This Moscow district owes its name to the palace Basmannaya Sloboda. A common version is that this name comes from the word "basman", for Dahl it is "palace or government bread". From the name of the bread came the Basman bakers, and from them living in this settlement and its name. However, it is hard to believe that in Moscow there were so many bakers who made special bread that they formed a special settlement, and not a small one, judging at least by the length of its main street - Staraya Basmannaya or by the number of inhabitants in 1638 there were 64 courtyards, and in 1679 - 113 households. In addition, the palace bakers lived in a completely different area of ​​Moscow - on the site of the current Khlebny Lane. Therefore, another explanation of the occupation of the local Slobozhans seems more reasonable. Basma in Russia was called thin sheets of metal with embossed, embossed embossed patterns, used for jewelry. And in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe current Staraya Basmannaya, artisans-basmans may have lived, who made such decorations, i.e. "basmil". Basma was also the name of a message with the Khan's seal squeezed out on it, and the origin of the word could be as follows: first the Khan's "basma", then generally relief images, and it is possible that "basman" was a special type of bread on which some kind of brand was squeezed out.
Basmannaya Sloboda was one of the large palace settlements of Moscow, in 1638 there were 64 courtyards, and by 1679 there were already 113. Its center was the Sretenskaya Church with the limit of the Great Martyr Nikita, known since 1625. In 1722, the church was already listed as a stone one, and eight years later - a dilapidated stone structure. But only a quarter of a century later, in 1751, the beautiful Baroque building that exists today (Staraya Basmannaya st. 16) was built. It is believed that it included the remains of the former stone church. Beautiful forms of the "Elizabethian" baroque are visible in the broken roof and, most importantly, window frames, broken sandriks and crepe cornices.
By the end of the 17th century, Basmannaya Sloboda expanded to the north. A new street appeared, on which, no later than 1695, a “newly built” wooden church of Peter and Paul, the heavenly patrons of the king, stood. This territory, located next to the Basmanniki, was called differently - the new soldier's, or Captain's, settlement, less often - New Basmannaya. Here, by decree of the tsar, the military were settled, and since 1714, merchants were allowed to build yards in both Basmanny settlements. Already by 1702, the population of the district had more than doubled - there were 114 households in the parish.
There were several settlements on the territory of the district, such as: Luchnikova settlement, Pancakes, Kolpachnaya, Khokhlovskaya, Kotelnikov settlement, Ogorodnaya settlement, Barashevsky, Kazennaya settlement, Kozhevnikov and Syromyatnikov settlement. In our time, the name of some streets reminds of the settlements located here: Kolpachny Lane, Khokhlovsky lanes, Ogorodnaya Sloboda lane, Barashevsky lane, Bolshoi and Maly Kazennye lanes, Upper, Lower, Novaya Syromyatnichesky streets, 1st, 3rd, 4th Syromyatnichesky lanes and Syromyatnicheskaya embankment and passage.
But perhaps the most famous of the Moscow settlements in this area was the German settlement. According to the royal decree of October 4, 1652, foreigners who did not accept Orthodoxy were to leave the prestigious districts of Moscow and form a non-Christian settlement on a site remote from the city center. Under the Novonemetskaya Sloboda, the government allocated an empty area on the right bank of the Yauza, west of the Basmanny Sloboda and south of the palace village of Pokrovsky. Already in the 16th century, this place was chosen by the "Germans" who settled in Moscow - Europeans of various nationalities who came here as captives, as well as as hired specialists. The people called them "Germans" as "dumb" who did not understand the Russian language, hence the name of the settlement. The first German settlement at this place disappeared in Time of Troubles, in 1610 the troops of False Dmitry II plundered and burned the settlement, and its inhabitants fled, leaving their homes, and for a long time there were only wastelands and fields with vegetable gardens on the site of the former German settlement. Until in 1652 the New German Sloboda was founded.
The Russians nicknamed the Moscow foreign suburb Kukuy, after the stream flowing in these places, a tributary of the Chechera River.
In the middle of the 17th century, this site on the banks of the Yauza was really empty, and foreigners, reluctantly leaving their homes in the city, built it up with wooden houses. Wooden houses of foreigners in the city center were ordered to be dismantled and moved to a new location. Plots for buildings were assigned to each according to his personal condition, position or trade.
The church of St. Michael, which existed already in 1576 until the ruin of the Old German Quarter by the guardsmen. Outwardly, Kirkha was not much different from an ordinary house.
In 1626, the Moscow Lutheran community was divided into merchants and officers - the "old" church of Mikhail remained with the merchants. Their wealth, wide opportunities and extensive connections made it possible to build a stone church already in 1684-1685. Kirch of St. Michael was the first stone church on the territory of Novonemetskaya Sloboda. The resulting community of officers built a separate Lutheran church, which was renewed in 1661 at the expense of General Nikolai Bauman, one of the most influential people in the settlement.
In the late 70s of the 17th century, the foreign settlement takes on the appearance of a real European town with gardens and even an embankment of alleys. It was so unlike appearance surrounding freedoms. Flower gardens in front of houses, small fountains, multi-colored painting of houses - a lot caused misunderstanding and even laughter of Muscovites.
The end of the 17th century was the heyday of the settlement, many of whose inhabitants found favor with the young Tsar Peter I. In 1694, the officer community began the construction of a stone church instead of the former wooden one. According to the Germans
Peter I gave a large amount for the construction, or at least was present at its laying. In honor of the patron saint of the king - the Apostle Peter - the temple was named. The community of this church was more numerous than the community of St. Michael. It included ambassadors from Prussia, Denmark and Sweden, who settled in Moscow.
Simultaneously with the construction of the church of St. Peter, the Dutch Reformed Church was being built. In 1629, the Reformers were allowed to build a small wooden church outside the White City, near Pogany Pond. Later, the Dutch began to build a brick temple and brought it to the roof. However, official permission was not received, and, referring to this, in 1642 the Russian authorities ordered the demolition of the building. Despite this, in 1647 the Reformed Church is listed as built.
Unlike Protestants, Catholics in Moscow were for a long time constrained in their rights, Catholic services were held sporadically, often only with the arrival of ambassadors. In the settlement, Catholics often prayed together with Protestants - a rare reconciliation, carried out only far from their homeland. Even the zealous Catholic Patrick Gordon, colonel of the Butyrka regiment and an associate of the young Peter I, got married and baptized children with a Reformed pastor. Having settled in Moscow, Gordon put a lot of effort into building the church. On May 5, 1687, the Catholic tent was consecrated, in which the service was held.
There were far fewer influential Catholics who served under the person of the king than Protestants. Realizing this, Colonel Patrick Gordon took over the main concerns for the construction. During preparations for the Azov campaign catholic priests filed a petition to the king, in which they asked for official permission to build a stone church. And only in 1698 the Catholics built a wooden church. According to the records of the Austrian ambassador, the temple was very cramped. In the summer of 1706, instead of a wooden church, a stone church was built, named after St. Apostles Peter and Paul, heavenly patrons of the king. Its construction became possible only at a time when Peter I ruled with absolute power, and the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church noticeably weakened. The church became the fourth and last foreign stone church in the German Quarter.
The September fire of 1812 dealt a terrible blow to the German Quarter. Almost the entire area turned out to be burnt out, including the Catholic Church and St. Peter. After 1812, only the Church of St. Michael and for some time - renewed cold Catholic Church. The remaining communities began to buy plots in other parts of Moscow, closer to the city center. So, in 1817 the community of St. Petra bought a land plot of the Lopukhina estate not far from Pokrovka, in Kosmodamiansky Lane, to renew the temple. Soon, the Catholics also resumed a warm church in the Myasnitskaya part of the city.
Kirch of St. Mikhail stood in the German settlement until the Soviet era. The surrounding territory was planned for the construction of the Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI). In 1928, the church was closed, and soon the church was demolished. The oldest Evangelical church in Moscow, which survived both the Time of Troubles and the fire of 1812, was destroyed. The German settlement was, as it were, decapitated. Her name reminds today of the long history and the destroyed traditions of the unique Moscow region.

Published:

golden link

"Dal's House" was found.

What does V.I.Dal mean today? What is the attractive force of his personality and talent? V.I. Dal is dear and necessary to us as the author of a unique dictionary, which none of Slavic peoples, and as a person who accomplished a scientific and patriotic feat by creating this dictionary.

V.I.Dal collected words, recorded live, sounding Russian speech everywhere. He did this everywhere and always: whether he rode in a wagon (listening to the coachman), whether he sailed on a ship (recording the speech of the sailors), during the first Russian Turkish war V.I. Dal, the doctor, found time and, during his rest hours, recorded the conversations of soldiers mobilized for war from all provinces of Russia. Later, as an official high rank in Orenburg and Nizhny Novgorod, constantly traveling around these provinces, annually visiting the famous Nizhny Novgorod fairs, he listened and wrote down Russian folk speech, sayings, jokes, parables, original words of smart merchants, he himself entered into conversations. In the constant work of collecting linguistic and ethnographic material, V.I.Dal, being a gifted and educated person, met like-minded assistants, in whom he found, in his words, “smart and efficient sympathy for his work.” Literary fame of V.I.Dal in the 40-50s of the XIX century, occupied by him high position and wide acquaintance with representatives of various social circles in St. Petersburg allowed him in 1846-1847. publish the "Ethnographic Circular" - an appeal to subscribers of the journals "Domestic Notes", "Contemporary", "Moskvityanin", "Notes of the Russian Geographical Society", in which V.I.Dal asked subscribers to send a variety of lexical material to the editorial office of the named journals or in his name to the office of the Ministry of the Interior. And this appeal resonated with readers: the richest vocabulary material constantly came from the field to the office. This material was carefully processed by V.I.Dal himself and his assistants-colleagues.

“... Each word (V.I. Dalem) was prepared along with an explanation for it on a piece of paper (1/16 of a sheet). These sheets were collected in rather thick bundles, tied with threads and folded into cardboard boxes (35 cm), open at the top, which were glued together by Dahl himself. - ”(From the memoirs of V.I. Dahl's contemporaries).

The result of this titanic long-term work was the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. It contains more than 200 thousand words and more than 30 thousand Russian proverbs and sayings, which V.I. Dal widely used in the dictionary as examples in explaining and interpreting words.

The dictionary is called "explanatory" because it not only translates one word to another, but interprets, explains the details of the meaning of words and concepts subordinate to them. V.I.Dal used the term “Great Russian” instead of Russian because he excluded from the dictionary, as they said then, “Little Russian” and “Belarusian” dialects, the church language.

The term "live" V.I.Dal shows that the dictionary includes words common to the people, indicates a desire to cover everything that among "the current Great Russian people can be heard or read."

The content of the dictionary goes far beyond the scope of a lexicographic work. This is a kind of encyclopedia of the Russian people, mainly the peasantry, mainly mid-nineteenth centuries. In his fundamental dictionary, V.I. Dal combined the vocabulary of the literary language with folk vocabulary, including regional words. Many years of work on the creation of the dictionary helped V.I. VI Dal stood at the origins of dialectology as a scientific discipline.

The enduring value of the "Explanatory Dictionary" of V.I. our people.

From the dictionary of V.I. Dahl we learn when, how and where it is better to sow this or that agricultural crop, how to harvest, how to build houses and make household items, agricultural implements. The dictionary tells us about peasant holidays and traditions. All this makes it possible to imagine how the spiritual image of the Russian people was formed, how its economic and social basis was formed.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of V.I. Dahl and his dictionary for modern Russian lexicography and the entire philological science. It's peculiar golden link in the Russian lexicographic chain, the rise of Russian vocabulary.

Purposeful compilation of dictionaries of the Russian language within the framework of the Academy of Sciences began at the end of the 18th century, about a hundred years before the publication of the dictionary by V.I.Dal. But Russian lexicography received a special development in the 20th century, it is called the “age of lexicography”.

Indeed, at present, we publish dozens of the most diverse dictionaries: multi-volume dictionaries of the modern Russian literary language, orthoepic, spelling dictionaries different types, word-building, special dictionaries of the Russian language for foreigners and many others. And without exaggeration, we can say that each of the authors and editors of these dictionaries turned to the dictionary of V.I. Dahl in everyday work on his dictionary. And this means that Dahl's dictionary is modern, it still works today. Dahl's dictionary is up-to-date, like everything ingenious, regardless of the time of creation.

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal died on September 22 (October 4), 1872. He was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery.

Shortly before his death, at the end of 1871, the patron and owner of the famous gallery P.M. Tretyakov visited the house on Presnya and informed V.I. Dahl of his intention to commission his portrait to the artist V.G. Perov.

In early 1872 the portrait was completed. Now it is in the Tretyakov Gallery.

After the death of V.I. L.V. Dal reconstructed this house, he introduced elements of wooden architecture into its appearance, while retaining the characteristic features of classicism, as a result of which the house became an original, unique mansion in Moscow of the 70s of the last century.

In 1902-1917, an academician, the founder of the Russian school, lived in this house organic chemistry A.M. Butlerov, and in 1920-1924 - professor, doctor of philological sciences, a major researcher of Russian folk versification M.P. Shtokmar.

The subsequent fate of the "House of Dahl" was not easy.

The wooden mansion, miraculously preserved during the fire of Moscow in 1812, survived many more hardships. In the spring of 1942, a fascist land mine fell near the house, but did not explode. When the sappers defused the bomb, it turned out that it was stuffed with sand instead of explosives and someone's kind friendly hand put a Czech-Russian dictionary into it.

Today, the area surrounding the "Dal House" is not at all like the former outskirts of Moscow. Due to the development of this corner of Moscow, the “Dal House” ended up in the courtyard of an administrative building, thereby becoming invisible from Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Street.

By the 60s of this century, the "Dal House" had fallen into such a dilapidated state that it was considered long lost. And only thanks to the search activity of the painstaking researcher of old Moscow Viktor Vasilyevich Sorokin (chief bibliographer of the Gorky Scientific Library of Moscow State University, now an honorary member of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments)"Dal's House" was found.

But the building was threatened with demolition. The Moscow city branch of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments accepted all necessary measures to preserve "Dal's House" as a unique monument national culture. Well-known figures of science and culture advocated for its preservation: architect-restorer P.D. Baranovsky, academicians I.G. Petrovsky, D.S. Likhachev, I.V. Petryanov-Sokolov, writers I.L. Leonov, N.S. Tikhonov, K.A. Fedin, artist A.A. Plastov and others. "Dal's House" was preserved, restored in 1971-1972 according to the project of the architect V.A. Vinogradov (in the form of a mansion of the 70s of the XIX century) and put under state protection as a monument of history and architecture of republican significance.

In one of the rooms of the Dahl House, the Museum Room of Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl was created and opened in 1986 with the help and at the expense of the Moscow City Branch of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.

In 1992, a protective memorial plaque was installed on the facade of the Dahl House. It, as a document in a durable material, clearly testifies to the recognition by our contemporaries of the significant contribution of Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl to the treasury of Russian history and culture.

Scientific consultant: Smolitskaya G.P. - lexicographer, doctor of philological sciences.

Galina Dmitrievna ZASUKHINA-PETRYANOVA

SALVATION OF V.I. DALYA

House of V.I. Dal decided to demolish. Various public organizations spent a lot of time to keep the house intact. Everything was in vain. The departmental interests of the USSR Ministry of Geology were higher than the preservation of a precious monument that survived the fire of Moscow in 1812. Before me is a copy of a letter written by Igor Vasilyevich to the 24th Congress of the CPSU - the last of the possible instances. The history of the house in which they lived is briefly told: the founder of Russian linguistics V.I. Dal, friend of A.S. Pushkin, who died in his arms; academician of architecture, pioneer of Russian wooden architecture L. V. Dal; writer P.I. Melnikov-Pechersky (author of the epics "In the Forests" and "On the Mountains"); the world-famous scientist, the creator of the theory of the structure of chemical compounds, academician A.M. Butlerov.

The most "important" argument was saved at the very end of the letter. Accurate calculations showed that the demolition of the house and its restoration will cost approximately the same, but in the case of restoration, Moscow will receive 600 m2 of usable area. It is difficult to assess which arguments won, but the house of V.I.Dal was saved.

From the book: PETRYANOV-SOKOLOV I. V. " About myself and my business, about him and his affairs"(M., 1999)

The Grimm brothers managed to bring their vocabulary only to the letter F; it was completed only in 1971.. Not only did Dahl's dictionary become an extraordinarily important text in itself - a national treasure, a source of true popular word for generations of Russian people; around him grew his own mythology.

2. Each word in the name of the dictionary is not accidental

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

Dahl's dictionary from the very beginning was a polemical enterprise - the author contrasted it with dictionaries prepared by scientists of the Russian Academy (since 1841 - the Academy of Sciences). AT famous name“The 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 good example replaces the element of interpretation). Dahl contrasted the “dry and useless” definitions of the academic dictionary, which are “the wiser, the simpler the subject,” with descriptions of the thesaurus type: 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 peculiar only to church books (unlike the dictionary of the Academy, which, in accordance with the regulations, was called the “Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Russian Language”), with careful use of borrowed and calque words, but but with the active involvement of dialect material;

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

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

The well-known even in our time method of collecting material - "for credit" - is described in his memoirs by Petr Boborykin:

“... the teachers of the gymnasium went to him [Dal]. Through one of them, L-n, a grammar teacher, he obtained from the schoolchildren all sorts of sayings and jokes from the raznochinsk spheres. Who delivered L-well known number new proverbs and sayings, he gave him five out of grammar. So, at least, they said both in the city [Nizhny Novgorod] and in the gymnasium.

3. Dahl compiled the dictionary alone

Vladimir Dahl. Portrait by Vasily Perov. 1872

Perhaps the most impressive thing in the history of the creation of the dictionary is how its author, while not a professional linguist, collected material and wrote all the articles alone. Large authoritative dictionaries were made and are being made on their own 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 achievements of Ushakov's collective dictionary, in the preparation of which he himself participated., "Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language" by Vasmer or "Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language" by Zaliznyak. Such dictionaries are perhaps even more coherent and more successful than the cumbersome products of multi-headed teams, in which the project is not limited in time. human life, no one is in a hurry, the idea is constantly changing, someone works better, someone worse, and everything is different.

Some external sources, including those collected by the Academy, Dahl nevertheless used (recall how the teacher of the gymnasium wrote down “sayings and jokes” for him), although he constantly complained about their unreliability, tried to double-check every word, and marked the ones that were not rechecked with a question mark. The burden of the huge work of collecting, preparing for printing and proofreading the material constantly caused him lamentations to 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 sharp his ear for language and instinct was, despite the lack of scientific information.

4. As Dahl's main business, the dictionary was evaluated only after his death.

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

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

“... from his writings it is clear that he is an experienced person in Russia; his reminiscences and stories refer both to the west and to the east, and to the north and south, and to the borders and to the 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 one, and in relation to shades of morals, and in relation to ways of life and crafts.

This is where Belinsky would have to say about the language of Dalev's prose, about folk catchphrases - but no.

Dal, 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 (Dal started a "medium circle") and homeopathy, which Dahl at first ardently criticized, and then became its apologist. In a small circle of fellow doctors who met at Dahl's in Nizhny Novgorod, they spoke Latin and played chess four of them. According to fellow surgeon Nikolai Pirogov, Dal “had a rare ability to imitate the voice, gestures, mine of other people; with extraordinary calmness and the most serious mien, he conveyed the most comical scenes, imitated sounds (the buzzing of a fly, a mosquito, etc.) incredibly true, ”and also masterfully played the organ (harmonica). 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 business is a dictionary, they 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 a blank sheet was sewn into each spread, where Dahl wrote down his additions and corrections. This copy has been preserved and is in the Department of Manuscripts of the Russian National (Public) Library in St. Petersburg.. So, in 1877, in the "Diary of a Writer" Dostoevsky, discussing the meaning of words, uses the combination "future Dal" in an almost nominal sense. In the next era, this understanding will become universally recognized.

5. Dahl believed that literacy was dangerous for peasants

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

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

“...Literacy in itself is not enlightenment, but only a means to achieve it; if it is used not for this, but for another thing, then it is harmful.<…>Allow a man to express his conviction, without being embarrassed by exclamations, zealots of enlightenment, although in respect of the fact that this man has 37,000 peasants in nine counties and nine rural schools at his disposal.<…>Mental and moral education can reach a significant degree without literacy; on the contrary, literacy, without any intellectual and moral education, and with the most unsuitable examples, almost always leads to the worst. Having made a person literate, you aroused needs in him, which you do not satisfy with anything, but leave him at a crossroads.<…>

What will you answer me if I prove 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 Dahl. "A Note on Literacy" (1858)

This idea Dahl mentions many publicists and writers of the era. The democrat Nekrasov wrote ironically: “Literacy is not without art / The venerable Dal pounced - / And he discovered a lot of feelings, / Both nobility and morality,” and the vindictive Shchedrin, as usual, recalled this more than once, for example: “... Dal at that time defended the right of a Russian man to be illiterate, on the grounds that if you teach a locksmith to read and write, he will immediately begin to forge the keys to other people's caskets. Years later, the philosopher Konstantin Leontiev sympathetically recalled Dahl's anti-pedagogical pathos in an article with the eloquent title "How and in what way is our liberalism harmful?", where he complained about liberals responding "with laughter or silence" to "a person who is direct or not afraid of original thought."

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

6. Dal wrote the word "Russian" with one "s"

The full name of Dahl's dictionary is quite widely known, and many will also remember that, according to the old spelling, the words "living Great Russian" are written through "a". But few people notice that Dahl actually wrote the second of these words through one "s". Yes, the collector of the Russian word insisted that it was precisely “Russian”. The dictionary itself explains this:

“They used to write Pravda Ruska; only Poland called us Russia, Russians, Russians, in Latin spelling, and we took it over, 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 in ancient Russian the word Russian, with the second "s" in the suffix, it was quite. Dal did not favor double consonants, and in general (as we see from the word cyrillic).

Only at the beginning of the 20th century, the linguist Ivan Baudouin de Courtenay, who was preparing the third edition of the dictionary, introduced the normative spelling (with two "s") into the text.

7. In Dahl's dictionary, there are indeed words invented by him, but very few

Among the mass ideas about Dahl's dictionary, there is this: Dahl invented everything (or a lot), composed it, people don't really say that. It is quite common, let us recall at least a vivid episode from “My Age ...” by Mariengof:

“In the library, my father, of course, had Dahl's explanatory dictionary. This book, in my opinion, is priceless. What wealth of words! What sayings! Proverbs! Tips and Riddles! Of course, they are about one-third invented by Dahl. But what of that? Nothing. It is important that they are well thought out. This explanatory dictionary in a 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 reread every day. Like an Old Believer Bible. From him, from Dahl, this wonderful Russian speech went to Nastya. And when she first came to Penza directly from her Saransk village Chernye Bugry, there was nothing like that at all - Nastenka usually said, 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, the same fictional, linguistic graphomania of verbal incontinence."

How much did Dahl actually come up with? Is everything in his vocabulary “living Great Russian”? Of course, there are also book neologisms in the dictionary, and quite fresh ones: for example, the expression in March, as "they say in memory of Gogol", and the word Decembrist, as "they called the former state criminals". And what did the lexicographer himself write?

Ethnographic department of Russian geographical society, awarding Dahl's dictionary with the Konstantinov Gold Medal, asked the compiler to enter the words into the dictionary "with the reservation where and how they were communicated to the compiler" in order to avoid criticism that "he puts words and speeches contrary to his spirit into the dictionary of the national language, and therefore apparently fictitious." In response to this remark (in the article "Answer to the Sentence", published in the first volume of the dictionary), Dahl admitted that he occasionally introduces into the dictionary words that "have not been in use hitherto", for example dexterity, as a substitute interpretation for foreign words (gymnastics). But he puts them not 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 really exists in some dialect to interpret a foreign language (for example, lively — machine Zhyvulya, zhivulka, well. Vologda carnivorous insect, flea, louse, etc. || All living things, but unreasonable. Sits, a living zhivulichka on a living chair, pulling at a living meat?|| Baby. || Machine?"), “in the sense in which it, perhaps, has not been accepted hitherto” (that is, a new meaning is invented for the real existing word- the so-called semantic neologism). Justifying the inclusion in the dictionary of diverse unusual-sounding verbal names ( concession, allowance, allowance 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, as soon as the "Russian ear". On this path, he had a most authoritative predecessor - Pushkin, who wrote almost the same:

“The magazines condemned the words: clap, talk and top as an unfortunate innovation. These words are native Russian. “Bova came out of the tent to cool off and heard people’s talk and a horse’s top in the open field” (The Tale of Bova the King). clap used colloquially instead of clapping, as thorn instead of hissing:

He launched a spike like a snake.
(Ancient Russian poems)

It must not interfere with the freedom of our rich and beautiful language.”

"Eugene Onegin", note 31

On the whole, 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 most convincingly demonstrate their reality through comparison with ancient Russian monuments, including those inaccessible to Dahl even theoretically. For example, in Novgorod birch bark letters, which have been found since 1951 (including in the most ancient ones - XI-XIII centuries), there are parallels with the words known from Dahl: buy into- become a business partner survive- hound puppy, fine-tuning- inquiry, investigation, lodba- fish, whitefish breed, warrior- women's dress, the same as the warrior, pollock- commotion head- at first, mail- an honorary gift, estimate- add, to inquire- inquire on occasion saying- bad reputation, take off- take off, be able to- arrange business sta-current- property, tula- discreet place, worm fish - not gutted; as well as phraseological units fall 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 article from a separate paragraph, inside which they are sometimes additionally grouped by semantic links. In a similar way, only more radically, the first "Dictionary of the Russian Academy" was built. The "nested" principle may not be very convenient for searching for words, but it turns dictionary entries into fascinating reading.

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

FOR VODKA, for wine, for tea, for tea, gift in small money for a service, beyond the ranks. When God made a German, a Frenchman, an Englishman, etc., and asked them if they were satisfied, they responded with satisfaction; Russian also, but asked for vodka. The orderly and from death asks for wine (lubok picture). You pull a man out of the water, he asks for vodka for that too. Lead 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. Linguistic education he didn't have However, in that era it was still a rarity, and it 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 consciously. In the "Wandering word" to the dictionary, he admitted that with grammar

“from the beginning he was in some kind of discord, not being able to apply it to our language and avoiding it, not so much by reason, but by some kind of dark feeling, so that it would not confuse ...”

On the second page, we see, albeit with a question mark, the convergence of words abrek(although it would seem to be labeled as Caucasian!) and doomed. Next, Dahl combines in one nest drawbar(borrowed from German) and breathe, space and simple and many others, but a number of single-root words, on the contrary, do not reduce. Subsequently, the erroneous division into nests was, if possible, corrected 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 art

Dahl created a dictionary that can not only be used as a reference, but also read as a collection of essays. The reader is confronted with rich ethnographic information: of course, it does not apply 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- two or three words and you can’t say:

“beating on the hands of the fathers of the bride and groom, usually covering their hands with the floors of caftans, as a sign of final consent; the end of courtship and the beginning of wedding ceremonies: engagement, conspiracy, blessing, betrothal, engagement, a big chant ... "

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, the warrior was rolling on the threshold!”

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

"Old sovereign or sovereign used indifferently, vm. gentleman, gentleman, landowner, nobleman; to this day we speak and write to the king: Most Merciful Sovereign; great. princes: Most Gracious Sovereign; to all individuals: Your Majesty[our fathers wrote, to the highest: your Majesty; to equal: my dear sir; to lower: my lord]».

An encyclopedic article surprising in detail is given at the word bast shoes(which fell into the nest paw). We note the involvement of not only “living Great Russian”, but also “Little Russian” (Ukrainian, more specifically, Chernihiv) material:

LAPOT, m. lapotok; pawpaw, pawpaw, m. posts, south app. (german Vasteln), short wicker shoes on the foot paw, ankle-deep, made of bast (barkers), bast (mochalyzhniki, worse), less often from the bark of willow, willow (verzni, willows), tala (sheljuzhniki), elm (elm trees), birch ( birch bark), oak (duboviki), from thin roots (root roots), from the shavings of a young oak (dubachi, Chernihiv), from hemp combs, broken shabby ropes (kurpy, krutsy, chuni, whisperers), from horse manes and tails (hairs), finally, from straw (straws, kursk.). Bast shoes are woven in 5-12 lines, bundles, on a block, kochedyk, kotochik (iron hook, pile) and consists of wattle (sole), head, firebrands (front), ear, collar (border from the sides) and heel; but bad bast shoes, in a simple braid, without a collar, and fragile; the collar or border converges with its ends on the heel and, when connected, forms a guard, a kind of loop into which the collars are threaded. The transverse basts, bent on the collar, are called kurts; there are usually ten chickens in a wattle fence. Sometimes the bast shoes are still hoofed, they pass over the wattle fence with a bast or tow; and hand-written bast shoes are decorated with a patterned undercut. Bast shoes are put on tailor and woolen linings and tied with frills in a binding crosswise to the knee; bast shoes without frills for the house and yard, weave higher than usual and are called: kapets, kakoty, kalti, shoe covers, tricks, chuyki, little tables, whisperers, frogs, feet, bare feet, topygs, etc.

11. Dahl has two articles with pictures

Modern lexicography, especially foreign lexicography, has come to the conclusion that the interpretation of many words cannot (or is unreasonably difficult) be given without a graphic illustration. But a full-fledged authoritative illustrated Russian explanatory dictionary, unfortunately, 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 own, but also our time: he provided two articles with pictures. In the article hat drawn-vano, what types of hats are, and can be distinguished by silhouette hairpin moscow from straight hairpin, a kashnik from tops. And in the article beef(nest beef) depicts a pensive cow, divided into parts indicated by numbers - among them, in addition to the usual sternum, shank and loin, there are, for example, underplows and a curl.

Russian State Library

Russian State Library

12. Dahl complained about the hard work right in the articles.

On the pages of his dictionary, Dahl often complains about the severity of the work undertaken. Complaints of the lexicographer is 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's hands are condemned to torment,
waiting for the poor head of sorrow and torment.
They did not order him to be tormented by the work of difficult forges,
nor send to the hard work of ore places.
Let the vocabulary do: then one thing prevails,
All the pangs of childbirth this one labor has in itself.

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

Volume. The volume of the dictionary is large, one can not do it.

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

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

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

Celebrate. Edit the set for printing, keep proofreading. You can’t do more than a sheet of this dictionary a day, your eyes won’t.

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

Employee. Dahl compiled his dictionary alone, without employees.

13. Dahl's dictionary experienced a rebirth

Ivan Baudouin de Courtenay. Around 1865 Biblioteka Narodowa

Ivan Aleksandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay, one of the greatest linguists in the history of science, played a major role in the history of Dahl's dictionary. Suffice it to say that basic linguistic concepts phonemes and morphemes were invented by his colleague 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 Capet: his namesake, also Baudouin de Courtenay, sat on the throne of Constantinople conquered by the Crusaders in the 13th century. According to the legend, when the professor, who went out to a political demonstration, was taken to the police station together with the students, Ivan Alexandrovich wrote in the police questionnaire: "King of Jerusalem." Passion for politics did not leave him even 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 by a right-wing extremist five days later.

In 1903-1909, a new (third) edition of Dahl's dictionary was published, edited by Baudouin, supplemented by 20 thousand new words (missed by Dahl or 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 doomed; etymologies were corrected, the nests were ordered, unified, the dictionary became more convenient for searching, and the "Russian" language became "Russian". Ivan Alexandrovich carefully outlined his additions square brackets, showing respect and sensitivity to Dahl's original idea.

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

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

The editorial board of Baudouin de Courtenay entered the mass consciousness not because of the purely scientific side: for the first time (and almost for the last time) in the history of mass domestic lexicography, obscene vocabulary was included in the dictionary. Baudouin explained it this way:

“The lexicographer has no right to cut and castrate the ‘living language’. Since well-known words exist in the minds of the vast majority of the people and constantly pour out, the lexicographer is obliged to enter them into the dictionary, even if all the hypocrites and tartuffes, who are usually great lovers of greasiness in secret, rebel against this and pretend to be indignant ... "

Of course, Russian swearing was well known to Dahl himself, but due to traditional delicacy, the corresponding lexemes and phraseological units were not included in his dictionary. Only in the article old-fashioned Dahl outlined dialectological views on the subject:

LOTTER, swearing swear, swear, swear, swear obscenely. This scolding is characteristic of a high, aka, southern. and app. adverb, and in the low surrounding, sowing. 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 abuse" in their alphabetic places, noting, in particular, that a three-letter word "becomes almost a pronoun." This became an event, and references to the Baudouin dictionary, which was not reprinted in the USSR, became a popular euphemism:

Alexey Krylov, shipbuilder. "My memories"

“And all these professors and academicians began to bend such expressions that no Dahl dictionary of the 1909 edition 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 the Dahl dictionary, the language was taught by both Russian people and foreigners

From about the 1880s to the 1930s, Dahl's dictionary (in the original or in the Baudouin edition) was the standard reference to the Russian language for all writers or readers. There was especially nowhere else to “check the word”, apart from numerous dictionaries of foreign words (the old lexicons from the times of Dashkova or Shishkov became the property of history, and the new academic dictionary that was being prepared just in these years, edited by Grot and Shakhmatov, remained unfinished) . Surprisingly, huge dictionary, at least half consisting of dialectisms, were also used by foreigners studying Russian. In 1909, after Russo-Japanese War, reconciled with Russia, the Japanese, with their inherent 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 "wealth of folk speech" from Dahl's dictionary

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, writers of various trends actively turned to Dahl: some wanted to diversify their own vocabulary and saturate it with unusual-sounding words, others wanted to look close to the people, to give their writings a dialect flavor. Even Chekhov spoke ironically about “one writer-populist”, who takes the words “from Dahl and Ostrovsky”, later this image will flash in other authors.

Sergey Yesenin. 1922 Wikimedia Commons

The petty-bourgeois and peasant lyric poets of the 19th century, from Koltsov to Drozhzhin, have very few dialectisms, they try to write "like gentlemen," they pass an exam for mastery of a large culture. But the new peasant modernist poets, headed by Klyuev and Yesenin, exaggerate their lexical colors to the utmost. But far from everything they take from their native dialects, and Dal, of course, serves as an important source for them (for reading which Professor I. N. Rozanov used to catch the embarrassed Yesenin).

The way for the peasants, of course, was pointed out by the intelligentsia. Klyuev's predecessors were urban stylists of folklore and reenactors of paganism Alexei Remizov, Sergei Gorodetsky and Alexei N. Tolstoy, who carefully studied the Explanatory Dictionary. And later, the “Kyiv Mallarmé” Vladimir Makkaveisky regretted “that until now Dahl had not been bought for the dusty shelf” (he immediately mentioned Remizov and Gorodets), and the Moscow futurist Boris Pasternak in 1914 wrote three inspired by Dahl poems about "drinking over the water of the bochaga" and sometimes returned to this technique in the future.

The unannounced Dahlian subtexts and sources from 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 "gogol" (inspired, in turn, by the name of Gogol) is adjacent to the word "goldfinch" - "gogol" is interpreted by Dahl as "dandy".

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

This understanding goes back to the era of modernism. In Andrey 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 Benedikt Livshits, "the vast, dense Dahl became cozy" in comparison with the primitive elements of futuristic word-creation.

Already in 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. On the other hand, each 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 element, non-existence, threatening our history from everywhere.

"On the nature of the word"

For the Russian emigration, of course, the "Explanatory Dictionary" was interpreted even more strongly as a "little Kremlin" and salvation from non-existence. Vladimir Nabokov twice recalled, in verse and prose, how, as a student, he stumbled upon Dahl's dictionary at a flea market in Cambridge and eagerly reread it: as in a Russian town - / I found Pushkin and Dal / 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 come in handy). The fear of forgetting or clogging up the only thing that I managed to scratch out, however, with quite strong claws, from Russia, has become a direct disease.

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

18. Dictionary of Solzhenitsyn: based on extracts from the Dalev

Publishing house "Russian way"

In Soviet Russia, the canonization of Dal, including by writers, only intensified. Although new explanatory dictionaries of the modern literary language appeared in the 20th century - Ushakov, Ozhegov, Bolshoy and Small Academic - the "outdated regional" dictionary still continued to retain the aura of the "main", "real" and "most complete", a monument to "Russia, which we have lost." Patriot writers like Aleksey Yugov accused modern dictionaries of “thrown out of the Russian language” compared to Dalev’s about a hundred thousand words (“forgetting”, however, that the vast majority of these words are non-literary dialectisms) . The crowning achievement of this tradition was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Russian Dictionary of Language Expansion", which is an extensive extract of rare words from Dahl that may be useful to a writer (a cautious mark "sometimes you can say" is introduced). They are supplemented with relatively few words compared to the main Dalev 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, is the replacement of foreign words with primordial and neologisms composed of primordial roots, a large number of verbal nouns with a zero suffix like “nahlyn” - it goes back 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 laborious complete retype) of an old book in pre-reform orthography, almost forgotten for 37 years, with all the “eras” and “yats”. The exclusivity of such an action, in addition to philological accuracy, also indicated the special sacred status attached to the dictionary. This reproduction strove 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 edition, and most importantly, part of the text was excluded due to censorship conditions.

In the first volume, page 541 has a strange appearance - there is much less text on it than on the neighboring ones, and at a glance it is clear that the lines are unusually sparse. In the appropriate place, Dahl had a word Jew and its derivatives (in the second posthumous edition - page 557). Probably, initially the dictionary was completely retyped, and then from the ready-made set the nest Jew they threw it out, retyped the page again with an increased interval and left no such frank indication of censorship as just a blank spot for the Soviet reader (in addition, from its location it would be quite obvious which word was deleted). However, examples scattered throughout other entries of the dictionary with this word remained (for example, “Jews write and read vice versa, from right to left” in the nest wrap).

Generally speaking, the names of ethnic groups as such on common grounds Dal did not include: in his dictionary there is neither Englishman, nor French, and actually Jew(there is only jewish stone). In those days, ethnonyms were often considered proper names in general, many other authors wrote them with a capital letter. Such vocabulary penetrates Dahl's dictionary only in connection with figurative meanings. Article Tatar exists, but it opens with the definition of a plant (Tatar), and in the nest hare the article about the brown hare occupies about the same space as all the figurative meanings associated with the ethnonym proper. Redacted article Jew was no exception: it begins with the definition of precisely figurative meaning- “a miser, a miser, a selfish miser”, and it contains many proverbs and sayings from which such an image of a Jew arises. They are also in Dalev's Proverbs of the Russian People. Although if you open, for example, an article hare, then we know that Russian mind- "hind mind, belated", Russian God- "maybe, I suppose yes somehow", and in the article Tatar we read: Tatar eyes- "arrogant, shameless rogue."

It is not clear whether the lexicographer himself was an ardent anti-Semite by the standards of that time. Dahl, an official in the Ministry of the Interior dealing in particular with religious movements, is credited with the "Note on Ritual Murders," a compilation of German and Polish texts sympathetically expounding on the blood libel against the Jews. This essay “surfaced” only during the Beilis case in 1913, and its belonging to Dahl has not been proven. Of course, neither the Soviet national policy, nor even the state Soviet anti-Semitism, built on bashful and hypocritical silences, did not allow discussing these plots among Russian classics in any way. It also played a role in the fact that since the time of Dahl, the word “Jew” has sharply strengthened the negative connotation that was present at that time, and in Soviet times it became officially taboo. It seemed inconceivable that the treasury of the national spirit, which Lenin highly appreciated, would contain characteristics that have now become "Black Hundred-pogrom" (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 and 1980s.

20. Modern dictionaries of “criminal jargon” are distorted Dal

A few years ago, the linguist Viktor Shapoval, while studying Russian slang dictionaries, discovered that in two big dictionaries Russian criminal jargon, published in the early 1990s, there is a large layer of outlandish words that are not confirmed by any real texts, marked “international” or “foreign”. Allegedly, these words are part of a certain international jargon of criminals and are described in departmental dictionaries with the heading "for official use." Among them, for example, the word screen, which allegedly 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 extreme - the first and last - volumes of Dahl's dictionary. Moreover, in the "international" words are especially readily taken, in which Dahl himself was not particularly sure and marked them with a question mark. 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 fell into the international slang of criminals, or some quick-witted compiler of a police dictionary “for official use” (perhaps , the criminal himself, who was promised leniency for such work) saw Dahl's dictionary on the shelf, armed himself with two extreme volumes and began to make extracts, 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 did not firmly understand the old spelling and the abbreviations made by Dahl. Yes, the word unit began to mean “surveillance” (in the sense of police surveillance), although Dahl’s context is as follows: “something in appearance is whole, but incoherent, composite; collection, selection, selection, osprey; sleep, surveillance, sgnetka. Before us is a typical Dahl attempt to pick up among the original words of synonyms-a replacement for a foreign one, and surveillance (through e) here means "something caked" (and surveillance from the word follow was written through "yat"). The imaginary argotism is completely anecdotal screen- "night"; the plagiarizer did not understand Dahl's entry screen, screen, night, i.e. “screen, screen or screen”. And this word means not “night”, but “chest”.

Words written out by someone from Dahl, misunderstood and additionally falsified, went for a walk in the numerous dictionaries of criminal jargon, published and republished in our time. Real secret languages ​​(Dal, by the way, also dealt with them) are, in general, rather poor - they need a cipher for a relatively limited range of concepts, and the public understands the word “word-variety” as “a thick and solid book”, therefore numerous lexicographic phantoms in such publications are always in demand.

Private bussiness

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (1801 - 1872) was born in the town of Lugansky Zavod (now the city of Lugansk). His father, Dane Johan Christian von Dahl, a scientist who spoke many languages, was invited to Russia by Catherine II and became the court librarian. But he did not hold this position for long, he went to Germany and, having graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Jena, became a doctor. Then he returned to Russia and ended up in Lugansk, taking the post of doctor of the mining department. In 1799, Dr. Dal received Russian citizenship and began to be called Ivan Matveyevich. In Lugansk, he created the first infirmary for workers.

In 1805 the family moved to Nikolaev. The children received their primary education at home. Their mother taught them languages, their father taught them literature and history. In the summer of 1814, Vladimir Dal and his younger brother entered the Naval Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg. Among the best cadets, Vladimir Dal went for training swimming on the Phoenix brig. He graduated with honors, becoming a midshipman. Dal served in the Black Sea Fleet. In 1823, he was arrested for an epigram on the commander of the fleet, Alexei Greig. Dahl was demoted to sailors, but after an appeal, the court's decision was canceled. Dahl retired and decided to continue his education. He entered the University of Dorpat at the Faculty of Medicine. Dahl completed a five-year course of study in four years, defending the work “The dissertation for a degree, outlining the observations: 1) successful craniotomy; 2) latent manifestations of the kidneys.

After graduating from university in 1829, Dahl was sent to the active army in the Balkans, where another Russian-Turkish war was going on. Dahl was a resident in a mobile hospital. At that time, he was already actively collecting words, proverbs and sayings. Dahl was awarded the order Anna of the third degree and the St. George medal on the ribbon.

After the end of the war, Dahl was sent to Kamenetz-Podolsky, where the cholera epidemic began, then the Polish war. There he distinguished himself while crossing the Vistula near Yuzefov. Dal built a bridge (the military engineering skills acquired in the cadet corps came in handy), defended it during the crossing, and then destroyed it himself. For this he was awarded the Order of Vladimir. After the end of the war, Dahl became an intern at the St. Petersburg military land hospital, where he earned fame as a major specialist in eye operations. In 1832 he published a book of fairy tales signed "Cossack Lugansk". Due to the satirical nature of some of the tales, the circulation of the collection was withdrawn, and the author was arrested. III branch, but thanks to the intercession of friends at the palace released on the same day.

In 1833, Dal received a position as an official for special assignments under the Orenburg Governor-General Vasily Perovsky. Shortly before leaving for Orenburg, he married Yulia Andre. As part of his service, Dal made inspection trips around the province, during which he became closely acquainted with the life of not only the Russian population, but also the Tatars, Bashkirs, and Kazakhs. Here, Dahl wrote the autobiographical novels "Midshipman Kisses" and "Vanya Sidorov Chaikin", other novels and stories. During these years, Dal takes part in a military expedition to Khiva. In this campaign, Dahl worked together with other scientists: biologist A. Leman, geographer P. A. Chikhachev, astronomer I. O. Vasiliev. On December 29, 1838, the Academy of Sciences elected collegiate assessor Dahl as its corresponding member in the natural sciences.

Vladimir Dal

In the summer of 1841 Dahl returned to the capital. On the recommendation of V. Perovsky, he was appointed head of the special office of the Ministry of the Interior. In this position as head of the office, Dahl did a lot to improve the work of St. Petersburg hospitals. At the same time, he was actively engaged in literary activities. When she aroused criticism from the minister, Dahl left the service and moved to Nizhny Novgorod, where in 1848 he became the manager of a specific office. This department dealt with peasants belonging to the royal family.

In 1859 he moved to Moscow and devoted all his time to processing the collected materials. In 1861 - 1862, Dal published a collection of proverbs of the Russian people, containing 30 thousand proverbs. He also published the books "On the dialects of the Russian language" and "On the superstitions and prejudices of the Russian people." In 1861, the first volume of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language was published, and the first edition was completed in 1868. Already seriously ill, Dahl continued to work on additions and corrections to the dictionary. On October 4 (September 22), 1872, Vladimir Dal dictated to his daughter the last word for the new edition of the dictionary, and a few hours later he was gone.

What is famous

Vladimir Dahl was glorified by the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language compiled by him, the collection of material for which took three decades. The dictionary included about two hundred thousand words, eighty thousand of which Dahl recorded for the first time. The book opens with a warning: “The dictionary is called explanatory, because it not only translates one word to another, but also interprets, explains the meanings of words and concepts subordinate to them. The words: of the living Great Russian language, indicate the volume and direction of all work. The vocabulary presented in the dictionary covers both the literary language and various dialects, professional terms, jargons. As an illustrative material, the dictionary contains a large number of phraseological units, proverbs, sayings. The interpretations of the words contain significant ethnographic material.

For his dictionary, Dal was awarded the Lomonosov Prize of the Academy of Sciences, the Prize of the Dorpat University, and the Konstantinovsky Gold Medal of the Russian Geographical Society. He also received the title of honorary member of the Academy of Sciences.

The second edition of the dictionary, containing almost five thousand amendments and additions, was published in 1880-1882. It was followed by the third (1903 - 1909), the editor of which was the famous Russian linguist I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay.

What you need to know

Vladimir Dal was a close friend of Pushkin. They met in the first period of Dal's Petersburg life. The acquaintance took place after Dahl decided to give Pushkin his book of fairy tales and went to him without being formally introduced. The donated copy has been preserved. Pushkin, in response, presented Dahl with the manuscript "Tales of the priest and his worker Balda" with the inscription: "To the storyteller Cossack Lugansk, the storyteller Alexander Pushkin."

In Orenburg, Dal again met with Pushkin, who began to write the "History of the Pugachev Rebellion" and collected materials for it. Dal and Pushkin traveled together through the villages, looking for people who still remembered the living Pugachev.

In the winter of 1836-1837, Dal came to St. Petersburg for a short time. After Pushkin's duel with Dantes, Vladimir Dal takes care of the wounded poet until last minute his life. Subsequently, Dahl left notes on the progress last hours Pushkin's life.

Direct speech

“Neither nickname, nor religion, nor the very blood of ancestors makes a person belong to one or another nationality. The spirit, the soul of a person - that's where you need to look for his belonging to one or another people. What is fashionable to determine the belonging of the spirit? Of course, a manifestation of the spirit - a thought. Whoever thinks in what language belongs to that people. I think in Russian." V. I. Dal

“Earth science and linguistics, apparently, are two sciences almost unrelated; 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 Department will have to be akin or in its nature to the Second Department of the Academy of Sciences [department of literature]. In this field, both learned societies give each other a fraternal hand of competition and help. V. I. Dal

18 facts about Vladimir Dal

• One of the fellow students of Vladimir Dal in the Naval Cadet Corps was the future famous Russian Admiral Pavel Nakhimov.
• In the Naval Corps, a record was kept of the number of blows with the rods that the cadets received, since parents were charged for the consumption of the rods. Thanks to this fact, it is known that during the five years of training, cadet Dahl was never flogged.
• When the young midshipman Dal rode along winter road on the coachman's troika, it was cold, and the driver, in order to cheer up the frozen passenger, said: "It makes you younger." Dahl asked what that meant. The coachman explained that he was rejuvenating, meaning it was getting cloudy, and that meant that the frost would subside. Dahl pulled out a notebook and wrote down the word and its interpretation. From this entry, the famous dictionary began. Over the years of work on the dictionary, the interpretation of the word "rejuvenate" has greatly expanded.
• Once, during the Turkish war of 1829, Dahl lost a camel with luggage, where there were 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. Dal's biographer P. I. Melnikov writes: “It is remarkable that his left hand was as developed as his right. He could write with his left hand and do whatever he wanted, as with his right. Such a happy ability was especially suitable for him as an operator. The most famous operators in St. Petersburg invited Dahl in those cases when the operation could be done more dexterously and more conveniently with the left hand.
• Like Professor Higgins from Pygmalion, who determined by pronunciation where an Englishman lived, Vladimir Ivanovich identified natives of various parts of Russia by the peculiarities of speech.
• In Orenburg, thanks to Dahl, a pedestrian bridge was built across the Ural River, a school of forestry and agriculture and a museum were opened at this school.
• On Thursdays literature, scientists, actors and artists gathered in Dahl's Petersburg apartment. At one of these meetings, the idea of ​​creating the Russian Geographical Society arose, of which Dahl became one of the founding members.
• Collecting materials for the dictionary, Dahl became one of the first researchers of secret languages, who used itinerant merchants - ofeni or artisans - wool beaters, who walked all over Russia, buying up wool. Dahl 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 "grandmothers" in the meaning of "money" first appeared.
• Four words in Dahl's dictionary are provided with illustrations: "beef", "mast", "sail" and "hat".
• After the word “snuffbox”, instead of the usual example - a proverb or saying - Dahl wrote: “That's how I'll go knocking on the heads with a snuffbox! our teacher of higher mathematics used to say, in Marine Corps". This is a memory of a mathematics teacher and class inspector Mark Gorkovenko.
• Most of all in the dictionary of words with the letter P. They occupy one volume out of four in its entirety.
• Shortly before his death, Dahl converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy.
• Dahl wrote the textbooks Botany and Zoology for military educational institutions, and in the St. Petersburg Literary Gazette he led the Menagerie section with stories about animals.
• In addition to a collection of proverbs, Dahl also recorded about a thousand Russian folk tales, which he handed over to the collector of fairy tales Alexander Afanasiev, he handed over the collected folk songs to Peter Kireevsky.
• Dal 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 Pushkin's other famous ring, stolen from the museum in March 1917, the ring donated to Dahl has been preserved and is kept in Pushkin's museum-apartment on the Moika.
• In 1913, shortly before the trial in the Beiliss case, the pamphlet "Note on Ritual Murders" was published, indicating Dahl's authorship. In it, the Jews were attributed to the use of the blood of Christians for ritual purposes. Previously, without the name of the author, it was published in 1844 under the title "Investigation about the murder of Christian babies by Jews and the use of their blood." Some researchers agree that Dal was the author of the text, others believe that it was written by the director of the Department of Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions, Privy Councilor V.V. Skripitsyn or the governor of the Volyn province, Major General I.V. Kamensky.

Materials about Vladimir Dal

BASMAN

BASMAN- husband, old (from weight, Tatar. batman? Swede. steelyard) palace or state bread; basmannik, resident of the Moscow Basmannaya Sloboda, palace baker, baker.

FABLE

FABLE- or a fable of wives. (bait? bass, embellishment) a fictional incident, fiction, a story for embellishment, for the sake of a red (Basque) word; allegorical, instructive narrative, fable, fable, parable, where it is customary to deduce animals and even things verbally;

*| lies, idle talk, idle talk, nonsense rumors, news. It’s full of fables to tell, get down to business. The nightingale is not fed with fables, with tales. Women's fables, but a fool loves it. Two words of fables - and that's the whole point. Fable in boots. Fables of Krylov. Drama fable, poems, content, plot and denouement. The fable will diminish. fable, fable, fable, storyteller, anecdote (see bass). Fable, fable, pertaining to or peculiar to fables. Fabler husband. storyteller, writer or inventor of fables. Fabulist husband. writer, writer, writer of fables, parables. Fable cf. a legend about prehistoric, fabulous centuries; the doctrine of polytheism, the deities of superstition, mythology; fabulous, mythological; fable, tell, tell about this subject;

*| lie, gossip, spin a fable; fabulist husband. engaged in the study of fabulous legends; mythologist;

*| liar, idler.

Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary - (Dal V.I. Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. St. Petersburg, 1863-1909.)