“Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” is a personal and scientific feat of V.I. Dahl

The Brothers Grimm only managed to improve their vocabulary to the letter F; it was completed only in 1971.. Not only did Dahl's dictionary become an incredibly important text in itself - a national treasure, a source of truly folk words for generations of Russian people; its own mythology grew around it.

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

Title page of the first volume of the first edition of the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language”. 1863

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 the “living” language, without vocabulary characteristic only of church books (unlike the Academy’s dictionary, which, in accordance with the guidelines, was called “Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Russian Language”), with careful use of borrowed and calque words, but 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 credit” 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

Vladimir Dal. Portrait by Vasily Perov. 1872

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 vocabularies are, perhaps, even more holistic and more successful than the cumbersome products of multi-headed teams, whose project is not limited by the duration of human life, no one is in a hurry, the idea is constantly changing, some work better, some worse, and everything 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 you take the bound first volume of the first edition, then the year 1863 is written on the title page. 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; however, 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 “medium 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

Rural free school. Painting by Alexander Morozov. 1865 State Tretyakov Gallery / Wikimedia Commons

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 hesitation, zealots of education, although in respect of the fact that this man 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 ZHIVULYA, 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

Ivan Baudouin de Courtenay. Around 1865 Biblioteka Narodowa

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 he didn’t: the elected president was shot dead by a right-wing extremist five days later.

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.

Sergey Yesenin. 1922 Wikimedia Commons

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 Evgeniy 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

Publishing house "Russian Way"

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 the finished set the 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 hide 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 notes, paying 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 attempt for Dahl to select synonyms for a foreign one among native words, 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.

Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language- a dictionary explaining the meanings of words used in oral and written speech of the 19th century. The basis of the work is the language of the people, expressed by a variety of regional, derivative and similar words, as well as examples of their use.

The dictionary has been created since 1819 Vladimir Ivanovich Dal. For this work in 1863 he was awarded the Lomonosov Prize of the Academy of Sciences and awarded the title of honorary academician. The first four-volume edition was published between 1863 and 1866.

Description

An example of an article in the first edition. Interpreted words are highlighted in bold

The dictionary contains about 200 thousand words, of which 63-72 thousand are words generally known in the 19th century that were not previously included in other dictionaries. Approximately 100 thousand words taken from Dictionary of Church Slavonic and Russian languages(1847), 20 thousand - from Experience of the regional Great Russian dictionary(1852) and Add-ons to him (1858), Experience of a terminological dictionary of agriculture, manufacturing, crafts and folk life(1843-1844) V. P. Burnasheva, Botanical Dictionary(1859) Annenkov and others. Number proverbs and sayings about 30 thousand, in some articles their number reaches several dozen ( - 73, - 86, - 110 ).

In certain cases, the Dictionary explains not only the meaning of words, but also describes the objects they call (methods of weaving , rules for performing a wedding ceremony ), which is typical not of explanatory, but of encyclopedic dictionaries. Proverbs and sayings accompanying them serve to provide a deep understanding of some subjects.

Editions

Pre-revolutionary

3rd(1903-1909) - revised and expanded by I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay. At least 20,000 new words were added, including rude and abusive words, which became an obstacle to the re-release of this version of the dictionary in the Soviet Union for censorship reasons. To make it easier to find words inside nests, many headings for such words were created with links to the article containing them. As in previous editions, the volumes were compiled over several issues. It was planned to publish 10 issues per volume over 4 years.

Soviet and Russian

1935 (5th) - exact photomechanical copy of the 2nd edition. An introductory article by A. M. Sukhotin has been added. Volume format 27x18 cm (enlarged).

Notes

1. Dictionaries// Great Russian Encyclopedia. Volume 32. - M., 2016. - P. 237-238.
2. , With. .
3. Autobiographical note by V.I. Dahl // Russian archive: historical and literary magazine. - M.: In the university printing house, 1872. - No. XI. - Stb. 2246-2250.
4. Dal V.I. Reply to the verdict// Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language. Part 4. - 1st ed. - M.: Printing house T. Rees, 1866. - P. 1-4.
5. Dal V.I.// Great Russian Encyclopedia. Electronic version (2016). - M.
6. Dal V.I. A parting word// Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language. Part 1. - 1st ed. - M.: Printing house T. Rees, 1866. - P. XIII.
7. Experience of a regional Great Russian dictionary, published by the Second Branch of the Imperial Academy of Sciences; Addition to the Experience of the Regional Great Russian Dictionary / Ed. OH. Vostokov. - St. Petersburg. : In type. Imp. acad. Sciences, 1852; 1858. - 275; 328 pp.
8. Burnashev V.P. Experience in a terminological dictionary of agriculture, manufacturing, crafts and folk life. Volume I; Volume II. - St. Petersburg. : Type. K. Zhernakova, 1843-1844. - P. 487; 415.
9. Vompersky V.P. Editions of the Explanatory Dictionary…// Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language. In 4 volumes. Volume 1 / V.I. Dahl. - M.: Russian language, 1989. - P. XIII-XVII.
10. Shcherbin V.K. The universe is in alphabetical order. - Mn. : Nar. Asveta, 1987. - P. 45. - 80 p.
11. , With. VI.
12. Kostinsky Yu.M. IN AND. Dahl. The main thing of his life// Domestic lexicographers of the 18th-20th centuries / Ed. G.A. Bogatova. - M.: Nauka, 2000. - P. 107. - 508 p.
13. Dictionary// Great Russian Encyclopedia. Volume 30. - M., 2015. - P. 424-425.

When you are going to give a gift to a true connoisseur of literature, it is difficult to choose something better than an exclusive edition of his favorite work, existing in a single copy. Just imagine what joy a luxurious and uniquely designed book (or a whole book) printed on excellent paper and bound in genuine leather can bring to such a person! It doesn’t matter who this gift is intended for: the hero of the day, a work colleague or a best friend. No matter who it is, custom-made gift books will always help emphasize how dear and significant this person is to you.

Our online store offers you not just expensive books, but real works of art that will be carefully stored, re-read many times and, of course, will become a source of pride for their owner.

In the “Rich Collection” catalog you will find a large selection of unique publications on a wide variety of topics: from religious literature and dictionaries to science fiction and even small subject libraries. Of course, in addition to ready-made publications by certain authors, we offer our clients the opportunity to order the production of absolutely any book, independently choosing the desired design and materials used. All that remains for you is to choose a piece that will be interesting to its owner. All other difficulties fall entirely on our shoulders!

Handmade books are always piece goods. Such expensive books are extremely rare, so they become family heirlooms and heirlooms. Buying gift editions and exclusive books means pleasing your business partners with an excellent business gift, and your family and friends with a luxurious publication for your home library. A book as a gift can be anything: now it is not a problem to buy books for adults, books for children, encyclopedias, dictionaries, collectible albums, collected works... The main thing is that it is interesting to its owner. And, of course, not only the content matters, but also the design of a unique book - it can be handmade, gold or silver embossing... All these details create a special atmosphere of sophistication and comfort, they attract attention and make the book not only a source of useful information, but also a unique art object that would be prestigious to place in your office or hall.

Purchasing exclusive books and collected works is very easy and simple. All you need to do is go to the catalog you like, select the option you want and place your order. We sincerely hope that you will definitely find something you like. Don't miss the opportunity to give a gift that will become a favorite part of its owner's library!

Our advantages:

• A huge range of printed products, a book as a gift in our online store can be selected to suit every taste, a variety of preferences and in different price ranges;
• All books are structured into sections. It will be easy for you to understand among these silent and wise printed publications. For your attention, the section “Top Sellers”, “New Products”, as well as a convenient division of books into genre categories;
• It's easy to place an order. You choose the gift book you like, and then confirm your order through a special form;
• 24/7 order processing. It is convenient and does not tie you to a purchase in time. Choose, buy books as a gift during the day, at night, in the morning, at any time convenient for you;
• Opportunity to use individual services. So, you have the opportunity to order a piece of leather binding, which will definitely make the gift original and unique, a real bibliophile’s dream.
• The multi-genre variety in our store is successfully combined with a selection of categories for different age groups of readers;
• Attractive prices and high delivery speed.

See, choose and order gift books. Give luxury and knowledge to yourself and your loved ones!

RichCollection: unique books - for unique people!

Biography of Vladimir Dahl

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (1801 - 1872) – writer, doctor, lexicographer, creator of the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language”.

Vladimir was born in the village of Lugansk Plant (now Lugansk) on November 10, 1801. His family was highly educated. His father was a doctor and linguist, and his mother was a pianist, she knew several languages, and was interested in literature. It is not surprising that Vladimir received an excellent home education. As a child, in his biography, Vladimir Dal became very attached in his soul to his native land, and later even took the pseudonym Cossack Lugansky.

Education in the biography of Vladimir Dahl was received at the St. Petersburg Naval Cadet Corps. After graduating in 1819, he went to serve in the navy. But after several years, he decided to choose a different path - he began to study medicine at the University of Dorpat (now the University of Tartu).

In 1828-1829 he took part in the Russian-Turkish war. Dahl takes part in battles, helps the wounded, and operates in field hospitals. Award-winning, he begins working at the military land hospital in St. Petersburg as a resident. Soon Dahl's biography becomes widely known: he was known as an excellent doctor. During his medical practice, including military practice, Dahl wrote several articles and sketches.

Then Dahl took up literature seriously. In 1832 his “Russian Fairy Tales” were published. It's five o'clock." He makes acquaintances and friendships with famous writers and poets: Gogol, Pushkin, Krylov, Zhukovsky and others. Together with Pushkin, Dahl travels around Russia. Dahl was present at the death of Pushkin, treated him after the duel, and participated in the autopsy.

During his biography, Vladimir Dal wrote more than a hundred essays in which he talked about Russian life. He traveled a lot, so he knew Russian life very well. Dahl also compiled textbooks “Botany” and “Zoology”, and in 1838 he became a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

But the most significant and voluminous work in the biography of Vladimir Dahl remains the “Explanatory Dictionary”, containing approximately 200 thousand words. Being well acquainted with many professions, crafts, signs and sayings, Dahl placed all his knowledge in the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language”.

From 1849 to 1859, Dal lived in Nizhny Novgorod, where he served as manager of a specific office, and then moved to Moscow. During this time, he published many articles and works. The first volume of the Explanatory Dictionary was published in 1861. A year later, Proverbs of the Russian People were published. Dahl's biography was awarded the Lomonosov Prize.

Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" (published in 1863 - 1866). consisting of 4 volumes, includes more than 200 thousand words and 30 thousand proverbs, sayings, proverbs, riddles, which are given as illustrations to explain the meanings of words.

The compiler of this dictionary, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (1801 - 1872), was a talented and hardworking person. He was educated first as a naval officer (St. Petersburg Naval Corps - 1814 - 1819), then as a doctor (Derpt, now Tartu, University - 1826 - 1829), and from 1833 he was a government official in various departments.

Dahl's interests were varied; he succeeded in many fields of knowledge: engineering, botany and zoology (corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in the department of natural sciences since 1838), ethnography, folklore (collection “Proverbs and Sayings of the Russian People”, 1861 - 1862). The writer Dal (pseudonym Kazak Lugansky) created many works: fairy tales, short stories, incidents, essays, mostly written in the spirit of the natural school. Dahl's complete works comprise 10 volumes.

But Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary, the work of his whole life, brought him the widest fame and recognition. Dahl was not a philologist, a linguist by training, he became one by vocation, because he loved and understood his native language, he knew how to listen and ponder the living folk word.

V.I. Dalem wrote several theoretical articles about the dictionary and adverbs of the Russian language. He devoted half a century to collecting words, hatching the idea of ​​​​creating a dictionary and its implementation. Wherever he was: on a military campaign, in a hospital, on a business trip, he wrote down words everywhere; it is not without reason that almost half of the words included in the dictionary were collected by the author himself. Dahl also had numerous assistants who sent information about words from various parts of the Russian state. It's hard to believe that the gigantic work of compiling the dictionary was done by one person. Before Dahl and after him, dictionaries with such a large coverage of material were not compiled alone; entire teams of specialists worked on them. Therefore, Dahl should rightfully be called an enthusiastic ascetic.

Dahl was the first to call his dictionary explanatory. In the epigraph, the author stated: “The dictionary is called explanatory because it not only translates one word into another, but interprets and explains the details of the meaning of words and concepts subordinate to them.” Subsequent dictionaries of this kind also began to be called explanatory. Dahl wanted, with the help of his dictionary, to acquaint his contemporaries with the richness and expressiveness of the existing folk language, “because this language is strong, fresh, rich, brief and clear...”. That is why the author included the words “living Great Russian language” in the title. Living, which means the one that is spoken at the present time. Therefore, the dictionary included a huge number of words (according to Dahl’s calculations - about 80 thousand), which were not included in other dictionaries, since the compilers regarded them as not worthy of attention, simple, everyday words (unlike books). The Great Russian language meant the Russian language (as opposed to Little Russian, or Little Russian, as the Ukrainian language was called in those days).

How is the dictionary built? The author arranged the vocabulary material according to the alphabetical-cluster principle: words that have a common root and initial letter are combined into a “nest”, and prefix formations with the same root should be searched for the letter of the alphabet with which the prefix begins (in the nest “to walk” we find the words khazhat', khozhenoe, khozhen'e, khod', walking, etc., prefix formations in the sockets with the corresponding initial letters: nurse, go out, go in, move, leave, etc.).

The explanation of words is given not only descriptively, but mostly with the help of synonyms, which Dahl called “identity words.” Among them are literary, colloquial, dialect words (for example, the nest “February”: Februariy, old, section, fierce; now people, bokogray, wide-roads). Dahl makes notes about dialect words: where, in what places in Russia they are common. For example: Novgorod, Pskov, Ryazan, etc.

Dalev's dictionary is an excellent collection of not only lexical, but also ethnographic material. The dictionary entries contain a variety of information about the life of the people: about housing, methods of farming, tools, everyday life, clothing, utensils, food, family life, religion, superstitions, omens, mythology, rituals, customs, morals, etc.

Thus, in the dictionary entry “Izba” we find the following information: “Izba (heater, istpka, ist-ba, hut) ... peasant house, hut; residential wooden house; residential upper room, room, clean (not cooking) half, people's room or kitchen, housing for servants in the manor's courtyard; old, inner peace in the royal wooden palace; old, ward, order, office... In Siberia, izba is a separate cooking room, kitchen, and front hut, in contrast to kuti, back, cooking, woman's hut. A prefabricated hut, hired by the world, for gatherings and for visiting elders. A black, or smoking, hut with a stove without a chimney. A white hut, or a white hut, in which there is a stove with a chimney and therefore there is no soot. A red hut, with a red, i.e., large or casement window, not just porticoes. The ancient hut was divided into three parts: the sholnush, or kitchen and bedroom; hut, dining room and living room; hot pot, clean, without a stove or with a Dutch oven; The gorenka was decorated with paintings and was sometimes placed as a separate extension.

In general, our huts are made of logs; it is usually four-walled; if it is partitioned off with a chopped wall, then it is five-walled, or with six chopped corners;... six-walled, if there is a canopy in the middle and from them there is an entrance to both halves, winter and summer...” Then follow proverbs, sayings and riddles, in of which the hut is mentioned (for example: The most precious thing is a well-fed honor and a covered hut. What is not visible in the hut? heat), and then derivative words (for example: hut - old, a servant at the royal hut, room).

When describing many realities (objects), Dahl acts as a subtle connoisseur of folk life. So, from the dictionary we learn more than a dozen names for a handle (for which they take, hold, lift a thing): ax handle - for an axe, bow, handle - for a bucket, handle, block - for a chisel, knife, broom handle - for a broom, rake - at the rake, the staple - at the chest, the hammer - at the hammer, the rod - at the fishing rod, the chain, the chain - at the flail, the scythe, the scythe - at the scythe, the shaft - at the banner, pikes.

A great variety of lexical material associated with trades and crafts was reflected in Dahl: fishing, trapping, hunting, butter-making, cheese-making, brewing, leatherworking, plumbing, carpentry, shoemaking, trade, weaving, tailoring, making bast shoes, spoons, hats , baskets, various games, etc. That is why the dictionary is called an encyclopedia of folk life of the 19th century.

A talented writer, Dahl approached vocabulary work as an artist. The articles are written so vividly and captivatingly that many of them are perceived as artistic miniatures (see the words life, animal, barge, circle, window, monkey, etc.).

Dahl's great work was noted by the scientific community. For the creation of the dictionary, the Russian Academy of Sciences awarded the author the Lomonosov Prize (1869), the Geographical Society - a gold medal (1862), and the University of Dorpat - a prize for achievements in linguistics (1870). Dahl was elected honorary academician (1868).

The high assessment given to Dahl’s dictionary by V.I. Lenin: “a magnificent thing” (from a note to A.V. Lunacharsky, January 18, 1920). According to the memoirs of contemporaries, the dictionary stood in the Kremlin office of V.I. Lenin. N.K. Krupskaya noted: “In order to understand what imagery is close to the peasantry, Vladimir Ilyich, by the way, especially carefully read and studied Dahl’s dictionary, insisted on its speedy republication.”

At present, the dictionary cannot be used as a reference book on the modern Russian language, since it reflects the state of the language of the last century and is, first of all, a dialect dictionary. In addition, it is not free from some errors and inaccuracies, which are caused by the linguistic views of the author (this includes the spelling of individual words, explanation of the origin (etymology) of words, grammatical notes, replacement of foreign words with Russian equivalents, sometimes created by Dahl himself, distribution of words into nests and inside nests, etc.).

But, without a doubt, the value of Dahl's dictionary will not fade with time. Specialists constantly turn to him: linguists, historians, ethnographers, folklorists, writers; it is used as a source when creating new dialect dictionaries; it is consulted when reading and studying the literature of the 19th century.

Dahl's Dictionary is an inexhaustible treasury for all those who are interested in the history of the Russian people, their culture and language.

The history of the creation of Dahl's dictionary

On one autumn day in 1859, retired St. Petersburg official Vladimir Ivanovich Dal settled in Moscow on Presnya. This event attracted the attention of others only because of the number of paper bales brought into the house. Few knew then that this extraordinary official spent his entire adult life collecting things that could not be touched, hung on a wall, or hidden in a pocket. What is heard everywhere and does not belong to anyone in particular. Vladimir Ivanovich collected...words.

At first he did this almost unconsciously. For example, I wrote down the first word on the road, when as a young man, having just graduated from the Naval Corps, he went to serve in the Black Sea. “Rejuvenates!” - said the coachman, looking at the sky covered with clouds. When you leaf through the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language,” pay attention to this word. It all started with him. The first of two hundred thousand!

Later, Dahl specifically asked people what and how they were called in their area. And fate seemed to deliberately help him in this matter. As a cadet, he sailed on a training ship, on which one hundred and fifty sailors from all over Russia served. After graduating from the University of Dorpat, he became a doctor and joined the active army. But even in war, he found the opportunity to gather soldiers around him and conduct his research. Amazing chains of words appeared in his notebook. Well, for example, did you know that “golk” is noise and shouting, rebellion, quarrel, ringing, noise, knocking, clatter, roar, hum, response, second, echo! “Bolda” is not a dunce, but also a knob, a club, a sledgehammer, a rammer.

And “baldovina” is not at all what you thought, but “a muddy, crucian carp lake.”

Dahl wrote down the words while wandering around the crowd of the famous Nizhny Novgorod fair. And even while serving in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg, he sent out circulars to cities and towns that contained all the same questions: what is called what? It even happened that all ministerial scribes were exclusively engaged in copying sent words, local dialects, fairy tales, proverbs, and beliefs.

What kind of “disease” struck Dahl? Why did he pursue every word unknown to him with the passion of a hunter? And for what?

Vladimir Ivanovich was born into a very peculiar family. His father was Danish, his mother was German. But everyone, including grandmother, spoke many languages. There were a lot of books in the house, and among them were dictionaries. My grandmother translated plays by foreign authors into Russian, and sometimes the whole family would look for the right word for her. In such an environment, it was probably difficult not to become infected with a love of words.

Later, Dahl traveled a lot around Russia, communicating with ordinary people. He was amazed at the accuracy and capacity of their speech and complained bitterly to his friends: “We don’t know our language... and what’s even worse, we don’t want to learn it...” Those were the times - through the window cut by Peter I from Europe such a stream of foreign language speeches poured in to us, that the elite of Russian society not only forgot how to speak and write in Russian, but also considered it shameful to think in their native language. There was an opinion that our language is poor and incapable of expressing any complex concepts.

The first person who, according to Dostoevsky, “speaked conscious Russian,” was Pushkin. We know that Dahl was on duty at the bedside of the dying poet, that he was bequeathed a talismanic ring and a friend’s frock coat that was shot through. There is evidence that it was Pushkin who inspired Dahl to compile the dictionary. But Dahl did not decide to do this soon.

Dahl's life was turbulent, eventful, labors, and creativity. He was a man of all trades. And he succeeded in everything. He was a skillful and decisive surgeon, writer, and scientist. Back in 1838, he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences for collecting collections on the flora and fauna of the Orenburg region. In between, he wrote textbooks on zoology and botany. He sang beautifully, played many musical instruments... “We must grasp every knowledge that we encounter along the way,” he believed, “there is no way to say in advance what will be useful in life.”

Only after retiring was Dahl finally able to look at the treasures he had collected over half a century and... he got scared. He realized that no one else could give these sketches a finished look, that is, create a dictionary that would serve people. Will the rest of my life be enough for this? Will there be enough knowledge? After all, he is not a linguist. After weighing all the pros and cons, Dahl got down to business, modestly calling himself a bearer in the construction of the chambers. "Front to rear axle."

In recent years, Dahl has been working in his house on Presnya, sometimes to the point of fainting. He almost single-handedly created a dictionary, almost twice as large in volume as the dictionary published by the Academy of Sciences team! People have been gratefully using this dictionary for one and a half hundred years.

Dahl's dictionary is called an encyclopedia of Russian folk life of the first half of the 19th century. From it you can find out what the peasant sowed, how he built a house, what agricultural tools he used, what he wore, what holidays and customs he had. And it doesn’t matter that many of the words collected by Dahl are no longer used. Dahl explained the purpose of his work this way: “... I do not claim that all folk speech, or even all the words of this speech, should be included in the educated Russian language; I only assert that we must study the simple and direct Russian speech of the people and assimilate it for ourselves, just as all living things assimilate good food for themselves and transform it into their blood and flesh.”

Few people know that Dahl and Pushkin were united not only by great personal friendship, but also by common ideas about the great importance of the Russian language, and a common concern for it. In the Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl Museum, on B. Gruzinskaya Street, at the Moscow city branch of VOOPIiK, an exhibition dedicated to the friendship of the two great sons of our Fatherland, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin and Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl, has been opened. The exhibition was timed to coincide with two significant anniversaries in the history of Russian culture - the 200th anniversary of the birth of A.S. Pushkin (June 6, 1999) and the subsequent 200th anniversary of V.I. Dahl (November 20, 2001) N. V. Gogol wrote about Pushkin - the recognized genius, glory and pride of Russia: “A.S. Pushkin is an extraordinary phenomenon and, perhaps, the only phenomenon of the Russian spirit: this is the Russian man in his development, in which he may appear through two hundred years."

V.G. Belinsky once spoke about Dal - the great lexicographer, creator of the famous “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language”, ethnographer, writer: “One of the peculiarities of V.I. Dal in his love for Rus' is that he loves it in the root, in the very core, the foundation of it, that he loves the simple Russian man... How well he knows his nature! He knows how to think with his head, see with his eyes, speak with his language.”

V.I. Dal himself indicated the time of his acquaintance with A.S. Pushkin: “It was at the end of September or early October 1832, when, at the end of the Turkish and Polish campaigns, I came to the capital and published my first experiments - published a collection” Russian tales"". This collection brought Dahl fame as a writer. In fairy tales, the writer set himself the task of introducing “his fellow countrymen to the folk language, to the dialect, which had wide scope in the Russian fairy tale.”

Zhukovsky, impressed by Dahl’s collection of fairy tales, who had entered the literary field, responsively promised to go with him to Pushkin, but the visit kept being postponed. Not wanting to hesitate any longer, Dahl took his collection and went to introduce himself to the eminent Pushkin. Dahl subsequently noted Pushkin’s magnificent Moscow dialect.

A.S. Pushkin, opening the book from the beginning, from the end, where necessary and laughing joyfully, went through the necklaces strung by Dahl from wonderful words, proverbs, sayings and apt figurative words: “What is this luxury, what is the meaning, what is the use of each our saying!" - he exclaimed.

The publisher of the Russian Archive, P.I. Bartenev, would later write down from Dahl’s words that Pushkin was constantly interested in the Russian folk language and highly appreciated the treasures of Russian folk speech collected by Dahl. He began compiling his famous Dictionary at the insistence of A.S. Pushkin. Love for the living Russian word became the basis of a strong and sincere friendship with the great poet.

A new meeting took place in the early autumn of 1833, on September 8, when Alexander Pushkin arrived in the distant Orenburg province to survey the historical sites of the uprising of Emelyan Pugachev. On the trip he was accompanied by V.I. Dal, an official of special assignments under the Orenburg military governor-general N.A. Perovsky. Listening to the steppe winds, for five days they toured historical places in a lively and friendly conversation.

Contemporaries, recalling their communication, emphasized that V.I. Dal was a living lexicon for Pushkin. Dahl showed Pushkin the places of the uprising, helped him meet and establish conversations with the right people. We visited the Berdskaya village - the place where Pugachev stayed during the siege of Orenburg, met with the 75-year-old Cossack woman Buntova and others who remembered Pugachev’s uprising. Pushkin questioned them, wrote down their stories and the lively figurative speech he liked in his notebook. Dahl also made notes, wrote down the same words, proverbs, sayings and songs...

Dahl continues to serve as an official of special assignments for the Orenburg military governor, devoting all his free time to literary pursuits. In Orenburg, Dahl writes a lot, quickly, and luck helps him - he is willingly read and praised in St. Petersburg and Moscow. And in addition to his literary pursuits, Dahl is occupied with the study of the region and the peoples inhabiting it, natural history, the structure of the museum... And as always and everywhere, the constant replenishment of the dictionary: collecting words, proverbs, songs, tales...

The thread of friendship with Pushkin does not break: Dal stands on Pushkin’s side when he created Sovremennik, defending the advanced artistic and aesthetic direction of the magazine. “The feeling nourished by all of us should ignite each of us to noble competition in the field of the useful and elegant,” writes Dahl in one of his articles for Sovremennik. (20) And when, at the beginning of 1836, Pushkin received permission to “publish four volumes of purely literary articles” - this will be Sovremennik - Dal will respond joyfully:

The noble rumors have finally arrived

To degrees that are dull and dry...

Later, after 2-3 years, V.I. Dal will read with reverent attention “The History of Pugachev” and “The Captain’s Daughter” created by Pushkin, where, of course, he will recognize familiar places and mutual acquaintances.

And again Dahl’s meeting with Pushkin.

In the first half of December 1836, the Orenburg military governor and his subordinate V.I. Dal arrived on official business in St. Petersburg. (20a)

Dal and Pushkin met several times. One of the meetings is known for certain. A few days before the duel, Pushkin heard from Dahl that the skin that a snake sheds annually is called in Russian “crawl out” - he liked this word, and our great poet, among jokes, sadly said to Dahl: “Yes, here we are writing , we are also called writers, but we don’t know half of the Russian words!”... The next day, Pushkin came to Dahl in a new frock coat. “What a crawl!” he said, laughing with his cheerful, ringing, sincere laugh. “Well, I won’t crawl out of this crawl soon. In this crawl, I will write this...” Dahl echoed in his memory: “Oh, you will see: I'll do a lot more!..."

Dahl learns about the duel that took place on January 27, 1837 and about Pushkin’s mortal wound, and hurries to the poet’s house on the Moika embankment, where their last meeting took place and those last 46 hours of the life of a mortally wounded man passed, and he knew that there was no hope.

At Pushkin's, Dahl had already found a crowd of his closest friends in the front hall: Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Odoevsky. There were doctors in the office of the wounded Pushkin. V.I. Dal remained with the poet, not leaving him until the last hour, the great hour of torment and courage. V.I. Dal looked after Pushkin like a doctor: he gave medicine, applied ice to his head, and applied poultices. To Pushkin’s question: “Dal, tell me the truth, will I die soon?” Dahl replied: “We still hope for you, we really do!” Pushkin shook hands with Dahl and said: “Well, thank you!”

Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev, a person very close to Pushkin (it was he who would take the coffin with the poet’s body to the Holy Mountains), immediately in the next room he would write: “His friend and doctor Dahl made his last moments easier.”

On the 29th at 2:45 pm Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin died. In the “Literary Supplements” to the magazine “Russian Invalid”, the famous sad announcement of Prince Odoevsky will appear in a mourning frame: “The sun of our poetry has set!... Pushkin died in the prime of his life, in the middle of his great career!”

On November 22, 1801, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was born. He went down in history, first of all, as the creator of the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.” It took him 50 years. But it was not only literature that occupied Dahl.

First word.

Young Dal graduated from the St. Petersburg Naval Corps and went to serve in the Black Sea Fleet. The coachman, wrapped in a heavy sheepskin coat, urged the horses, looking over his shoulder at the rider. He shrank from the cold, raised his collar, and put his hands in his sleeves. The coachman pointed his whip at the sky and boomed:

- 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.”

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.

In 1819, Dahl graduated from school as a midshipman and was assigned to the fleet in Nikolaev. His first pocket dictionary of cadet jargon contains 34 words. In September 1823, Dahl was arrested on suspicion of writing a libelous epigram that offended the honor and dignity of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Alexei Greig. What was written was addressed to Greig’s common-law wife Yulia Kulchitskaya, the daughter of a Mogilev innkeeper. The anonymous author clearly laughed at the heartfelt affection of the elderly vice admiral for the youthful and bright woman. The accused spent six months behind bars, he was threatened with demotion to the rank and file, but he was acquitted and out of harm’s way was transferred to the Baltic Fleet, in Kronstadt.

Vladimir Dal was very friendly with the poet Alexander Pushkin. In the early autumn of 1833, they visited the Orenburg province together. For five days they traveled around the sites of the uprising of Emelyan Pugachev. We visited the Berdskaya village, which Pugachev occupied during the siege of Orenburg, and met with people who remembered those events. The poet questioned them, wrote down their stories and the lively figurative speech he liked in his notebook, so that he could later add them to his novel “The Captain's Daughter.” Dahl also made notes, recorded the same words, proverbs, songs...

In December 1836 Dahl arrived on official business in St. Petersburg. Pushkin joyfully greeted his friend, visited him many times, and was interested in linguistic discoveries. Alexander Sergeevich really liked the word he heard from Dahl, previously unknown to him, “crawl” - the skin that snakes shed after winter, leaving it. Once visiting Dahl in a new frock coat, Pushkin joked: “What, is the crawl good? Well, I won’t be crawling out of this hole any time soon. I’ll write this in it!” He did not take off this coat even on the day of the duel with Dantes. In order not to cause unnecessary suffering to the wounded poet, they had to “crawl out” from him. Dahl was one of those who was in the apartment on the Moika during the last 46 hours of Pushkin’s life.

Having participated in the Russian-Turkish war, Dahl understood that fate was giving him an amazing opportunity to get acquainted with the Russian language in its entirety. In the evenings he sat down by the campfires and had long conversations with the soldiers. After a year of hostilities, Dahl’s notes grew to such a size that the command allocated him... a pack camel to transport them. On his hump, the future dictionary traveled along military roads in the form of several bags filled with notebooks. One day, trouble happened: a camel loaded with notes was captured by the Turks during a battle. Vladimir Ivanovich’s grief knew no bounds. Later he wrote: “I was orphaned with the loss of my notes... Conversations with soldiers from all areas of broad Rus' brought me abundant supplies for learning the language, and all this was lost.”

It would seem that everything is over and the dictionary will never be born again. But the officers and soldiers could not stand by and watch their beloved doctor grieve. A detachment of Cossacks went to the Turkish rear in search of the camel, and a few days later the missing animal was returned to Dahl along with the precious luggage. Fortunately, all the notes turned out to be safe and sound.

Dahl had just returned from the Turkish campaign when in 1831 he was again called up to war. This time he had to fight the Poles. It was here that Dahl accomplished his amazing feat. One day, the infantry corps in which Dahl served as a doctor found himself pressed by the Poles to the bank of the Vistula River. The forces were unequal, and the Poles burned the bridge so that the enemy could not retreat across the river. The Russian detachment was threatened with imminent death if not for the resourcefulness of the divisional doctor Dahl. Around the abandoned distillery where Dahl placed the wounded and sick, there were many empty barrels lying around. It was from these that he proposed to build a temporary crossing across the Vistula. When the last Russian soldiers safely crossed the river, the advanced detachments of the Polish army gathered on the empty bank. Then Dahl approached them and asked permission to transfer the wounded to the other side. So, talking, they reached the middle of the bridge together, and behind them the Polish cavalry walked along the crossing.

And then Dahl quickened his pace and jumped onto one of the barrels, where he had a sharpened ax stored in advance. The Poles did not have time to come to their senses when Dahl swung his ax - and the entire crossing suddenly fell into pieces. Under the gunfire of his deceived opponents, Dahl swam safely to the shore and was greeted by the enthusiastic cries of our soldiers. By the way, the military authorities reprimanded Vladimir Dal, but Tsar Nicholas I, by personal decree, awarded Dal the military Vladimir Cross with diamonds and a bow.

The Russian scientist and writer, compiler of the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” Vladimir Ivanovich Dal, following the Russian Emperor Alexander III, the Russian artist Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov and the German composer Richard Wagner, joined the list of “Russian extremists”. The brochure “Notes on Ritual Murders,” compiled by Dahl, was included in the “Federal List of Extremist Materials” under number 1494 by decision of the Leninsky District Court of Orenburg dated July 26, 2010.

KP - Samara

Dahl's dictionary contains more than two hundred thousand words, including dialects, proverbs and sayings. Vladimir Dal began collecting words in a dictionary as a 15-year-old midshipman in the Black Sea Fleet. Then, during his travels around the country, he communicated a lot and willingly with sailors, soldiers, and peasants, writing down apt common expressions. Today, many of the words he collected have fallen out of use. Aif.ru introduces readers to only some of them.

1. Akarenok - short, stocky
2. Anchutki - little devils, demons
3. Watarba - turmoil, anxiety, vanity.
4. Day - weekday, working day, working time or period of day, working hours of the day
5. Endovnik - hungry for beer, mash, drinking
6. Call - cry
7. To be greedy - to care, to try
8. Ker - hamlet, settlement, settlement,
9. Kozloder - a bad singer, with a nasty, high, hoarse and trembling voice
10. To be stubborn - to be stubborn, to resist, to break
11. Mess - think, guess, guess, figure out, come up with something, guess, guess
12. Mimozyrya - gape, onlooker
13. Overtake - beat cheater, cheat
14. Penyaz - money
15. Pyrndik - pimple
16. Saryn - crowd, rabble
17. Supra - dispute, litigation, struggle, bickering
18. Khukhrya - dirty
19. To baffle - to puzzle
20. Fifik - bullfinch
21. Fitina - sin, offense

AiF - Health

Dahl's "Explanatory Dictionary" is a unique and large-scale monument of literature. Many of the words collected in the famous publication have long gone out of use as unnecessary. However, some of them are so original and sonorous that they could easily enter the modern lexicon.

Here are some of the funniest ones:

1. Pipka, pipetsa - smoking pipe, pipe, pipe, pipe, inserted into something

2. Miomozyrya - gape, onlooker

3. Khukhrya - unkempt, disheveled, dirty

4. Endovnik - hungry for beer, mash, drinking

5. Yaga - fur coat, sheepskin coat with a folding collar

6. Rubbing tray - towel, rag for wiping, wiping

7. To baffle - to puzzle

8. Get dirty - get dirty, get dirty, get dirty

9. Cucumber - self-will, obstinacy

10. Supra - dispute, litigation, struggle, bickering

11. To become numb - to become numb, to cool down, to freeze

12. Naopako - on the contrary, inverted, inverted, backwards, opposite, opposite, backwards; wrong, inside out

13. Drink - to harass, torment

14. Pretend - pretend, pretend

15. Hunger - starve, be hungry, languish with hunger; want to eat, call for food, howl, for food

Muscovite

An explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language is a dictionary compiled by Vladimir Ivanovich Dal in the middle of the 19th century. One of the largest dictionaries of the Russian language. Contains about 200,000 words and 30,000 proverbs, sayings, riddles and sayings that serve to explain the meaning of the words given.
The dictionary is based on the living folk language with its regional modifications; the dictionary includes the vocabulary of written and oral speech of the 19th century.

For the first editions of the dictionary, Dahl received the Konstantinov Medal in 1861, and in 1868 he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences and awarded the Lomonosov Prize.