Explanatory dictionary for distance. Dahl's explanatory dictionary online for free, dictionary of Dahl's synonyms on Slovonline

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 Russian Academy(since 1841 - 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 active involvement 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. At least that's what they said 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 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 plan is constantly changing, someone works better, someone worse, and everything is different.

Some external sources, including those collected by the Academy, Dahl still used (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 the 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; 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, the author of popular fairy tales and stories from folk life under the pseudonym Cossack Lugansky, a military doctor, an engineer, a public figure, an eccentric, a 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

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 Leontiev 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 who respond 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?

Ethnographic Department of Russian Geographical Society, awarding Dahl’s dictionary with the Gold Constantine Medal, asked the compiler to include words in the dictionary “with a reservation 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 to 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, tenon, 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 being invented for the real 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 charters, which have been found since 1951 (including in the most ancient ones - the 11th-13th 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- notoriety pull off- take off, be able to- arrange the matter, sta-current- property, Tula- a secluded 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: Dear Sir[our fathers wrote to the highest: Dear Sir; 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, topygs, 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 the basic linguistic concepts phonemes And morphemes were invented by his employee, 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 conquered by the crusaders throne of Constantinople. 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

The editorship of Baudouin de Courtenay entered the mass consciousness not because of its scientific side: for the first time (and almost in last time) in the history of mass domestic 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 include them in the dictionary, even if all the hypocrites and Tartuffes, who are usually great lovers of secret salacious things, rebelled against this and pretended to be indignant ... "

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 about a hundred thousand words from the Russian language” in comparison with Dalevsky (“forgetting,” however, that the vast majority of these words are non-literary dialecticisms) . The crowning achievement of this tradition was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Dictionary of Language Expansion, which is an extensive extract rare words from Dahl, which may be useful to a writer (a cautious 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 was thrown out, once again retyping the page with increased spacing and not leaving for the Soviet reader such an overt indication of censorship as simply white spot(In addition, it would be quite obvious from its location which word was removed). 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, the names of ethnic groups as such are general principles Dal did not include: 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 the definition precisely figurative meaning- “miser, 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 slang 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.

An anonymous “departmental” lexicographer arbitrarily interpreted completely innocent words as criminal terms, and also had an uncertain understanding old spelling and Dahl's cuts. 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. 

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 vocabulary 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 he went, 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 Knyazhevich’s collection), 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 Russian word. In this huge piggy bank he put living Russian words, and along 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 reminds real romance traveler and tireless worker.
From the biography of Vladimir Ivanovich 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 of his pocket notebook, a pencil, 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 toward 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. Study at the university was interrupted by the outbreak 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 Dahl 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? Accurate information There is no 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 in 1 district they were collected former residents 20 provinces! On the way, Pushkin told Dahl a fairy tale about St. 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 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 was 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 and interprets words.” The entries in this dictionary are small stories about the life of the people, their works, folk customs, beliefs and mores. 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
“PORRIDGE,” explains Dahl, “a thick food, cereal boiled in water or milk. Steep porridge, buckwheat, millet, spelled, egg, oatmeal, rye... 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 general work(artel workers 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, a turmoil, a 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 that until his last days he made amendments 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 Tsar’s words: “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 bright events there was an annual fair here. This is how Dal’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 hum—exactly.” goldfish from the whirlpool. 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. "straps"). One "strap" will be used as an example for explaining 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, going 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 one far behind? Together - not heavy, 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.
Living word 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 more fully and brightly different sides people's life.
"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.
Last volume 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 it is already 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, at that time distant time(more than 2 centuries ago) the town in Ukraine was called Luganya, and the house at number 12 stood on English 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 is open memorial museum Dalia. 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.

Direct speech

“Neither nickname, nor religion, nor the very blood of ancestors makes a person a member of one or another nationality. The spirit, the soul of a person - this is where one must look for his belonging to one or another people. How can one determine the identity of a spirit? Of course, a manifestation of the spirit - thought. Whoever thinks in what language belongs to that people. I think in Russian." V. I. Dal

“Earth science and linguistics are apparently two almost unrelated sciences; but if you study the earth together with its inhabitants, then this question takes on a different form, and the Russian Geographical Society in its Ethnographic Division will be akin or in character to the Second Branch of the Academy of Sciences [department of literature]. In this field, both scientific societies offer each other a fraternal hand of competition and help.” V. I. Dal

18 facts about Dal
One of Vladimir Dahl's classmates at Morskoe cadet corps was the future famous Russian admiral Pavel Nakhimov.
In the Marine Corps, records were kept of the number of canings that cadets received, since parents were charged a fee for the consumption of canes. Thanks to this fact, it is known that during the five years of training, cadet Dahl was never flogged.
When the young midshipman Dahl was driving along the winter road in a coachman's troika, it was cold, and the coachman, in order to cheer up the frozen passenger, said: “It's rejuvenating.” Dahl asked what this meant. The coachman explained that rejuvenation means it will become cloudy, and this means that the frost will subside. Dahl pulled out a notebook and wrote down the word and its interpretation. The famous dictionary began with this entry. Over the years of work on the dictionary, the interpretation of the word “rejuvenate” has expanded greatly.
One day during Turkish war In 1829, Dahl's camel disappeared from his luggage, which contained notebooks with his notes. The soldiers searched for the camel for eleven days and eventually recaptured it from the Turks.
Dahl was equally fluent in both hands. Dahl’s biographer P.I. Melnikov writes: “It’s wonderful that he has left hand was as developed as the right one. He could write and do anything with his left hand, just like with his right. This lucky ability was especially useful for him as an operator. The most famous operators in St. Petersburg invited Dahl in cases where the operation could be done more dexterously and more conveniently with the left hand.”
Like Professor Higgins from Pygmalion, who determined by pronunciation where an Englishman lived, Vladimir Ivanovich identified natives of the most different corners Russia.
In Orenburg, thanks to Dahl, a pedestrian bridge was built across the Ural River, a school of forestry and agriculture was opened, and a museum was opened at this school.
On Thursdays, literature, scientists, actors, and artists gathered in Dahl’s St. Petersburg apartment. At one of these, the idea of ​​creating the Russian Geographical Society arose, of which Dal became one of the founding members.
While collecting materials for the dictionary, Dahl became one of the first researchers of the secret languages ​​used by the itinerant Ofeni traders or wool craftsmen who walked throughout Russia buying wool. Dahl also wrote down words from the secret language of St. Petersburg swindlers of the 19th century. It was in this language, according to Dahl, that the word “grandmother” first appeared in the meaning of “money.”
Four words in Dahl's dictionary are illustrated: "beef", "mast", "sail" and "hat".
After the word “snuffbox”, instead of the usual example - a proverb or a saying - Dahl wrote: “That’s how I’ll go and hit heads with a snuffbox! our teacher used to say higher mathematics, in the Marine Corps." This is a memory of mathematics teacher and class inspector Mark Gorkovenko.
The dictionary contains the most words starting with the letter P. They occupy one volume out of four in its entirety.
Shortly before his death, Dahl converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy.
For military educational institutions Dahl wrote the textbooks “Botany” and “Zoology”, and in the St. Petersburg “Literary Gazette” he ran the “Menagerie” section with stories about animals.
In addition to the collection of proverbs, Dahl also wrote down about a thousand Russian folk tales, which he gave to the collector of fairy tales Alexander Afanasyev, he gave the collected folk songs to Pyotr Kireevsky.
Dahl came up with the pseudonym Pechersky for the writer Pavel Melnikov.
Shortly before his death, Pushkin gave Dahl his ring with an emerald talisman. Unlike another famous Pushkin ring, stolen from the museum in March 1917, the ring given to Dahl has been preserved and is located in Pushkin’s museum-apartment on the Moika.
In 1913, shortly before the trial in the Beilis case, a brochure “Note on Ritual Murders” was published, indicating the authorship of Dahl. It attributed to Jews the use of Christian blood for ritual purposes. Previously, without the name of the author, it was published in 1844 under the title “Investigation of the killing of Christian babies by Jews and the consumption of their blood.” Some researchers agree that the author of the text was Dal, others believe that it was written by the director of the Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Denominations, Privy Councilor V.V. Skripitsyn or the governor of the Volyn province, Major General I.V. Kamensky.

Polit.ru/news/2014/11/22/dal/

The living folk Russian language is magnificent in all its diversity. Many dialect expressions, outdated words, and emotional shades color folk speech. But there, nevertheless, sometimes you have to look into the dictionary to look for the designation of a particular phrase, proverb, expression.

The explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language by V. I. Dahl is a unique and irreplaceable creation in the history of the Russian language. Compiled in the mid-nineteenth century, it played an important role in the development of the Slavic humanities.

The dictionary is based on living folk oral and written language, its regional modifications. The composition included more than 30,000 proverbs and sayings, 200,000 words. The information included in the dictionary explains not only individual morphological units, but also phenomena from folk life, various traditions and rituals, the use and creation of this or that object. So, in the “oil” column you will find not only a description of a specific thing, but also its origin, method of creation and principle of application. The online Russian explanatory dictionary will help you find this or that important information. Thanks to the presence of not only literary, but also spoken words and phrases, you can find explanations that do not exist in other dictionaries.

An explanatory dictionary for the Russian language is not considered normative. There are no instructions in the interpretation of words grammatical plan, stylistic characteristics. Despite the lack of extensive definitions, examples are provided correct use words and constructions.

The dictionary was compiled according to the principle of alphabetical-clustered distribution. In essence, the method is not bad, but in some places it is not entirely successful. Sometimes in the cell of a specific word there are simply words or expressions that are consonant with it, but have no connection in meaning.

History of creation

The roots of Dahl's explanatory dictionary stretch back to the time of his first trip to Rus'. At that time, the author wrote down almost every word and expression that interested him. It was they who became the basis of the dictionary created later. The long and painstaking work to compile the final version lasted almost 54 years.

For the first edition of the explanatory dictionary of a living language, the author received the Konstantinov Medal (1861). Moreover, a week before his death, bedridden Vladimir Dal gave his daughter orders regarding the second edition of his masterpiece.

How to use Dahl's explanatory dictionary online?

Not every member of modern society has the finances to buy an expensive book or the time to visit the library. Recently, the problem of finding information has been completely solved. Dahl's explanatory dictionary online will help you find all the necessary explanations for free. All you need to do is decide on the search word, follow the alphabetical guide and find the nest you need. The search principle is simple even for younger schoolchildren, not to mention adults.

On our website you can find the Dahl dictionary online for free and other useful sections with dictionaries of synonyms, phraseological units, etc.

Usually, when you write articles or notes, you often have to use dictionaries in order to correctly enter the necessary phrases into the article. Often, in false technical or philosophical-logical texts, during analysis, new terms appear that are difficult to explain. You have to use third-party resources on the Internet, for example, an online explanatory dictionary that allows you to quickly and completely easily, without wasting time, find the interpretation of complex words and phrases. I would like to thank you for something like this, which is so convenient to use while sitting at the computer. Alena Safonova

Ours has always treated the Russian language with reverence. Several dictionaries that were in the house wandered from the coffee table to the work table, bypassing the shelves of the bookcase. They were actively used. My eldest daughter recently took a couple of pieces to university. I, involuntarily, had to look for a dictionary of synonyms of the Russian language online. After some googling, I found this site and continued working. The variety of local dictionaries matters. Let my daughter leaf through the pages of the book, now I’ll use the pages of the site. Tatiana

The name of Oleg Dahl and his works are the first thing that comes to the mind of a Russian person on occasion. And the memory will live as long as our language exists. And the online synonym dictionary is used by several generations in our house: a schoolgirl, a college student, a mother-teacher and a grandmother of retirement age. There are a lot of synonyms; they are included in many scientific works on various topics. There are many of them here! The site is simple, convenient, and your computer is always at hand. Just follow the links to your bookmarks; this address has recently been added. Veronica

I read Dahl's stories, he is a very interesting, original writer, he introduced into Russian literature such a concept as a physiological essay. And he was also a doctor, if I’m not mistaken, an ophthalmologist. Moreover, they said about him that he knew how to perform operations on the eyes, both with his right and left hands. But the main brainchild is, of course, the dictionary. Well, he’s a non-Russian person, I think he’s a Swede or a Dane, but how conscientiously and painstakingly. In my line of work, I quite often have to use dictionaries, so, in my opinion, Dahl’s is the best Sergey Fedorovich

The dictionary is unique in its kind. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that the great literary critic not only wrote his work, but lived it. Collecting information bit by bit, carrying it through the soul and transforming it into precise, comprehensive interpretations. Dahl considered the Russian language itself, which was a living essence for him, to be his teacher. That’s why it turned out to be an immortal encyclopedic bestseller, telling about Russian life and spirit. The explanatory dictionary of the Russian language reveals the slightest nuances of the Russian character and the liveliness of the people's mind. The meaning of words takes on new colors and shades. This resource is an indispensable online companion for philologists: students, teachers, writers, linguists, journalists.

It was interesting to learn about the dictionary; it’s the best dictionary in the world; I recommend looking up the meaning of words in Dahl’s dictionary. Please write more about this dictionary on the website Lera Troshina

1. There are no accents in Dahl's dictionary. It wasn’t - Dahl didn’t put it down?... or that’s how they publish it now.
2. Did Dahl have the letter Yo (yo)? Have they gotten rid of it now? There are a lot of misunderstandings without her.

V.I. Dahl's dictionary is the pearl of Russian literature. This is a beacon guiding us in the right direction of our language creation. Helping to synchronize watches in the 21st century, so that we do not dissolve the “great and mighty” - with English phraseological units, and do not slide into the “Albanian” dialect. It is gratifying that Dahl’s dictionary is online, presented to a wide audience and completely free of charge. The only thing is a timely upgrade for aesthetics and ease of use. DictionaryOnline

It would be nice if Veronica knew the real name of Dahl, the author of the dictionary - Vladimir Ivanovich. And one more thing: regarding the “non-Russian person”. Not only was Dal born in Russia, he also wrote the following lines: “When I sailed to the shores of Denmark, I was greatly interested in the fact that I would see the fatherland of my ancestors, my fatherland. Having set foot on the shore of Denmark, at the very first I was finally convinced “that my fatherland is Russia, that I have nothing in common with the fatherland of my ancestors.” Alexander

Why "Name of Oleg Dahl"? The dictionary was created by Vladimir Ivanovich Dal, and Oleg Dal was an actor. And they lived at different times. Vladimir Dal is a contemporary of Pushkin, and Oleg Dal was our contemporary Ninelli

It’s great that on your website there is V.I.DAL’s Dictionary, an invaluable treasure for everyone who studies the history of the Russian language and, in general, for every Russian-speaking person. Thank you! Noticed errors: 1) in the editorial article of the site in the third line of the penultimate paragraph the word “determine” is written without a soft sign 2) Evgenia S. called V.I.DAL a literary critic, rather, he was a Linguist by the grace of God, a great Lexicographer and Historian of the Russian language , an ethnographer, and only then a writer and literary critic. Altaybaeva Dana

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The editorial office of the newspaper “Kyiv Rus Segodnya” received an amazing material telling about the fate of the creator of the “Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” Vladimir Ivanovich Dal. The author of the material is Alla Arkhipovna Mikhelis, who does a lot for the development of Russian-Ukrainian friendship, lives in Donbass, not far from the places where V.I. was born. Dahl.

Dahl's Dictionary is a treasury of folk wisdom. It is the living folk language that has preserved in vital freshness the spirit that gives the language persistence, strength, clarity, integrity and beauty. Dahl understood this and realized that it was the language of the people that could serve as the basis for the development of educated speech. Dahl led the entire element of Russian life through the fire of his spirit and accomplished the feat of creating an Explanatory Dictionary, in which he revealed the philosophical, creative essence of the Russian people.

This material is very important for understanding the place and role of the Russian language in world history, as well as for the revival and strengthening of Russian civilization.

The Russian language retains an important role as a language of interethnic communication, and now not only in the Eurasian space, but, as shown by the Fifth Assembly of the Russian World, which was held with great success on November 2-3, 2011 in St. Petersburg, throughout the entire globe .

Word

The tombs, mummies and bones are silent,
Only the Word is given life:
From ancient darkness, on the world graveyard,
Only the Letters sound.
And we have no other property!
Know how to save
At least to the best of my ability, in days of anger and suffering,
Our immortal gift is speech.
(I. Bunin).

November 23, 2011 (November 10, old style) will mark the 210th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl. The man who accomplished the feat of creating the Great Dictionary of the Great Russian Language.

The Old Russian language is a Proto-language. It is older than all languages, including Greek and Phoenician, Etruscan and Sanskrit, Arabic and Cretan. He stands at the level of the fundamental principles of Being. The root system of the Russian language is more than 100 thousand years old. The Old Russian All-Yasvyatskaya letter had 147 letters. Letters carry the semantic load of the word, i.e. the letter is more than a sound symbol. In general, the Russian alphabet is, by and large, broader than the alphabet. This is the doctrine of the integrity of the universe.

Language contains mystery, the innermost lives in it. Apparently, this hidden thing captivated the great worker, the valiant worker V.I. Dalia. Of the 71 years he lived, he collected, compiled and improved his Dictionary for 53 years. Those. I started this main business of my life at the age of 18.

Dal was born in Lugansk in the family of a doctor; he spent his childhood in Nikolaev, from where he moved to study at the St. Petersburg Naval Corps at the age of 13. After graduating, 18-year-old Dahl served in the navy for about 5 years. Then he retires due to health reasons and enters the Faculty of Medicine University of Dorpat. In 1829, having defended his dissertation, he went to active army to Turkey, then participates in the Polish company. And for another year he worked as a resident at a military land hospital in St. Petersburg.

From 1832 - an official of special assignments under the Orenburg governor for 10 years. From 1841 to 1849 - a major ministerial official in St. Petersburg, and from 1849 - manager of the specific office of Nizhny. After 10 years in this position, he retired (1859) and settled in Moscow. This is the official outline of his biography. And here is how he recalls in his Autobiographical Note: “On March 3, 1819... we were released as a midshipman, and I was sent to the Black Sea, to Nikolaev, at my request. On this first trip through Rus', I unconsciously laid the foundation for my dictionary and wrote down every word that I had not heard before.”

Dal had an exceptional interest in the Russian folk language, creativity and everyday life, and his personal fate was such that he had to visit various parts the vast Russian state and come into close contact with many representatives of the Russian people, mainly the peasantry. When he worked in Orenburg, he had to make frequent and large trips around the region, and this gave him the opportunity to learn the nature and ethnography of the distant outskirts of Russia. He did not limit himself to collecting materials on language and folk literature: he replenished the collections of the natural sciences department of the Academy of Sciences with a large number of exhibits.

But no matter what Dahl did, he, first of all, remained a collector of linguistic and ethnographic material. As a result, he accumulated huge reserves of words, expressions, proverbs, sayings, fairy tales, and songs. And there was a desire to organize these materials and make them public. He offered these materials and himself at the disposal of the Academy of Sciences, but this offer was not accepted. All that remained was to devote himself to this grandiose work. As a result, a unique, one-of-a-kind phenomenon arose - “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” (1863-66). The creator was not a linguist by profession, but became an outstanding expert on the Russian word, and he showed himself to be a sensitive connoisseur and caring collector of Russian speech already in his early youth. Dahl said about himself and his dictionary: “It was written not by a teacher, not by a mentor, not by someone who knows the matter better than others, but by someone who worked on it more than many, a student who throughout his entire age collected bit by bit what he heard from his teacher - living Russian language."

Dahl's creativity consisted in the transmutation of the elemental energies of folk art that he identified. These energies seem to have passed through the creative laboratory of the Distant Spirit. Although he himself very modestly said that, by working on what I had collected, I improved it through the diligence of my labor.

Dahl, in fact, made a revolution in our native language. The fact is that since the times of Peter the Great, the language was distorted, various vaccinations were given to it, which killed the game. From a rich, sonorous, strong and independent language, a language could become sluggish, heavy and folkish, as Dahl put it. Stiff writers shook off their fingers from the Russian language, which seemed rude and incomprehensible to them, and resorted to French dictionary. Dahl replied that other people's figures of speech are meaningless in our language, understandable only to those who read between the lines with their non-Russian thoughts, translating what they read mentally into another language!

And he set the task: “to give space to this wild child, to let it grow on its own roots, on its own juices, flavored with care and care;... we have no shortage of words and expressions, just know how to find them, study, assimilate and put them to use " The question stood like this: “Russian speech faces one of two things: either to become utterly vulgar, or, having come to its senses, to turn onto a different path, taking with it all the reserves abandoned in a hurry.”

“Here we will talk only about the language... of the common people, who... always and everywhere retain the more indigenous and original,... do not become clever, do not distort the language, like us, whose mind has gone beyond reason in this regard and the natural instinct has been lost.”

Dahl cites the example of Derzhavin, Karamzin, Krylov, Zhukovsky and Pushkin, who avoided foreign language and tried to write in pure Russian. “And how Pushkin valued our folk speech,” Dahl wrote in 1862, “with what fervor and delight he listened to it, how seething impatience alone forced him to interrupt his contemplations with a noisy explosion of approvals and sharp remarks and comparisons, “I have witnessed it more than once.”

In a word, Dahl believed that the time had come to appreciate the folk language and develop an educated language from it. The folk language had hitherto been neglected, and there was no other living, filling source equal to it. “If we cut off... this source,” said Dahl, “then drought will befall us, and we will be forced to grow and nourish our native language with foreign words, as parasitoid plants do... we will separate ourselves completely from the people, we will break the last connection with them, we will even more in his speech, lagging behind his native shore and not approaching another; we will kill and destroy our last moral strength in this stubborn struggle with nature.”

In 4 books of the Dahl Dictionary, all the knowledge accumulated over centuries of deep, multilateral experiments is collected in concise formulas. In the dictionary, a thoughtful person will find the answer to the most complex problems lives illuminated from many sides... Dahl showed that the phonetics, root and conceptual system of the Russian language are such that a whole series of words and phrases (or sayings, as Dahl said) cannot be translated into other languages ​​without losing shades of meaning and many associative connections. He wrote: “Is it possible to renounce one’s homeland and soil, from the basic principles and elements, trying to transfer the language from its natural root to someone else’s, in order to distort its nature and turn it into a parasite living on someone else’s juices?.. in no way can one dispute the self-truth that a living folk language, preserving in vital freshness the spirit that gives the language durability, strength, clarity, integrity and beauty, should serve... as a treasury for the development of educated Russian speech, instead of our current language, kazhennik”...

Dahl gives an example, ironically: “In the novel “Guide in the Desert”, in Russian “steppe leader”, there is a nickname “discoverer of traces” - and this is the same paradox of literacy as the title itself - literacy that stands on stilts. The English word pathfinder is exactly translated by the Russian word “stalker (pathfinder)”; but, firstly, in our dictionaries there is no tracker, or even the verbs “to track down, to track down”; secondly, English is made up of two words, which means that we need, throwing away our word or without even looking for it, forge a new one from 2, and then, pointing to our ugly brainchild, reproach the clumsiness of the Russian language.”

There are thousands of these examples, and this is our sin! But the time has come for repentance. And so Dahl writes: “The people do not find it difficult to find a new expression in their treasury if they need it, but they have completely different techniques: they take only one word closest to the main concept, and then change the ending, add one or two prepositions... or by transferring the stress any form and meaning is given to the expression.”

"With tongue, with human words, you cannot joke with speech with impunity; verbal speech a person is... a tangible connection... between body and spirit; without words there is no conscious thought... without these material means in the material world, the spirit cannot do anything, cannot even manifest itself.”

And Dahl gives the example of our neighbors, brothers of the same root, whose Slavic language merged with Western ones. Formed new language, but from this violence he was overcome with death, and he became rigid, which was clearly expressed by the loss of his syllable stress.

Dahl's work was invisible and unselfish. As long as he could remember, he was always confused and worried by the incongruity of the written language in comparison with the oral speech of an ordinary Russian person; Without deviating from the spirit of language, the common man was forced to express himself clearly, directly, briefly and gracefully. Greedily grabbing native speeches, words and expressions on the fly when they rolled off the tongue in a simple conversation, Dahl wrote them down for memory, for learning the language, because he liked them. And how many times has it happened that this word was not in any dictionary, but the word was purely Russian!!!

The supplies were already demanding carts. He had an interesting incident during the Russian-Turkish War (1829), when his pack camel disappeared in the turmoil of the war. He cared little about suitcases with clothes. "Conversation with soldiers from all localities wider Russia brought me abundant supplies for learning the language, and it all perished. Fortunately, the Cossacks picked up a camel with a clarinet somewhere and a week later brought it to Andrianopol.”

When Dahl was refused any support by the Academy of Sciences, he had to take on the task of compiling a dictionary himself, relying only on God and himself. Weighing forces and means, i.e. knowledge and abilities, Dahl was clearly aware that he lacked general knowledge of linguistics, and in particular grammar. Moreover, he was at odds with grammar, because... Everywhere I found Latin and German grammar in the Russian language, but I couldn’t find Russian.

But on the other hand: 1) there was a large warehouse of supplies that were not previously included in our dictionaries (over 80 thousand words - A.M.); 2) there was a strong sympathy for the living Russian language, close acquaintance with it, which could replace (partially) scholarship; 3) there was also love for him, vouching for the overcoming of labor, for persistent, assiduous work on this matter until the end of his life; 4) in addition, the diversity of service: naval, military, medical, civil, a penchant for the natural sciences and all crafts familiarized him in language and concepts with the life of different classes and states of science and knowledge. And after weighing all this, Dahl became emboldened, deciding that he could not overcome everything alone, but he was given his own part of the work, his talent, which he was obliged to put into circulation. And then “There will be more gifted and learned workers for whom it will be easier to fill in what is missing, having found one part of the matter ready, ... the basis and essence of my vocabulary ... Front axle to rear axle.”

But how to look at all the local dialects or dialects that make up the national language? Dahl says that with the exception of the close neighbors of Little and White Rus', we have no dialects, but perhaps only dialects. Local dialects are the legitimate children of the Russian language and are much more beautiful than written jargon. And we can learn Russian speech patterns in every area of ​​Rus', in every village, in every shack. Local deviations of the language are so insignificant that not everyone even notices them... Dahl pointed out: “In adverb, more in political sense, called regional, local dialect small country, also a local language, distorted, recoiling from the indigenous language, born from a mixture of two or more languages.”

In particular, dwelling on the dialects of different regions of Russia, Dahl noted the extreme variability and instability of accents in Novorossiya: glyboko, customs, money, etc. Dahl did not at all claim that all words folk speech must be included in the educated Russian language. But he argued that “we must study the simple and direct Russian speech of the people and assimilate it to ourselves, just as all living things assimilate good food and transform it into their blood and flesh.”

But what order should we adopt for the Dictionary—alphabetical or root-word? Both of them have disadvantages. With the alphabetical method, words are selected in alphabetical order and explained on their own, “as if there were no others. Those closest and dearest, with their legal change on the second and third letters, are scattered far apart and languish here and there alone; every living part of speech is torn and lost; a word in which no less life, as in the person himself, endures and becomes rigid; the same interpretations must be repeated several times. There is no strength to read such a dictionary; by the tenth word the mind will become dull and the head will spin, because our mind requires in everything... reasonable connection, gradualism and consistency. Moreover... a dead list of words is neither help nor joy... Dictionaries in all languages ​​are compiled in this order, therefore, they find it convenient... I take such a dictionary in my hands again, leaf through it one day and another, but... with an anxious feeling I put it aside. No, such a dictionary is not for me. How will I put it into action, how will I call it out and discover all the treasures..?”

With this method, said Dahl, “I cannot find the word that I lack; I can’t look at the closest (related) words in a row in order to get comfortable with the basic meaning of the words of this root; I can’t find the expressions I need under the general, generic concept, look at the law and order of word production in order to comprehend my speech... - everything is scattered apart; in a word, this is not a dictionary... it’s a list, a collection of words... without connection or meaning, for extreme limited use, and more for a foreigner than for a Russian.

The second method, root-based, is very difficult in practice, because knowledge of roots forms a whole science in itself and requires the study of all related languages, not excluding obsolete ones. Moreover, this method is based on shaky principles, where you cannot do without a stretch. Moreover, when searching for words, the root-word order presupposes that the creator and the reader have the same view and beliefs regarding the attribution of a word to one or another root... Therefore, a special, voluminous index is required and it is necessary to search for each word twice, and this is annoying and tiring.”

Dahl decided to collect into families, or nests, all the words that were obviously related in meaning. And in alphabetical order there are directions where to look for each necessary word. Dahl imagines such a dictionary reference book every educated person. “In this dictionary, under each main, generic or collective word ... all subordinate expressions relating to the same subject should be placed with a detailed interpretation.” The dictionary consists of a number of entries, each of which explains tens and hundreds of words. “If we find in their place the words: mountain, chain, ridge, spur, ridge, syrt, mound, hill, hill, eel, wedge, vzlok, rock, sprout, stone, etc., then none of these words, if necessary, cannot find and collect, and will also not find their comparative explanation, which alone is capable of giving a true idea of ​​their meaning.” But! “all these sayings, as well as many similar ones, are combined and explained comparatively under general concepts“mountain,” expressing any elevation of the earth’s surface.”

And since the reserves and preparations for Dahl were not just columns of heard words, but the life behind the words in its entirety, the Explanatory Dictionary was an encyclopedic work. Considering the generic relations of clusters of words, Dahl found a general law of their interrelation. This law gives the rules for the formation of words by links, a chain, usually starting with a verb. And Dahl adds: “how correctly K. Aksakov captured, when he examined verbs, life, manpower our language! Our verbs in no way succumb to the dead spirit of such a grammar, which wants to force them to subordinate them to only external signs; they require recognition of their independent, spiritual power... their significance and meaning.” “It seems that our future grammar will have to go this way, i.e. develop in advance the laws of word production, intelligently embracing the spirit of the language, and then turn to the consideration of each of the parts of speech.”

When explaining and interpreting words, Dahl conveyed the meaning of “one word to others, and even more so to dozens of others, and this is more intelligible than any definition, and examples clarify the matter even more. Each of the explanatory words will be found again in its place, and there, in turn, will be explained in more detail by identical words.”

This is how Dahl understood the urgent need to follow his calling, purpose, predestination. Among the treasures included in the Dictionary as examples, proverbs and sayings as indigenous Russian sayings occupy first place; there are over 30 thousand of them... “Whoever doesn’t like them can easily skip over them, and others, perhaps, having delved into the hefty way of speech, will see that there is something to learn here.”

The dictionaries that existed before Dahl were indeed incomprehensible. Even the academic dictionary (regional) was published with raw materials as supplies were delivered. That is, this is not the work of a scientific fraternity, but a gift from a publisher who was not included in the consideration of the manuscript. And Dahl asks: maybe the Dictionary should not have been given the name Explanatory Dictionary, but called “Reserves for the Explanatory Dictionary”? But he himself answers: “If the dictionaries that were hitherto were called not stocks, but dictionaries, then what about their general collection, with the addition of over 80 thousand words (specifically, 83 - A.M.), with explanations and examples much more more complete and integral, not to be called a dictionary? Dahl explained and provided examples of about 200 thousand words.

And Dahl also wrote: “Instead of “Russian” it is said “Great Russian”. It seems that this would be more accurate and correct,” and he explained, “Little Russian and Belarusian dialects, not to mention other Slavic languages... were excluded, at least they became not obligatory for the dictionary, but could be included in it here and there, due to their inextricable connection with whole, for clarification and interpretation."

Yes, our sacred language has found its Light. He managed to overcome the problems facing Dahl only because a feeling of love and a taste for the purity and vitality of language, as well as boundless hard work, motivated this ascetic of the Russian Land. The dictionary contains 200 thousand words. (for comparison, in Hebrew, in which the Bible is written, there are only 15 thousand).

Dahl’s biographer, V. Porudominsky, writes: “Dahl’s explanatory dictionary is not picked up just to find the right word...” “it is discovered as the greatest treasury of our language. Like a rich collection of proverbs - a repository of folk wisdom. It reads like a story. It is studied as a kind of encyclopedia of the life of the Russian people.”

Dahl was grateful in his gigantic work not only to previous dictionaries, but to everyone who, over the past 25 years, provided him with collections of words, notes, explanations and reserves at his request. Let us, however, make a note about predecessor dictionaries. “The regional dictionary of the Academy of Sciences included everything indiscriminately that was sent by district teachers, and with the same ugly explanations... which have lost all sense and meaning, are one-sided or incorrect. In this dictionary, from A to U (from basics to basics), confusion stretches out due to bewilderment about what to do with our grammar, which has confused the entire scientific fraternity, which is why the accepted rules have proven their inconsistency.”

This violence and inconsistency of grammar was also pointed out by Dahl’s predecessors: Vostokov, and even more so Grech and K. Aksakov.

Dahl admitted that he himself did not avoid errors and shortcomings in his dictionary, but in order to eliminate them, he would have to live two or three centuries. “But,” he wrote, “with the simplest, everyday verbs in our dictionaries half of the derivatives are missing: with the verb “give” I added 11 words compared to other dictionaries..., with the verb “to crush” - 14..., “to regret” - 19, “give” - 26, etc.. I don’t choose from choice, but take examples in a row.”

This was such unselfish work, to which he never expected to see an end. And he had no assistants or employees in finishing the dictionary. For it is very difficult to find people who spend entire years of their lives working for themselves, like farm laborers, for free. Therefore, all the capital work was done by Dahl himself. And in our time it has been noted more than once that this is the work of several research institutes!

Dahl was awarded the Lomonosov Prize of the Academy of Sciences and elected Honorary Academician. Speaking before the Society of Russian Literature, Dahl said that we (i.e., the intelligentsia) know our language so poorly that instead of “ordinary” we use “everyday”, instead of “identify” - “identify”... And there are thousands of such examples. “And at the same time, we fill the language with long, harsh words that are essentially alien to the Russian language. “Where are these seven-point words, with a crush of four consonants in a row, among the people? The people do not say “preventative smallpox,” but say “protective”; they do not say “due to circumstances that prevented it,” but say “there was an obstacle.” IN " own home- but why not in “ours”? Or will the post office delivery guy not find me in his house? And “property” supplanted the native word “sob”... If someone else’s word is accepted into another language, then at least allow me to change it as much as the spirit of that language requires: he is the master of the word, and not the word to him!”

And again: “I happened to hear from people, however, smart and respectful... that it doesn’t matter what words you use to explain... - as long as what you write contains mind, heart, soul and life... This belief is erroneous and harmful, as every lie and mistake: it corrupts the mind and heart.” In his dictionary, Dahl tried to explain, first of all, words that were forgotten, overwritten by inattention, and the simplest, well-known meanings, as he put it, “there is nothing to chew on.”

Dahl's dictionary acquired another meaning - in everyday, ethnographic terms, it indicated the origin and affinity of generations, and therefore the regional dialect or dialect cannot be ignored by the ethnographer. Dahl said about himself: “I have a lot of data, there are notes and samples of dialects of almost all districts, not only every province, I rarely find it difficult to recognize the peasant’s homeland by dialect.”

Dahl truly devoted all his strength, all his time and all his eyes to the dictionary. His Dictionary is a firebird that he caught while serving home Service of your life. In addition, he indicated or corrected many words distorted in the regional dictionary of the Academy of Sciences. And also many so-called Ofen words (thieves' jargon), i.e. Dahl did not accept those composed or distorted from the academic dictionary.

Dahl's dictionary is called the Russian Bible.

The 16th century French writer and philosopher M. Montaigne said: “Let a teacher, when explaining something, show it to the student from a hundred sides and apply it to many different subjects in order to check whether the student has understood it properly and to what extent he has mastered it.” So Dahl taught us to understand the object of knowledge from different sides! His consciousness penetrated, in fact, into the laws of Being, he was given creative power, he fertilized space with collected fiery formulas. The distance was given to Russia so that we could perceive the knowledge expressed in the right word not formally - lexically, but meaningfully and deeply! His identical words come from the people; these are synonymous transformations at the level of consciousness of the people. This is an indicator that the Russian people are organically characterized by a creative (and not dogmatic) awareness of the lexical forms of the language and their transformation through process-shaped thinking. All of advanced Russia saw in Dahl's Dictionary a new spiritual and cultural approach to all issues of life, both state and private.

References.

1. Porudominsky V.I. Dal / V.I. Porudominsky. – M.: Young Guard. Issue 17(505), 1971, 384 p.
2. Dal V.I. Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language / V.I. Dal. – M.: Russian language, Volume 1-4, 1989 – 1990, 2717 p. (links to pages from volume 1).
3. Montaigne M. Advice from a wise man / M. Montaigne - M.: Olma Media Group, 2010, 303 p.

Dal Vladimir Ivanovich- Russian writer, doctor, author of "" (1863-1866) - one of the largest dictionaries of the Russian language, containing about 200,000 words and 30,000 proverbs, sayings, riddles and sayings that serve to explain the meaning of the words given.

Years of life: 1801 - 1872.

Dahl wrote about the importance of an explanatory dictionary:

“The living folk language, which has preserved in vital freshness the spirit that gives the language harmony, strength, clarity, integrity and beauty, should serve as a source and treasury for the development of educated Russian speech”;

“General definitions of words and the objects and concepts themselves are an almost impossible task and, moreover, useless. It is the more sophisticated the simpler and more everyday the subject is. The transfer and explanation of one word to another, and even more so to tens of others, is, of course, more intelligible than any definition, and examples explain the matter even more.”

Dal had a strong friendship. One day he began to ask Dahl what he was working on now, and Dahl told him everything about his many years of passion for collecting words, which he had already collected about twenty thousand. warmly supported Dahl's idea. Dahl spoke enthusiastically about the proverbs and sayings collected by Dahl: “What a luxury, what a meaning, what a use in each of our sayings! What kind of gold! paused, and then continued: “Your meeting is not a simple idea, not a hobby. This is a completely new thing for us. You can be envied - you have a goal. Accumulating treasures for years and suddenly opening the chests in front of amazed contemporaries and descendants!”

In 1861, for the first issues of the Dictionary, he received the Constantine Medal from the Imperial Geographical Society. Complete "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" by V.I. Dahl was published in 1863 - 1866. In 1868, Dahl was elected an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and awarded the Lomonosov Prize.

The Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language by Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl is one of the largest dictionaries of the Russian language, containing about 200,000 words and 30,000 proverbs, sayings, riddles and sayings that serve to explain the meaning of the words given.

Editions of Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary:

1st edition of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, M., in the printing house of A. Semyon, 1863 (vol. 1), in the printing house of the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, 1865 (vols. 2, 3), in the printing house of T. Ris, 1866 (vol. .4)

2nd, “corrected and significantly enlarged according to the author’s manuscript”, “edition by the bookseller-typographer M. O. Wolf,” St. Petersburg-M., 1880, 1881, 1882, 1882.

3rd, “corrected and significantly expanded edition, edited by prof. I. A. Baudouin-de-Courtenay", publication of "suppliers of the Court of HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY" (as indicated only in volume 1) of the partnership M. O. Wolf, St. Petersburg-M., 1903, 1905, 1907, 1909. In At least 20,000 new words were introduced into the dictionary, including vulgar and abusive language (in the fourth volume). The editor was subjected to severe criticism for his additions; in Soviet times, Dahl's Baudouin Dictionary was not republished.