wonderful doctor!).

And the house in which Dahl lived in recent years stands on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya in Moscow (he lived here for almost 13 years). The house has been renovated, restored, and a Dahl memorial museum has been opened in it. The old crooked poplar and centuries-old linden trees probably remember this man. They say that in 1941 a fascist bomb fell in front of the house, but did not explode. When the sappers opened it, instead of a detonator they found... a Czech-Russian dictionary. Providence, through the hand of an anti-fascist worker, preserved for us this wonderful house of the great Dahl.

"Reports and messages on the Russian language" V.A. Krutetskaya. Additional materials, helpful information, Interesting Facts. Elementary School.

Let's look at his face, look into the distance - in those distant times!..
Friend of A.S. Pushkin... The greatest merit of V.I. Dahl, which gave his name wide and honorable fame, are his two large scientific collections - “Proverbs of the Russian People” (1862) and “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” ( 1861-68).
He is widely known in St. Petersburg as an ophthalmologist, also famous for the fact that he performed eye operations equally well with both his right and left hands.
He could write and do anything with his left hand, just like with his right. ... The most famous operators in St. Petersburg invited Dahl in those cases when the operation could be done more dexterously and more conveniently with the left hand...

Sayings and Quotes:

A Russian person cannot be happy alone, he needs the participation of others, and without this he will not be happy.

Language is the centuries-old work of an entire generation.

Just as rubles are made from kopecks, so knowledge is made from grains of what you read.

The teacher himself must be what he wants the student to be.

The language will not keep pace with education, will not meet modern needs, if it is not allowed to develop from its own juice and root, to ferment with its own yeast.

V.I. Dal was born on November 10, 1801 in Lugansk, Ukraine, on Angliyskaya Street, in a small one-story house surrounded by barracks, huts, dugouts of the first factory workers of the foundry. Here he spent his childhood, here his love for his father’s land was born, which he carried throughout his long life, subsequently choosing the literary pseudonym Cossack Lugansky.

His father, the Dane Johann Christian Dahl, a scientist who spoke many languages, was invited to Russia by Catherine II and appointed court librarian. However, he did not remain in this position for long, and after leaving for Germany and graduating from the medical faculty of the University of Jena, he returned to Russia as a doctor. The reasons why he ended up in a remote mining town at that time are unknown. But nevertheless, in Lugansk he served as a doctor for the mining department, under which he created the first infirmary for workers. The regional archive contains a report from Dr. I.M. Dahl (the Russian name Ivan Matveevich was received by Johann Christian Dahl along with Russian citizenship in 1799 in Lugansk, a year after his arrival) to the board of the plant about the plight of “working people”, which sets out the facts , indicating the unsanitary living conditions of workers, poverty and the prevalence of infectious diseases among them.

Vladimir Dal did not immediately follow in his father’s footsteps. After graduating from the Naval Cadet Corps, he served as a midshipman in the Black Sea Fleet, then, after promotion in rank, in the Baltic Fleet. However, an excellent home education (Vladimir’s mother also spoke several languages, knew literature and music) and an inquisitive mind encouraged V. Dahl to further improve his knowledge. "I felt the need for thorough learning, for education, in order to be in the world useful person"- this is how V. Dal himself explained his position in life. He left the navy and entered the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Dorpat, which at that time had a strong composition of professors. Together with Vladimir Dal, future celebrities studied at the faculty - surgeons N. Pirogov and F. Inozemtsev, therapist G. Sokolsky, physiologists A. Philomafitsky and A. Zagorsky.

Modern researchers have restored the pages medical activities Dahl according to meager lines from some of his works, archival documents, rare testimonies of contemporaries. Having defended his doctoral dissertation ahead of schedule (“Dissertation for the scientific degree, outlining observations: 1) successful craniotomy; 2) hidden manifestations of the kidneys"), Dahl participates in the Russian-Turkish war (1828-29); together with the Russian army he makes the transition through the Balkans, continuously operating in tent hospitals and directly on the battlefields. "...Saw a thousand , another wounded that covered the field... cut, bandaged, took out bullets..." Dahl's talent as a surgeon was highly appreciated by the outstanding Russian surgeon Pirogov. Dahl had to participate in battles and sieges, set up field combat hospitals, and fight for life in difficult conditions wounded, operate and fight fever, plague and cholera.

“During the raging of cholera in Kamenets-Podolsk, he was in charge of a hospital for cholera patients,” an entry from Dahl’s formal list, stored in the archives of Lugansk.

Awarded orders and medals, in 1832 Dahl became a resident at the St. Petersburg Military Land Hospital. Here he earned the reputation of an excellent ophthalmologist and became a medical celebrity in St. Petersburg.

Also known Scientific research Dahl on the organization of medical services in the theater of military operations, on homeopathy, pharmacology. Sketches of his articles on operational tactics for gunshot wounds were found. Of undoubted interest is one of the first published (and the first signed by the pseudonym Kazak Lugansky) articles by Dahl, “The Word of a Doctor to the Sick and Healthy,” the provisions of which remain relevant today. The main attention in the article is drawn to the need for a correct lifestyle: “Those who are on the move and do not eat their fill are less likely to need a doctor’s allowance.”

Particularly dear to us are the pages of Dahl’s life associated with Pushkin. A friend of Pushkin, Dal shared with the poet all the hardships of difficult travels along the roads of Russia. Together they traveled to the places where Pugachev moved. It is possible that it was Pushkin who gave Dahl the idea to take up the dictionary. Admired by Dahl's fairy tales, Pushkin gave him a handwritten text of one of his fairy tales with a dedicatory inscription "To the storyteller Cossack Lugansky - storyteller Alexander Pushkin." Nowadays, few people know that the first fairy tale of our childhood, “Ryaba Hen,” belongs to the storyteller Kazak Lugansky (Dahl).

In the tragic January days of 1837, Vladimir Dal, as a close friend of the poet and as a doctor, took an active part in caring for the mortally wounded Pushkin. The words of the dying Pushkin were addressed to Dahl: “Life is over...” The grateful poet, along with a talisman ring, handed him a black frock coat, riddled with Dantes’ bullet, with the words: “Take Vypolzin (a word first heard from Dahl and liked by Pushkin) for yourself too ". Dahl also took part in the autopsy of the poet; he wrote in the act on the cause of death: “The wound is, of course, fatal...” He left notes of extraordinary artistic power about the last hours of the great poet’s life.

Working as a doctor was only part of Dahl's multifaceted activities. It seems to us now that his Explanatory Dictionary is of greatest value; for his contemporaries, Dal was valuable primarily as the writer Cossack Lugansky. In the 30-40s of the last century, he was the most popular writer of everyday life and compiled 100 essays on Russian life, which were published in Otechestvennye zapiski and other metropolitan magazines, and later made up two volumes in his collected works. His writing activity was highly appreciated by A. Pushkin, I. Turgenev, V. Belinsky, N. Dobrolyubov. In 1845, Belinsky wrote about Dal: “After Gogol, this is still decisively the first talent in Russian literature.”

Dahl's work was positively affected by his good knowledge of modern life - after all, none of the writers of the 19th century traveled around Rus' as much as Vladimir Dal. Dahl’s excellent spiritual qualities, talent, sociability, and versatility of interests attracted people to him. Therefore, he is close to Pushkin, Gogol, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Zhukovsky, Odoevsky, Lazhechnikov; was acquainted with Shevchenko, corresponded with him and even took part in his release from exile (although later their friendship would end due to many differences in life positions). Many progressive figures of that time attended the St. Petersburg Thursdays organized by Dahl, including the composer Glinka, the surgeon Pirogov, the geographer Litke and many others.

Dahl was also a naturalist - he wrote two textbooks, “Botany” and “Zoology.” And, probably, the level of knowledge in this area was quite high, since in 1838 the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences V. Dal was elected corresponding member in the department of natural sciences. And in the “Literary Gazette”, published at that time in St. Petersburg, the tireless Dahl ran the “Menagerie” section, in which his stories about animals were published.

It is necessary to note Dahl’s merits as an ethnographer. During his ten-year stay in the Nizhny Novgorod province, he collected enormous scientific material for a geographical atlas of the distribution of various dialects. His ethnographic descriptions of the peoples of the Lower Urals and Kazakhstan brought him particular fame among specialists.

Finally, V. Dahl’s “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” is a collection of moral, philosophical, everyday, folklore experience, a verbal consolidation of the vast, centuries-old history of the living Great Russian language, this dictionary is his life’s work. He himself simply said about his work: “I loved my fatherland and brought it the grain I owed according to my strength.” But what is this “grain”? Vladimir Krupin, one of the Dalevists, in an anniversary article for the 180th anniversary of the birth of V. Dahl wrote: “... it will always be a reproach for us that the loner Dahl accomplished work equal to the work of many decades of another humanitarian institute with its powerful team and modern means of science and technology." And the famous modern writer Andrei Bitov called Dahl Magellan, “... who swam the Russian language from A to Z. It is impossible to imagine that one person did this, but that’s just how it happened.” Over the course of half a century, Dahl explained and provided examples of about 200 thousand words! But besides all that, Dahlem collected more than 37 thousand proverbs of the Russian people! But he also served, healed, and was engaged in scientific and writing activities.

Dahl's work on the dictionary received high recognition from the entire Russian society; he received the Lomonosov Prize, which was prestigious at that time. An interesting fact is the recognition of Dahl’s work. There was no free place at the Academy of Sciences, and then Academician Pogodin made a proposal to cast lots and have one of the academicians leave the academy so that Dahl could fill the vacancy. But it ended with Dahl becoming an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences.

By the time the dictionary was completed, Dahl’s health was already seriously undermined. “It would seem,” writes Dalevist P.I. Melnikov-Pechersky, “with the end of long-term and hard work, Vladimir Ivanovich’s health should, if not be restored, then at least get better. It turned out the opposite... A long-term habit of constant work, which suddenly stopped, is harmful affected the health of the great hardworker." On September 22, 1872, V. Dahl died. He is buried in Moscow at the Vagankovskoye cemetery.

Lugansk residents remember and honor their fellow countryman. On the street now named after V. Dahl, there is a house in which his family lived. The old mansion became a museum, and the inscription on the memorial plaque reads: “In this house in 1801, the outstanding writer and lexicographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was born.” The museum has become one of the centers of cultural life of the city. Within the walls of the museum, in the homeland of the Cossack Lugansky, the famous “Dalevsky Thursdays” have been revived, of which the author of these lines was repeatedly a participant. Local sculptors, artists, poets and writers dedicate their works to the glorious fellow countryman. There is a monument erected on the street where Cossack Lugansky was born. V. Dahl is depicted during the period of completing work on the dictionary, and his whole appearance seems to express a feeling of fulfilled duty.

V.I. Dal and the blood libel

Valery Kozyr's biographical sketch "Vladimir Ivanovich Dal" was written with encyclopedic conciseness and accuracy. It covers the main aspects of the multifaceted activities of one of the most outstanding representatives of Russian culture in the era of its greatest flourishing and, in essence, does not need any additions or comments. However, in the modern socio-political context, publishing it without touching on the topic of Dahl’s alleged involvement in the blood libel against the Jews would mean putting the magazine, the author of the essay, and its hero in a false position, which is why the editors asked me to accompany the essay with this short afterword. Those who are familiar with the obscurantist “Note on Ritual Murders,” which is widely distributed in Russia under the name of V.I. Dahl, or have heard something about it, may be perplexed: why the author kept silent about this episode in the biography of his hero. And this would undermine the credibility of the essay as a whole.

In one of the upcoming issues of Vestnik, my work on the Bloody Libel against Jews in Russia will be published, which will also cover in detail the issue of the “Note” attributed to Dahl. For now, in this short Post Scriptum, I simply inform readers that Vladimir Ivanovich Dal did not compose such a “Note” and had nothing to do with it. Those who have attributed and continue to attribute its authorship to V.I. Dahl are falsifiers who are trying to cover up their crimes of hatred with the untainted name of the creator of one of the most monumental and original creations of the Russian genius - “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.”

The most detailed biography of V.I. Dahl was compiled by P.I. Melnikov-Pechersky (with the collection of Dahl’s works, 1897, vol. I; Dahl’s autobiography is also there).