Vladimir Ivanovich Dal short biography writer, doctor, lexicographer, creator of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language is presented in this article.
Vladimir Dal short biography for children
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was born November 10, 1801 in the small village of Lugansky Zavod (now Lugansk) in a highly educated family. His father was a doctor and linguist, and his mother was a pianist. She knew several languages and was interested in literature. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that Vladimir received a good home education. Vladimir Dal was very attached with his heart and soul to native land, and later he even took a pseudonym for himself - “Cossack Lugansk”. The first work was published under this pseudonym.
Education Vladimir Dal received in the St. Petersburg Naval Cadet Corps. After graduating from college in 1819, he went to serve in the Navy. But soon after a few years, Dahl decided to take a completely different path - he began to seriously study medicine at the University of Dorpat (now the University of Tartu).
In 1828-1829 he took an active part in the Russian-Turkish war. Dahl acts on the front lines in battles, helps wounded soldiers, operates on them in field hospitals. For such activities, he was awarded with awards, and Vladimir Ivanovich begins to work as an intern at the military land hospital in St. Petersburg. He is reputed to be an excellent doctor. For all the time of his medical practice, given the military, Dahl even wrote several sketches, articles.
Then Vladimir Dal took up seriously literature. In 1832, his Russian Tales were published. Five first." He began to make friends and acquaintances with famous poets and writers such as: Gogol, Pushkin, Krylov, Zhukovsky and others. Together with Alexander Pushkin, Dal wanders around Russia. He was present at the death of Alexander Pushkin, after the duel he treated him and participated in the autopsy.
During his life, Vladimir Dal wrote more than 100 essays in which he talked about Russian life. The writer traveled a lot, so he knew Russian life.
Vladimir Ivanovich also compiled such textbooks - "Zoology", "Botany", and in 1838 he became an honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
But the most voluminous and significant work of Vladimir Dahl was and remains the Explanatory Dictionary, which contains about 200 thousand words. The first volume of the Explanatory Dictionary was published in 1861.
From 1849 to 1859, Dal lived in Nizhny Novgorod, where he served as a manager in a specific office, but soon moved to Moscow. Here he published many articles and works. And in 1862 "Proverbs of the Russian people" was published.
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was born on November 10 (22), 1801 in Little Russia in the family of a doctor. His father was a Danish who spent his youth in Germany, where he studied ancient languages and theology. Mother, German by birth, spoke five languages.
Vladimir Ivanovich was educated at home, from childhood he studied modern and ancient languages, he began to write poetry early and studied versification for many years as gymnastics for the mind.
At the age of 14, he entered the naval cadet corps in St. Petersburg, where he began his systemic education. After home freedom, drill and constant physical exercise, as well as the manners that prevailed in the cadet corps of that time, were accepted by the young Dahl without much enthusiasm. He later said that he considered those years of his training "lost". He later described the reigning orders in the story "Midshipman Kisses, or Look Back Tough".
The training voyage to Denmark did not impress Vladimir Ivanovich Dal, he finally decided for himself that he was Russian and had nothing to do with the homeland of his ancestors.
After three years of training in the corps, he was sent to serve in the Black Sea Fleet, where he began to write down unfamiliar words encountered in the speech of his colleagues, which marked the beginning of the creation of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.
His epigram to the Commander-in-Chief of the Black Sea Fleet served first as a pretext for arrest, and then for Dal's transfer to Kronstadt after being acquitted by the court. Then Vladimir Ivanovich retired, for some time earned his living as a tutor, and then entered the medical faculty of the University of Dorpat.
Dahl recalled these years as the happiest in his life. It was to these years that Dahl met the famous poets Yazykov and Zhukovsky, the publisher of the Slavyanin magazine Voeikov, and also the surgeon Pirogov, who became Dahl's lifelong friend. At the same time, Dahl published his poems for the first time.
In 1829 Dahl, having received a diploma as a surgeon, was sent to the Russian-Turkish war, where he worked in a field hospital, becoming a brilliant specialist and expert in his field. It was then that the work on the dictionary was continued. In Dahl's notebook, it was during this period that an entry appeared that he finds "the language of a commoner is more figurative, simple, but at the same time, possessing clarity and definition, in contrast to the language of the book, which is used by educated people."
After the end of the war, Dahl continued his medical practice, served as a doctor, and also dealt with epidemiological problems and even traveled to villages where cholera was rampant. Since 1832, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he began to publish his literary works.
The story "Gypsy" was the first to be published. After it, “Russian fairy tales from folk oral tradition to civil letters were published, adapted to everyday life and embellished with walking sayings by Cossack Vladimir Lugansky. Five first." Strict censorship did not allow the distribution of a collection of these tales, seeing them as a mockery of the authorities. The case could have ended in a lawsuit, but Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl was saved by service in a military hospital during the hostilities.
And already in 1833 he was sent to Orenburg, where he became an official for special assignments under the Orenburg military governor. In connection with the affairs of the service, he was forced to travel a lot around the province, to observe the life and customs of the common people.
The stories "Bikei and Maulina" about the life of the Kazakhs and "Bashkir Mermaid" can be attributed to this period of service. In addition to literary activities, he was engaged in collecting a collection of flora and fauna of the Orenburg province, for which they even wanted to appoint him a member of the Academy of Sciences, but since the number of academic places was limited and no one wanted to give up his chair, the title of honorary was introduced for Dahl member of the Academy.
During Pushkin's journey to the places of the Pugachev uprising, he met Dal, which was not long, but good relations with each other connected them until the very death of Alexander Sergeevich. Having learned about Pushkin's injury, Dahl immediately left for St. Petersburg and was on duty at the bedside of the dying poet.
As a military doctor, Vladimir Ivanovich took part in the Khiva campaign, after which he returned to St. Petersburg and began working as a secretary and official for special assignments at the Ministry of the Interior. It is to this period of public service that Dahl's "Study on the Scopal Heresy", written as a report to the Minister of the Interior, can be attributed.
Dal did not leave literary activity, having published a number of stories in various collections, which were distinguished by an abundance of naturalistic details, accurately described peasant life and customs. Vladimir Ivanovich received the highest marks from both critics and fellow writers. His talent was appreciated by Belinsky and Gogol.
The folk words and expressions used by the hero of Dahl's stories were easily recognizable, Gogol even wrote about this that Dahl does not have to invent a plot that novelists usually puzzle over, he simply takes the most insignificant episode, which, upon closer examination, turns out to be a piece of folk stories.
Little stories about Everyday life Dalem's peasants were united in the cycles "Pictures from Russian Life". In 1849, Dahl, on his own initiative, was appointed manager of the Nizhny Novgorod specific office in order to be able to actually observe the life of the simple peasantry. In addition to his immediate duties, which included drafting acts, writing complaints from peasants, he was also disinterestedly engaged in medical practice and even performed surgeries.
The collection of proverbs published by him combined folk wisdom, accumulated over the centuries, and unknown a wide range readers.
The proverbs were divided not only in alphabetical order, but also by themes, among which the theme of the family, the theme of mother earth, the theme of the Lord God stood out.
The main work of the life of Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was the explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language, on the creation of which he spent fifty years of his life. The dictionary includes 200 thousand words. This work was of great cultural significance for its time and continues to be used to this day. Along with real literary words, Dahl's dictionary included dialect words or the words that were used in the speech, being a tracing translation from foreign languages, sometimes Dahl also included words he invented, which indicates some unprofessionalism of the author, who collected and published everything that he considered necessary.
At the end of his life, Dahl worked on the second edition of the dictionary. In addition, he wrote children's stories, and also arranged for the peasants bible stories into modern language.
He studied zoology and botany, collected folk tales, mastered playing several musical instruments, was fond of spiritualism and homeopathy. Contemporaries noted that Dahl manages to study everything that interests him.
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal died in Moscow in 1872.
IN AND. Dal is known by many, almost everyone. But mostly they know his last name and the result of his work - "The Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language."
I bring to your attention an article about a Russian German, about our great compatriot, which was written and sent to me by the candidate philological sciences Zinaida Savinovna Deryagina.
The point is that tomorrow memorable date- The 4th of October. This is the day of the death of V.I. Dahl. He was a worthy man, and, most importantly, he devoted his whole life to Russia. And he was born in Russia - in Lugan. That is, in Lugansk ...
"Vladimir Ivanovich Dal
On the anniversary of the death
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal - the author of the well-known " Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language", a most valuable manual, first of all, for everyone who studies the Russian language and Russian literature. A huge number of articles and even poems have been written about this treasury of the Russian language, one of them belongs to V. Nabokov, and it was inspired by the fact that, far from his homeland, he suddenly saw books dear to his heart in a bookstore:
When the exile sorrow
It was snowing like in a Russian town
I found Pushkin and Dahl
On an enchanted tray...
V.I.Dal was an excellent connoisseur of the Russian language and its dialects, the classification of which he was the first to make. Contemporaries said that sometimes, only by two or three spoken words, he could determine where a person comes from, what dialect he is a carrier of. He also collected proverbs, sayings, riddles, the most diverse ethnographic material (an explanation of rituals, beliefs, cultural objects, etc.), which he always used in his literary works. But few of our contemporaries know that V.I.Dal is a brilliant naval officer, doctor, surgeon, homeopath, writer (pseudonym Kazak Lugansky), a scientist in the field of ethnography, statistics, zoology and botany. He was a talented design engineer and inventor. He was one of the founders of the Russian geographical society. .For 36 years he was in the public service (8 years - official for special assignments under the Orenburg Governor-General V.A. Perovsky; 9 years - head of the special office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia; 10 years - manager of the specific office in Nizhny Novgorod).
Vasily Perov - Portrait of V.I. Dahl, 1872
IN AND. Dal was born on November 10 (23), 1801 in Lugan, Yekaterinoslav region (now it is the city of Lugansk in the Donbass). His father, Johann Christian Dahl, was a Dane; his mother, Maria Freitag, was German, and his grandmother was from the French Huguenot family of de Malli. She was engaged in translations into Russian of the works of European writers. It is believed that the influence of his grandmother did not remain without a trace for V.I.Dal: his very first reading of Russian books was precisely her translations.
Dahl wrote about his parents as follows: “Father was strict, but very smart and fair; the mother is kind and sensible, and personally took care of our teaching as far as she could; she knew, in addition to German and Russian, three more languages.
Dane Johann Dahl, having accepted Russian citizenship, was a sincere patriot of his new Fatherland. He served as a doctor at the Lugansk steel plant. Later, Ivan Dal's family moved to the city of Nikolaev, where Dal Sr. served in the maritime department. It was from here, from Nikolaev, that Vladimir Dal, in 1814, when he was only 13 and a half years old, was taken to St. Petersburg to study at the Naval Cadet Corps. In 1816, that is, 15 years old, Dahl was promoted to midshipmen. Then this rank was considered an officer. Together with the other twelve midshipmen, Dahl was lucky enough to go on a sailboat to Copenhagen. Among these midshipmen was future hero Sinop and Sevastopol, the future Admiral P. S. Nakhimov.
Later, Dahl wrote about this voyage like this: “When I sailed to the shores of Denmark, I was very interested in what I would see the Fatherland of my ancestors, my Fatherland. Having set foot on the coast of Denmark, at the very first stages I was finally convinced that my Fatherland was Russia, that I had nothing in common with the fatherland of my ancestors. I have always considered the Germans a stranger to me.”
On March 2, 1819, when Dahl was 17 years old, he was released from the Naval Corps as a midshipman to the Black Sea Fleet. And he graduated twelfth in seniority out of 86 people, that is, he graduated from the Naval Corps brilliantly.
It was at this very time, one might say, that the compilation of the Dalem Dictionary began. And it was like that. A young midshipman rode from Petersburg, dressed to the nines, on a pair of post horses (at that time the Nikolaevskaya Railway, it will appear in a few decades). The midshipman's clothes did not warm him well, he shivered and huddled in the sleigh. The coachman was from the Zimogorsky Pit (Novgorod province), and he, in consolation to the chilled, chilled to the bones, young midshipman, said, pointing to the cloudy sky:
- Cools down!
Dahl asked:
— How does it slow down?- It was said in Russian, but it was not entirely clear to him what was being said.
And the coachman explained the meaning of the word: rejuvenates - it means that the sky is becoming cloudy, and this is a sure sign of a thaw. Apparently, the coachman wanted to at least somehow console the frozen naval officer, which is why he uttered this word, which is usual for his dialect, but it was unfamiliar to the traveler. And the midshipman, despite the frost, with his hands numb from the cold, took out a notebook from his pocket and wrote down this word: "Rejuvenate - otherwise cloudy", in the Novgorod province means "clouded with clouds, speaking of the sky, tend to bad weather."
It is this date - March 1819 - that becomes the beginning of Dahl's work on collecting material, and then work on compiling the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. It was at this time that Dahl wrote down the very first word, and ahead were hundreds of thousands of Russian words that were waiting for their turn ...
Since then, Dala has always been Notebook, in which he introduced dialect words, various stable phrases, proverbs, sayings, riddles, jokes. Ten years later, he already had several thick notebooks covered in small beaded handwriting.
I will note in passing that I was lucky to see the notes made by Dahl's hand. This is really a beaded handwriting, and it could very often be disassembled only with a magnifying glass. In the early 90s, I participated in the preparation for publication of several notes by Dahl, compiled by him at the time when he served as an official for special assignments under the Orenburg Governor-General V.A. Perovsky. It was these notes by Dahl that I deciphered in August 1991 in reading room Department of Manuscripts of the Russian State Library.
And it must also be said that Dahl wrote down the words wherever it could be done. He collected a huge amount of material for his future Dictionary during the Russian-Turkish war of 1828-1829, in which he took part as a military doctor. This is what he wrote about :….“Nowhere has it been as comfortable as on camping trips. It used to happen that on a day trip somewhere you would gather around you soldiers from different places, and you will start asking how such and such an object is called in that province, as in another, in the third; look in the book, and there is already a whole string of regional sayings ... ".
During this military campaign, Dahl accumulated so many notes that this required a pack camel. And once in the military turmoil, two crossings from Adrianople [modern. - Edirne in Turkey - approx. ZD], this camel is missing. And Dahl recalled this as follows: “I was orphaned with the loss of my notes, we didn’t care much about suitcases with clothes ... Fortunately, the Cossacks recaptured a camel somewhere and a week later brought him to Adrianople ... Thus, - later admitted Dahl , - the beginning of the Russian Dictionary was delivered from Turkish captivity ... ".
At the beginning of his life path Dal, probably, did not think that he would be engaged in compiling the Dictionary, especially since he received a military education: he graduated from the Naval Corps in St. Petersburg. And for the first seven years he served in the Navy - first in the Black Sea, and then in the Baltic, but in 1826 he left the naval service. Having resigned and removed his midshipman's uniform, he went to Derpt, to the ancient Russian Yuryev-city, where his widowed mother and younger brother had moved at that time. Here, at the Imperial Derpt University, V.I. Dal became a student at the Faculty of Medicine. Two years later (in 1828) the Russian-Turkish war began. And although all the students were sent to the front, because beyond the Danube, as they said then, our Russian troops were met by two enemies: the Turks and the plague. But Dahl, as a capable and very talented student, was left so that he could take the exam for a doctorate in medicine. And he brilliantly passed the exam not only for a doctor of medicine, but also for a surgeon. I must say that there were legends about Dala the surgeon, and they even said that "he has two right hands." That is, Dahl's left hand was developed in the same way as the right. Later, the most famous operators in St. Petersburg (namely, as surgeons were then called) invited Dahl in those cases when the operation could be done most conveniently with the left hand.
And it should also be noted that at that time the life of the patient directly depended on the skill of the surgeon, or rather, on the speed of the operation. Anesthesia was not yet used at that time, it was introduced only during another Russian-Turkish war of 1853-1855, Dahl's friend, the famous doctor N.I. Pirogov. And at the beginning of the 19th century, in order for the patient not to die from pain shock on the operating table, a lightning-fast reaction of the surgeon was needed. And it must also be said that Dahl was best known as an oculist surgeon. He has more than forty successful cataract surgeries to his credit. These are the preserved information about Dala the doctor. By the way, the description of Dahl's operations has since entered the textbooks of medicine.
After the Turkish campaign ended, the Polish uprising began, and Dahl was again in the army. He was appointed divisional doctor of the 3rd Infantry Corps, commanded by Adjutant General (later Count) Ridiger. At one of the very dangerous moments for the detachment, Dahl also showed himself as a design engineer. From improvised means (empty barrels, rafts, boats, ferries), he built two pontoon bridges, along which military units crossed to the other side of the Vistula. It is interesting that when the last Russian soldiers entered the opposite bank of the Vistula, the Poles suddenly attacked the bridge fortifications. Dahl with a small team was left by General Riediger to destroy these bridges. And then we will give the story of the famous writer P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky about this page military biography Dalia:
“... The Poles entered the bridge. Several officers walked ahead, talking cheerfully. Dahl went up to them and announced that the sick and wounded with doctors and infirmary servants remained in the distillery, but that he was quite sure of their safety, because the war was going on with Christians, with enlightened people. The officers reassure Dahl that the patients are safe, while they themselves move forward, talking cheerfully with the Russian doctor. Behind them enter the bridge advanced people detachment. Approaching the middle of the bridge, Dahl quickened his steps, jumped onto one barrel, where a sharply sharpened ax had been stored in advance. Having cut with several blows of the ax the main knots of the ropes that connected the building, he rushed into the water. Barrels, boats, ferries carried down the Vistula, the bridge blurred. Under the shots of the Poles, Dal swam to the shore and was greeted by the enthusiastic cries of our troops. The garrison of the bridge fortification, our artillery and Wagenburg were saved from imminent death, and the Polish corps of Romarino was cut off the road to the Krakow and Sandomierz voivodship, where he sought after the capture of Warsaw by the Russians ... ".
Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich from the report of the commander-in-chief Prince Paskevich, which was compiled on the basis of the report of General Ridiger, having learned about this feat of Dahl, awarded him the Vladimir Cross with a bow. In 1832, after returning from Poland, V.I.Dal left medicine and retired, having no means of subsistence. Why did he do this? Apparently, he felt a literary gift in himself. I also think that he probably would not have dared to change his life in such a way if he had not been on friendly terms with the leading Russian writers of that time. Even when Dahl studied at the University of Dorpat, he met the first Russian poet in those days, V. A. Zhukovsky. And when he moved to St. Petersburg, this acquaintance grew into friendship, and friendship with Zhukovsky made V.I. Dalia is already a friend of A.S. Pushkin, and also brought him closer to N. Yazykov, Krylov, Gogol, Prince Odoevsky, and the Perovsky brothers. V.I.Dal entered the literary field from fairy tales. And he called his first collection (1833) like this: “Russian fairy tales from folk oral tradition to civil diploma, adapted to everyday life and embellished with walking sayings by Cossack Vladimir Lugansky. Heel first". He later wrote about his fairy tales: “Not fairy tales in themselves are important to me, but Russian word, which we have in such a pen that it cannot appear to people without a special pretext and reason - the fairy tale served as an excuse. I set myself the task of acquainting my countrymen with vernacular and a voice that revealed such free revelry and wide scope in a folk tale.
And I must also say that this was the view of Dahl himself not only on fairy tales written in the folk language, but also on his stories, novels, essays that appeared with him later. In his literary works, Dahl wanted to depict the features of folk life in its genuine form. And here it is important to note that before that, in our literature, the Russian commoner, the Russian peasant, was portrayed either in a sugary, idyllic way (for example, almost with a pink wreath on his head, like Karamzin and his imitators), or in a dirty and caricature form.
Let me remind you that at that time there were no works by Gogol, there were no Notes of the hunter Turgenev, there were no stories of Tolstoy. And the discoverer of the so-called natural school in Russian literature it was Dal (Cossack Lugansk). And I must also say that modern Russian people do not even suspect that in the 19th century V.I.Dal was one of the most famous and widely read Russian writers. His works were published in the best journals and in the best almanacs, his writings were published in separate collections, two- and four-volumes and multi-volume collections. And critics of all directions paid attention literally to each of his new appearances in the press, they analyzed in detail his fairy tales, essays, stories, novels. But in the 20th century, Dahl was no longer read and even simply mentioned as a writer. Indeed, we do not know Dahl the writer at all. Why did he become objectionable in the 20th century, in Soviet time? Most likely, because he, like none of the Russian writers of the 19th century, knew all of Russia well, the life of all strata of society at that time, and therefore Dal did not participate in creating the image of “bast, dark, uneducated” Russia. But it is precisely this image of Russia that took shape in our literature of the 19th century, and it is precisely this image tsarist Russia was needed by the new revolutionary government in order to build a new policy of the 20th century on this denial!
Once again, we note that the image of “bast, dark and uneducated” Russia was created precisely by Russian writers of the 19th century, who for the most part came from the nobility of Central Russia, and, by the way, all of them - bar, and they all knew only the lordly peasants. They did not know a serf, that is, a free Russian peasant. In passing, we add that there were serfs in Russia a little bit more 30 % (according to the modern historian M.M. Gromyko). And, for example, in the Russian North, in the Urals, in Siberia, and these are vast territories, the Russian people simply did not know serfdom.
I would like to quote Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl's interesting reflections on the Russian peasant. He wrote thus: “... It’s a well-known fact that the farther you go north with us, the more prosperous you find men, and the more neatness and luxury you will find in their way of life.
... You, perhaps, do not know that there are places in Russia where peasant women on holidays appear on the street in no other way than in silk, brocade and pearls; and the girl would cry out her eyes in shame if she had to go out not in white silk half-length gloves! In the middle lane we live, if they chew bread, and sometimes they do not disdain both chaff and quinoa; in the north - the legs feed the wolf; three or four summer months, where bread is born, cannot feed the whole family, at least field work ends with this period, and the remaining eight [months] go to crafts of various kinds, and money quickly turns from hand to hand ... ". These are the words of V.I. Dahl about the Russian peasant.
It turns out that our great Pushkin also thought and wrote about the Russian peasant. We will give a small excerpt from Pushkin's Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg:
“... Take a look at the Russian peasant: is there even a shadow of slavish humiliation in his steps and speech? There is nothing to say about his courage and intelligence. His receptivity is known. Agility and dexterity are amazing. The traveler travels from region to region in Russia, not knowing a single word of Russian, and everywhere he is understood, his requirements are fulfilled, and conditions are concluded with him. You will never meet in our people what the French call un badaud (mouth-eater or onlooker); you will never notice in him either rude surprise or ignorant contempt for someone else's. There is no person in Russia who does not have his own home. The beggar, leaving to wander the world, leaves his hut. It doesn't exist in other countries. Having a cow everywhere in Europe is a sign of luxury; and with us not having a cow is a sign of terrible poverty. Our peasant is tidy out of habit and according to the rule: every Saturday he goes to the bathhouse; washes several times a day…».
This is how Dal and Pushkin wrote about serf Russia, and they could not know another Russia! And you can't believe them! But we continue to repeat the words imposed on us, the idea of backward, dirty, unwashed, illiterate Russia imposed on us ...
The first collection of fairy tales by V.I.Dal immediately received the most enthusiastic responses. Pushkin spoke of his fairy tales with particular praise. It is believed that it was under the influence of these distant tales that Pushkin wrote one of his best tales (“The Tale of the Fisherman and the Golden Fish”) and presented it to Dahl with the following inscription: “Yours from yours! Storyteller Cossack Lugansky, storyteller Alexander Pushkin.
At the same time, this collection of Dahl was met with an extremely negative reception. In his tales, they saw "mockery at the government, a complaint about the sad situation of the soldiers, etc." Dal received a denunciation, and he was arrested. According to the assumptions of his biographers, Zhukovsky rescued him from imprisonment (already the next day): at that time Zhukovsky was the tutor of the heir to the Russian throne. And one of the Perovsky brothers - Vasily Alekseevich - at the same time was preparing to take the post of governor-general in Orenburg, and he offered the young talented writer and famous surgeon the service of an official for special assignments.
This is how it starts brilliant career V.I.Dal. For 36 years he was a government official of the highest rank, dealing with administrative matters. He served in Orenburg for 8 years, it was there that his best literary works were created, putting the Cossack of Lugansk among the leading Russian writers of the 19th century.
V.I.Dal returned to St. Petersburg in 1936, where he became the closest witness to the tragic death of A.S. Pushkin, from whom he received a talisman ring as a keepsake. Without leaving medicine (he became especially interested in ophthalmology and homeopathy), he continued to write literary works (the collection There Were and Fables - 1834-1839), writes articles about the Russian language (1842), about Russian proverbs (1847), about beliefs, superstitions and prejudices of the Russian people (1845). At the same time, he serves in the high position of the head of the special office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia.
In 1849, V.I.Dal was appointed manager of the specific office in Nizhny Novgorod, where he served for 10 years. According to his contemporaries, Dahl was a "strange official": he everywhere collected material for his Dictionary. Priests and policemen, rural teachers and doctors, county officials answered his questionnaires. And even entire offices were busy whitewashing (that is, copying cleanly) the answers to the questionnaires sent from all over the Russian Empire and compiling file cabinets. The working day of the official-writer-lexicographer himself began at 9 am and ended at 3 am. A lot of material for the Dictionary was given to him by the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, where all of Russia gathered. He was well versed in trade, in crafts, he knew perfectly well the whole structure of the peasant economy. And as Melnikov-Pechersky wrote in his memoirs, “ The peasants did not want to believe that Dal was not a natural Russian person. They said: He grew up exactly in the village, he was fed on the chambers, he was made to drink on the stove .... And what a perfectionist he is to any peasant business ... There he repaired the harrow, so much so that our brother wouldn’t even think of it, he taught there how to make it not flow from the windows in winter and there was no fumes in the hut, there he cured the horse with his grains ... With these grains, he treated both people and cattle. He will come and, before talking about the matter, will go around the patients, whom he will perform an operation on, whom he will give medical advice ... ".
Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language V.I. Dahl wrote already in Moscow, where he moved from Nizhny Novgorod, having retired in 1859. He lived in Presnya own house built before the war of 1812. The French were in this house. Not knowing how to heat Russian stoves, they made a fire right on the parquet, which burned out, but the house itself miraculously survived. It survived into the 20th century: in 1941, when a bomb was dropped into the courtyard of the house during the raids on Moscow, it did not explode. As it turned out, instead of a detonator, a Czech-Russian dictionary was enclosed (it is now stored in the Museum of the History of Moscow). The house on Presnya now houses the V.I.Dal Museum (in two memorial rooms).
From Nizhny Novgorod, Dal brought his Dictionary to Moscow, finally dismantled to the letter. The dictionary began to appear in 1861, and eight years later (1868) it was published in full. Here is how Dahl's friend, P.I. Melnikov-Pechersky, wrote about this event:
«… Four huge volumes of 330 sheets, the fruit of 47 years of tireless labor, appeared before the Russian public. How would Dahl's name thunder if it were a French, German, English dictionary! And we have at least one word in some magazine. Not a single university expressed its respect for Dahl's monumental work by raising him to the degree of Doctor of Russian Literature, while doctoral diplomas were handed out in vain. Not a single university has honored the compiler of the Explanatory Dictionary with the title of honorary member, or at least a simple hello to the tireless worker who completed such a great work! I did not know a person more modest and unambitious than Dahl, but he was surprised by such indifference. However, I was mistaken: one university, located in Russia, treated Dahl's work with due respect. This is a German university that exists in the truly Russian city of Yuriev, now called Derpt. From there they sent Dahl a Latin diploma and a German prize for the Russian Dictionary…».
V.I.Dal was supported by Academician M.P. Pogodin, historian and writer. He made this statement: " Dahl's dictionary is finished. Now the Russian Academy without Dahl is unthinkable. But there are no vacancies for an ordinary academician. I suggest: all of us, academicians, cast lots on who to leave the academy out, and give the abolished place to Dahl. The dropout will take the first vacancy that opens up.". But the academicians did not agree with this proposal, and V.I. Dahl was elected only an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences (1868), which later awarded him the Lomonosov Prize for the Dictionary (1869).
VI Dal was an extraordinarily talented person. Here is how the famous surgeon N.I. Pirogov, his friend and classmate at Dorpat University, wrote about him: “ He was a man of what is called a jack of all trades. For whatever Dahl undertook, he managed to do everything. And let's add one more thing: this was a man who, all his long life devotedly and honestly served Russia, the Russian people, Russian science, Russian literature... And it was no coincidence that he wrote about himself like this: My father comes from(i.e. foreigner) and my Fatherland is Rus', the Russian state!
Zinaida Savinovna Deryagina
candidate of philological sciences”.
Let's look into his face, look into the distance - in those distant times! ..
A friend of A.S. Pushkin ... The greatest merit of V.I. Dal, which gave his name wide and honorable fame, is his two large scientific collections - "Proverbs of the Russian people" (1862) and "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" ( 1861-68).
He is widely known in St. Petersburg as an ophthalmologist, who also became famous for the fact that he performed eye operations equally well with both his right and left hands.
He could write with his left hand and do whatever he wanted, as with his right. ... The most famous operators in St. Petersburg invited Dahl in those cases when the operation could be done more dexterously and more conveniently with the left hand ...
Statements and quotes:
A Russian person cannot be happy alone, he needs the participation of others, and without this he will not be happy.
Language is the age-old work of an entire generation.
Just as rubles are made up of kopecks, so knowledge is made up of grains of what has been read.
The educator himself must be what he wants to make the pupil.
The language will not keep pace with education, will not meet modern needs, if it is not allowed to work out from its juice and root, to ferment on its own yeast.
VI Dal was born on November 10, 1801 in Lugansk, Ukraine, on English Street, in a small one-story house surrounded by barracks, huts, dugouts of the first factory workers of the foundry. Here he spent his childhood, here was born the love for his fatherland, which he carried through his whole long life, subsequently choosing a literary pseudonym for himself Cossack Lugansk.
His father, the Dane Johann Christian Dahl, a scholar who spoke many languages, was invited to Russia by Catherine II and appointed court librarian. However, he did not stay in this position for long, and after leaving for Germany and graduating from the medical faculty of the University of Jena, he returned to Russia as a doctor. The reasons why he ended up in a provincial mining town at that time are unknown. Nevertheless, in Lugansk he served as a doctor in the mining department, under which he created the first infirmary for workers. The regional archive keeps the report of Dr. I.M. Dal ( Russian name Ivan Matveyevich was received by Johann Christian Dahl along with Russian citizenship in 1799 in Lugansk, a year after his arrival) to the factory board about the plight of "working people", which sets out facts that testify to the unsanitary living conditions of workers, poverty and the prevalence of infectious diseases among them. diseases.
Vladimir Dal did not immediately follow in his father's footsteps. After the end of the maritime cadet corps he served as a midshipman in the Black Sea, then, after promotion in rank, in the Baltic Fleet. However, an excellent home education (Vladimir's mother also spoke several languages, knew literature and music) and an inquisitive mind encouraged V. Dahl to further improve his knowledge. "I felt the need for a thorough study, for education, in order to be in the world useful person", - this is how V. Dal himself explained his life position. He leaves the fleet and enters the University of Dorpat at the Faculty of Medicine, which at that time was distinguished by a strong composition of professors. Together with Vladimir Dal, future celebrities studied at the faculty - surgeons N. Pirogov and F. Inozemtsev, therapist G. Sokolsky, physiologists A. Filomafitsky and A. Zagorsky.
Modern researchers have restored the pages of Dahl's medical activity using scanty lines from some of his works, archival documents, and rare testimonies of contemporaries. Having defended his doctoral dissertation ahead of schedule ("The dissertation for a degree, outlining the observations: 1) successful craniotomy; 2) latent manifestations of the kidneys"), Dal participates in the Russian-Turkish war (1828-29); together with the Russian army, he makes the transition through the Balkans, continuously operating in tent hospitals and directly on the battlefields. "... I saw a thousand or two wounded that covered the field ... cut, bandaged, took out bullets ..." Dal's talent as a surgeon was highly appreciated by the outstanding Russian surgeon Pirogov. Dahl had to participate in battles and sieges, deploy field combat hospitals, fight in difficult conditions for the lives of the wounded, operate and fight fever, plague and cholera.
"During the rampage of cholera in Kamenetz-Podolsk, he was in charge of a hospital for cholera patients," - an entry from Dahl's official list, stored in the archives of Lugansk.
Awarded with orders and medals, since 1832 Dal became an intern at the St. Petersburg Military Land Hospital. Here he earned the fame of an excellent ophthalmologist surgeon and became a medical celebrity of St. Petersburg.
Also known are Dahl's scientific research on the organization medical service in the theater of operations, in homeopathy, pharmacology. Found sketches of his articles on operational tactics in case of gunshot wounds. Of undoubted interest is one of the first published (and the first, signed by the pseudonym Kazak Lugansky) Dahl's articles "The word of the physician to the sick and healthy", the provisions of which remain relevant at the present time. The article focuses on the need for a proper lifestyle: "Those who are on the move and do not eat their fill, less often need a doctor's allowance."
The pages of Dahl's life connected with Pushkin are especially dear to us. A friend of Pushkin, Dal shared with the poet all the hardships of difficult travels along the roads of Russia. Together they traveled to the places of Pugachev's movement. It is possible that it was Pushkin who gave Dahl the idea to take up the dictionary. Fascinated by Dahl's tales, Pushkin presented him with a handwritten text of one of his tales with a dedicatory inscription "To the storyteller Cossack Lugansk - the storyteller Alexander Pushkin." Now few people know that the first fairy tale of our childhood "Ryaba the Hen" belongs to the storyteller Cossack Lugansky (Dal).
In the tragic days of January 1837 Vladimir Dal close friend poet and as a doctor took an active part in the care of the mortally wounded Pushkin. The words of the dying Pushkin were addressed to Dahl: "Life is over ..." The grateful poet, along with a talisman ring, handed him a black frock coat, shot through by a Dantes bullet, with the words: "Crawl out (a word first heard from Dahl and liked by Pushkin) also take yourself ". Dahl also took part in the autopsy of the poet; he wrote in the act on the cause of death: "The wound is, of course, fatal ..." He left an unusual artistic power notes about last hours the life of the great poet.
Working as a doctor was only part of Dahl's many-sided activities. We now seem the greatest value his "Explanatory Dictionary", for contemporaries Dal was valuable primarily as a writer Cossack Lugansk. In the 30-40s of the last century, he was the most popular writer of everyday life and compiled 100 essays on Russian life, which were published in Otechestvennye Zapiski and other metropolitan journals, and later compiled two volumes in his collected works. His writing activity highly appreciated by A. Pushkin, I. Turgenev, V. Belinsky, N. Dobrolyubov. In 1845, Belinsky wrote about Dal: "After Gogol, this is still decisively the first talent in Russian literature."
Dahl's work had a positive effect good knowledge them modern life- after all, none of writers of the 19th century did not wander around Rus' as much as Vladimir Dal. lovely spiritual qualities, talent, sociability, versatility of Dahl's interests attracted people to him. Therefore, he closely converges with Pushkin, Gogol, Nekrasov, Turgenev, Zhukovsky, Odoevsky, Lazhechnikov; was familiar with Shevchenko, corresponded with him and even took part in his release from exile (although later their friendship would end due to many disagreements in life positions). The Petersburg Thursdays organized by Dahl were attended by many progressive figures of that time, including the composer Glinka, the surgeon Pirogov, the geographer Litke and many others.
Dahl was also a naturalist - he wrote two textbooks "Botany" and "Zoology". And, probably, the level of knowledge in this area was quite high, since in 1838 V. Dahl was elected a corresponding member of the department of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences natural sciences. And in the "Literaturnaya gazeta", published at that time in St. Petersburg, the indefatigable Dal led the section "Menagerie", in which his stories about animals were printed.
It is necessary to note Dahl's merits as an ethnographer. During a ten year stay in Nizhny Novgorod province he collected a huge scientific material for a geographical atlas of the distribution of various dialects. Ethnographic descriptions of the peoples of the Lower Urals and Kazakhstan brought him special fame among specialists.
Finally, "The Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" by V. Dahl is a collection of moral, philosophical, everyday, folklore experience, verbal consolidation of a huge centuries of history of the living Great Russian language, this dictionary is the work of his whole life. He himself simply said about his work: "I loved my homeland and brought her a grain of strength due to me." But what is this "grain"? Vladimir Krupin, one of the Dahl scholars, in his jubilee article on the 180th anniversary of the birth of V. Dahl wrote: "... we will always be reproached that the loner Dahl accomplished a work equal to the work of many decades of another humanitarian institute with its powerful team and modern means of science and technology. "And the famous contemporary writer Andrey Bitov called Dal Magellan, "... who swam across the Russian language from A to Z. It is impossible to imagine that one person did this, but that was just the way it was." For half a century, Dahl explained and provided with examples about 200 thousand words! But besides everything, Dalem collected more than 37 thousand proverbs of the Russian people! But he still served, healed, was engaged in scientific and writing activities.
Dahl's work on the dictionary received high recognition from the entire Russian society; he received the prestigious Lomonosov Prize for that time. An interesting fact is the recognition of Dahl's work. There was no free place in the Academy of Sciences, and then Academician Pogodin proposed to cast lots and one of the Academicians to leave the Academy so that Dahl would fill the vacancy. But the matter ended with Dahl becoming an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences.
By the time the dictionary was completed, Dahl's health had already been seriously undermined. “It would seem,” writes P.I. affected the health of the great worker." September 22, 1872 V. Dahl died. He was buried in Moscow at the Vagankovsky cemetery.
Luhansk citizens remember and honor their countryman. On the street now bearing the name of V. Dal, there is a house where his family lived. The old mansion has become a museum, and the inscription on the memorial plaque reads: "In this house in 1801 was born eminent writer and lexicographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dal". The museum became one of the centers cultural life cities. Within the walls of the museum, in the homeland of the Cossack Lugansky, the famous "Dalevsky Thursdays" were revived, in which the author of these lines has repeatedly been a participant. Local sculptors, artists, poets and writers dedicate their works to the glorious countryman. A monument was erected on the street where Cossack Lugansky was born. V. Dal is depicted in the period of completion of work on the dictionary, and his whole appearance, as it were, expresses a sense of duty performed.
V.I.Dal and blood libel
The biographical sketch of Valery Kozyr "Vladimir Ivanovich Dal" is written with encyclopedic conciseness and accuracy. It covers the main aspects of the multifaceted activity of one of the most prominent representatives of Russian culture of the era of its highest prosperity and, in essence, does not need any additions or comments. However, in the modern socio-political context, to publish it without touching upon the topic of Dahl's alleged involvement in the blood libel against the Jews would mean to put the magazine, the author of the essay, and its hero in a false position, which is why the editors asked me to accompany the essay with this brief afterword. Those who are familiar with the obscurantist "Note on Ritual Murders", which is widely distributed in Russia under the name of V.I. Dal, or have heard something about it, may be perplexed: why the author kept silent about this episode in the biography of his hero. And this would undermine the credibility of the essay as a whole.
In one of the next issues of Vestnik, my work on the blood libel against the Jews in Russia will be published, in which the question of the "Note" attributed to Dahl is also covered in detail. For the time being, in this brief Post Scriptum, I simply inform readers that Vladimir Ivanovich Dal did not compose such a "Note" and had nothing to do with it. Those who attributed and continue to attribute its authorship to V.I.
Most detailed biography V. I. Dahl was compiled by P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky (with the collection of works by Dahl, 1897, vol. I; Dahl’s autobiography is also there).
The merits of Vladimir Dahl in the history of the Russian language are exceptional. His "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" and "Dictionary of Proverbs of the Russian Language" are still invaluable aids in understanding Russian culture, Russia and the Russian people. The contribution of Vladimir Dal to Russian literature is also recognized, but the volume of forgotten and uncollected works of the writer, which even specialists do not know about, is significant. His manuscript heritage has not been studied. Missing scientific publications his works. The last edition of the complete works of V. Dahl was published in 1897-1898. A recent attempt at a new edition of it under the direction of V.Ya. Deryagina stopped with the death of the editor and the termination of the publishing house in the financial turmoil of the mid-90s. And most importantly: the legacy of Vladimir Dahl was not the subject of textual analysis.
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal is an outstanding, largely underestimated phenomenon in Russian culture. Everyone recognizes Dahl as an outstanding lexicographer, but in the 20th century there were other outstanding achievements - new, more modern explanatory dictionaries. Many recognize Dahl as a talented writer, but his "ethnographic work" (and these are fairy tales, novels, short stories and essays, soldier's and sailor's leisure, pictures of Russian life) looks rather modest among the artistic achievements and discoveries of great contemporaries. Meanwhile, his work as a collector, and his philological research, and his artistic creativity do not exist by themselves, but in the organic unity of the life path. In their totality, the quality and significance of the spiritual work of an ascetic of Russian culture are changing. In this sense, his work is quite commensurate with what Pushkin and Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy did for Russia.
V. Dahl's explanatory dictionary is not just a dictionary, but an unsurpassed dictionary of the Russian language, in which not only words are collected and explained, systematized by root nests, but also deliberately calculated and achieved a special effect. Thanks to the qualitative selection of explanatory examples, and these are proverbs, sayings, live speech of the Russian people, Dahl's Dictionary also has an outstanding aesthetic value: in addition to everything else, his Dictionary is also becoming artwork, which reflected the personality of the great Russian philologist and writer, his experience of knowing Russia.
If we measure the value of Dahl in Russian literature by the usual categories of creativity, then it is obvious that Dahl did not seek to compose entertaining plots and create new ones. literary characters. In his works, the main event and actor becomes a living Russian word. Dahl's writing interest is absorbed by the same thing that he was engaged in lexicographic work - the awareness of the Word, the assimilation of it spiritual meaning. in philological writings and artistic creativity Dahl expressed an indefatigable interest in the living Russian word, its ancestral roots, aesthetic and artistic possibilities.
The purity of Russian speech, which delighted many of the writer's contemporaries and descendants, was a conscious setting of creativity and its penetration into Divine meaning Russian speech, into the root system of the language, and in this sense, of course, the result of his study of Russian speech and the Russian people is not accidental, but natural and logical - the conscious transition of V. Dahl at the end of his life from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy.
The electronic edition of the Complete Works of Vladimir Dahl, made with the support of the Russian Humanitarian Science Foundation (project 98-04-12019c), was prepared on the basis of a textological study of all editions of his works. As a result of the survey periodicals In the 20-70s, a significant amount of forgotten publications and manuscripts of the writer was revealed. All the first publications of Vladimir Dahl's works are typed in the author's spelling and punctuation. Based on them, other editions of his works have been prepared. Multiple proofreading of texts was carried out, editions were compiled, textological analysis of all lifetime editions of his works was given, lists of misprints and variants of lifetime editions were prepared.
The publication includes all the published and handwritten texts of the outstanding Russian lexicographer and writer discovered so far, has a hypertext structure and will be equipped with application programs for an in-depth and versatile philological analysis of the heritage of Vladimir Dahl.
All this became possible due to the fact that since the beginning of the 90s in Petrozavodsk state university a textological group was created to prepare editions of Russian classics of Russian classics (primarily Dostoevsky) in the author's spelling and punctuation. The textual principles of establishing a "canonical text" are implemented in the Complete Works of Dostoevsky. Starting with the fourth volume, the publication comes out with the blessing of His Holiness the Patriarch.
During the work on textological projects, Petrozavodsk University published four volumes of the Complete Works of Dostoevsky, scientific description personal copy of the Gospel of 1823, which was presented to him by the wives of the Decembrists. He never parted with this book throughout his life, it was always at hand, according to it he checked the fate of the heroes and his own fate. This great book played leading role in the "rebirth of convictions" of the recent Petrashovite. These and other results of our work can be found on the Philolog.Ru server.
Our experience electronic edition Dahl's writings inevitably poses a new challenge. In order to adequately respond to the love of Vladimir Dahl for Russia, for the Russian people and for the Russian language, it is necessary to publish an academic complete collection works of the great Russian writer and philologist. We invite all interested persons to this work.
