Vladimir Dal - about the creation of a great explanatory dictionary, friendship with Pushkin and other interesting facts.

MBOU "Khomutovskaya secondary school"

library lesson on the topic

"Vladimir Ivanovich Dal - a man who collected words"

Dubinina Elena Vladimirovna

teacher-librarian

2015

The purpose of the lesson:

To introduce students to V.I.Dal and his Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language

Tasks:

Subject:

To acquaint with the biography of V.I. Dal, the history of the creation of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language

Contribute to the formation of skills independent work with dictionary

Cultivate respect for folk traditions and culture of the Russian people.

Metasubject:

Regulatory

Identify and formulate a cognitive goal, plan learning activities in accordance with the tasks;

Evaluate your own performance.

cognitive

Listen to the teacher's questions and answer them;

Build speech statements;

Search for information;

Communicative

Participate in joint collective activities;

Personal:

Develop motives and interests of cognitive activity;

Respect the culture of your people and other peoples;

Be creative.

Lesson resources : computer, projector, screen, laptops, dictionaries.

During the classes:

Lesson steps:

Stage 1. Organizational.

Hello guys.I am glad to welcome you to our library lesson.

Stage 2. Motivation (creating a problem situation).

Today I will try to introduce you to an unusual person who devoted his whole life to a very important and interesting business. What exactly are you trying to figure out...

slide 1.

(A snowstorm. The wind is howling. Young Dal is talking to the coachman).

Coachman: Well, sir, shall we go?

Dal: (Sweeping snow from overcoat):Will we get into such a blizzard?

Driver: Don't hesitate (pokes a whip at the sky). Rejuvenates.

Dal: How does it "rejuvenate"?

Coachman: Cloudy. To warmth.

Dal: Is that what they say in the Novgorod province?

Coachman: So they say. The sky is overcast with clouds, it tends to bad weather.

(Dal pulls out a notebook and a pencil from his pocket, blows on stiff fingers and starts writing something. The coachman leaves)

Dal: Rejuvenate - otherwise cloudy - in the Novgorod province means to cover up with clouds, speaking of the sky, tend to bad weather ... "

Guys, what do you think our hero did?

(collected and wrote down the words)

Correctly. And this man's name was Vladimir Ivanovich Dal. Those few lines written in the notebook laid the foundation for the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.

Stage 3. Goal setting and planning.

Slide 2.

So, the topic of our lesson is "V.I. Dal - a man who collected words."

Now let's try to definetasks that we will solve in our lesson.

Who will be discussed?

And what do you know about this man, about his life and the work of his whole life?

Today in the lesson we will try to expand our knowledge about the life of V.I. Dahl, get acquainted with his “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” and work with him.

Stage 4. "Discovery" of new knowledge (study of a new topic).

It’s not for nothing that we started talking about this today. amazing person. The fact is, November 22 marks the 214th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl.

Many of us know Vladimir Dahl as the compiler of the famous Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. However, almost no one heard about his other talents.

But his biography is so rich in events, adventures and meetings with famous people that he himself could become the hero of an exciting adventure novel.

However, judge for yourself:

Slide 3.

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was born on November 22, 1801 in the town of Lugan, Yekaterinoslav province. His father, Johann Dahl, a Dane, graduated from the University of Jena, was a wonderful linguist, and Catherine II invited him to Russia as a court librarian.

But the place turned out to be not very profitable, so Johann Dahl went to Jena, graduated from the medical faculty and returned to Russia.

In St. Petersburg, he married Maria Freigat, the daughter of an official who served in a pawnshop. Vladimir Dahl's mother was well educated: she was fluent in five languages ​​and taught the children everything herself. More than once, Volodya Dal heard from her: “We must hook on any knowledge that we meet on the way; there is no way to tell in advance what will come in handy in life.

The family always spoke Russian. The father “on every occasion reminded the children that they were Russians.” The "ancient and new languages" that the father spoke, the five languages ​​​​that the mother spoke - all this gave rise to a "sense of language" in the children.

slide 4.

Later, the Daley family moved to Nikolaev, a seaside city. Perhaps that is why in 1814 Father Dal took his sons Volodya and Karl to study at the St. cadet corps. Here, fate brings young Vladimir Dal to Pavel Nakhimov, the future admiral.

After graduating from the cadet corps in 1819, Dal served as a naval officer in the Black Sea and then in the Baltic fleets. It was during the years of study that he showed interest in the Russian word, and it was during these years that Dahl compiled his first dictionary. It included 34 words of cadet jargon.

Slide 5.

He did not serve long in the Navy. After retiring and taking off his naval uniform, Vladimir Dal entered the medical faculty at the University of Dorpat (now it is the Estonian city of Tartu). He studied very hard. He set a task for himself: every day to learn a hundred new Latin words, spent a long time in the library, did not leave the clinic for days. Soon both professors and students started talking about Dal. The famous surgeon Nikolai Pirogov, who studied at the same university, later recalled: “He was a man, as they say, of all trades. For whatever Dahl undertook, he managed to master everything.

slide 6.

The brilliant future of a scientist and teacher opened up before a talented student. However, these plans of his were not destined to come true: in 1828, the Russian-Turkish war broke out. There were not enough doctors at the front, so all medical students were urgently called to military service. And Vladimir Dal went to fight.

A month later, Dal was already on the Danube. Here he proved himself a tireless, courageous and resourceful military surgeon. Together with the Russian army, he made the transition through the Balkans, operated in tent hospitals and right on the battlefields.

And yet, despite the bloody horrors of the war, it was then that Vladimir Dal collected a huge amount of material for the future dictionary. The fact is that in the military units where he happened to serve, there were soldiers from all over Russia, from various regions and provinces. If the war had not brought them together, even whole life to travel all these lands and hear local dialects.

In the evenings, tired after operations, he went into the soldiers' tents, sat down at the bivouac fires and talked with the soldiers for a long time. He asked how certain household items are called in their villages, how weddings are celebrated, what fairy tales they tell, what songs they sing, and carefully wrote down everything he heard in thick notebooks made of thick paper.

After a year of hostilities, Dahl's notes grew to such a size that for their transportation the command allocated him ... a pack camel. On his hump, the future dictionary traveled along military roads in the form of several bags filled with notebooks.

Dal had just returned from the Turkish campaign, when in 1831 he was again called up for war. This time he had to fight with the Poles. It was here that Dal accomplished his amazing feat, when with one swing of an ax he managed to stop an entire army. And you can find out how this happened by reading the book by Alexander Tkachenko "Vladimir Dal".

For his exploits, Dal was awarded the Order of St. Anna of the third degree, the St. George medal on a ribbon, and the combat Vladimir Cross with diamonds and a bow.

When Dahl finished his military service, he immediately began to put his notes in order. Before compiling a real dictionary from them, it was still very far away, while Dahl began to compose ... fairy tales.

Slide 7.

Dahl's tales are not only folklore, they are also the work of a talented writer. With his light hand the Russian language of the common people came to literature.

Dal taught young readers mother tongue, attached to folk art, formed moral feelings. Dahl's works were published in magazines " Children's reading”, “Family Evenings”, “Sincere Word”.
For the youngest children, he released two collections: “The first first book for a semi-literate granddaughter. Fairy tales, songs, games” and “Pervinka is different. A literate granddaughter with an illiterate brethren. Fairy tales, songs, games. Both books were published in 1871 and then reprinted more than once. All of you are well aware of the wonderful fairy tales of V.I. Vladimir Dal signed his fairy tales with the pseudonym "Cossack Lugansky" (Cossack - a free man, Lugansky - according to his place of birth)

(Exhibition of books by V. Dahl. Display of books.)

The tales of Vladimir Dal were enthusiastically received by all the best Russian writers of that time. Pushkin was especially pleased with the publication of this book. By the way, Alexander Sergeevich and Vladimir Ivanovich were very friendly. It is also known that Dahl gave Pushkin the plot of a fairy tale about a fisherman and a fish. Later, Pushkin presented her manuscript to Vladimir Ivanovich with the inscription: “Yours from yours! To the storyteller Cossack Lugansky from the storyteller Pushkin.

But why did Pushkin so want a bright vernacular Dahl's fairy tales entered the spoken language? The fact is that the majority of educated Russian people in that era preferred to communicate with each other in French or German. The Russian language was then considered rude, and high society did not like to speak it. Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin and Vladimir Ivanovich grieved about this. Both of them, each in their own way, tried to reveal to the Russian people all the beauty and charm of their native speech.

slide 8.

Simultaneously with the work on the dictionary, Dahl also worked on the collection “Proverbs of the Russian people”, which included not only proverbs, but also sayings, tongue twisters, riddles. He copied each proverb twice on narrow strips of paper, Dahl called them “thongs”. One "strap" went to the dictionary, as an example for explanation, and the other to a notebook designed to collect proverbs. 180 notebooks, where Dahl pasted "thongs" - this is 180 topics. Among them are “Mind is stupidity”, “Joy is grief”, “Truth is falsehood”"Element", "Universe"etc. Dahl collected 30130 proverbs.

Valentin Berestov said: “Without knowing it, we use only fragments of proverbs and sayings that in the last century every person knew them in full, untruncated form.”

Here are some proverbs in their entirety:

“Mountain does not converge with the mountain, but the pot will collide with the pot”

“Miracles in the sieve! There are a lot of holes, but there is nowhere to jump out”

“He ate a dog and choked on his tail”

"The morning is wiser than the evening, and the grass is greener."

slide 9.

And now let's look at how well you know the proverbs recorded for us by Vladimir Ivanovich Dal. Guys, please look to the left - here you can see the beginning of the proverb. Look to the right - here is the end of the proverb. Try to assemble whole proverbs from these parts.

The game " Collect the proverb.

Whoever is not lazy to plow / will give birth to bread.

Do not hurry with your tongue / hurry up with your deeds.

Don't blame your neighbor/when you sleep until noon.

Lying on the stove / and not seeing bread.

Labor feeds a person / and laziness spoils.

The lazy spinner has no shirt for himself

A lazy person knows the holidays / but does not remember everyday life.

Well done. You know proverbs very well.

slide 10.

And yet the meaning of life for Dahl was the compilation of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. Vladimir Ivanovich collected 200,000 words in his lifetime.

Dahl not only wrote down, but also explained each word, looked for others that were close to him in meaning, and gave examples from life.

You have a volume of Dahl's dictionary on your tables. Look through it, look at the notes to the words - these are real little stories about the life of the people and their work, about crafts, about folk customs and beliefs. They explain what huts Russian people lived in in the old days, what stoves they stoked, what carts they rode, what they plowed the field with, how they fished and how they called this fish, what cabbage soup they slurped, what porridge was cooked from, what they taught kids. The whole life of a Russian person of that time was reflected in the dictionary, as if in a magic mirror.

Slide 11.

How to work with the Dahl dictionary?

Dahl arranged the words alphabetically, but arranged them not individually, but in nests. Each nest contains words formed from the same root. With the exception of words that were formed with the help of prefixes. Words with prefixes are placed under the letters they begin with.

FOR EXAMPLE:

• School - school // crops and additives of trees of different ages for planting fruit or forest trees // horse training // any position of a person where he acquires resourcefulness, experience and knowledge. School means to teach, to keep strictly under supervision. Schoolboy A schoolboy is a student who goes to school. schooling - dry, stupid teaching relentlessly follows petty, often absurd rules.schooling, schooling- have fun with school pranks, hang out

Stage 5 Inclusion of new knowledge in the knowledge system (reinforcement).

Let's work with V. Dahl's dictionary. You have a dictionary volume and a worksheet on your tables. Let's do it exercise number 1 . The exercise contains a word whose meaning is to be found in the dictionary.

Dictionary work.

Words: Koporka lorgnette, dadon, pigalitsa, prokalyak, charlotte, spit, shawl.

Let's see what you got. (Student answers)

Unfortunately, few of us have such a wonderful dictionary at home. What to do if suddenly you come across a word whose meaning you do not know, and the dictionary is not at hand. You can refer to the electronic version of the Explanatory Dictionary of V.I.Dal.

slide 12.

Open and turn on your computers. Enter the address in the address barhttp://v-dal.ru/ .

Here is the main page of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. This page contains brief information about the compiler of the dictionary, alphabetical and subject index. For the convenience of searching for words, you can use the form located in the upper right corner of the page. To do this, enter a word in the search box and click the "find" button. All the necessary information will open before you.

Let's try to work. We carry out exercise number 2.

Find the meaning of the word, select a proverb or saying with this word.

Words: Flattery, moshna, bait, surprise, keep up, brag, try, slurp.

(Working with the electronic version of the dictionary. Checking.)

slide 13.

And now let's check how carefully you listened and what you learned in the lesson. To do this, I suggest you answer the questions of a mini-quiz.

Quiz.

1. Name the city where V.I.Dal was born. (Lugansk)
2. What professions did Dahl own? (sailor, military doctor, writer, language expert and word collector / lexicographer /)
3. What name did V.I.Dal sign his books with? (Cossack Lugansk)
4. The plot of which fairy tale was prompted by Dal to Pushkin? ("The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish")
5. What is the name of main work the whole life of V.I.Dal? (“Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language”).
6. What does the word "bucket" mean? (Clear weather)
   

Stage 6 Reflection and evaluation.

Well, our lesson has come to an end. Let's summarize.

1. What was the topic of our lesson? (V.I. Dal, the man who collected words. Dictionary of the living Great Russian language.)
2. What goals did we set and did we achieve them? (1) Get acquainted with the life of V.I.Dal; 2) We got acquainted with the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language; 3) Learned to work with a dictionary.

We are great today, we have achieved our goals. And how do you think it will be useful to you in later life and how?

Stage 7. Homework.

slide 14.

And to consolidate the acquired knowledge and skills, do your homework.

Homework:

1. Read the book by Alexander Tkachenko "Vladimir Dal"
2. In the dictionary of V.I. Dal, find the meaning of the word "rain", write out a proverb or saying with this word.

In preparation homework you can use the electronic version of the dictionary.

The lesson is over. Goodbye.

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal, whose biography will be described in this article, is a Russian scientist and writer. He was a corresponding member of the Physics and Mathematics Department of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He was one of the 12 founders of the Russian Geographical Society. He knew at least 12 languages, including several Turkic ones. He was best known for compiling the Explanatory Dictionary of the Great Russian Language.

A family

Vladimir Dal, whose biography is well known to all fans of his work, was born in 1801 on the territory of modern Lugansk (Ukraine).

His father was Danish and Russian name Ivan took along with Russian citizenship in 1799. Ivan Matveyevich Dal knew French, Greek, English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Latin and German was a physician and theologian. His linguistic abilities were so high that Catherine II herself invited Ivan Matveyevich to St. Petersburg to work in the court library. He later went to Jena to train as a doctor, then returned to Russia and obtained a medical license.

In St. Petersburg, Ivan Matveyevich married Maria Freitag. They had 4 boys:

• Vladimir (born 1801).
• Carl (b. 1802). He served in the Navy all his life, had no children. Buried in Nikolaev (Ukraine).
• Pavel (born 1805). He suffered from consumption and, due to poor health, lived with his mother in Italy. Didn't have children. He died young and was buried in Rome.
• Leo (year of birth unknown). He was killed by Polish rebels.

Maria Dahl knew 5 languages. Her mother was a descendant of an old family of French Huguenots and studied Russian literature. Most often she translated into Russian the works of A. V. Iffland and S. Gesner. Maria Dahl's grandfather is a pawnshop official, a collegiate assessor. In fact, it was he who forced the father of the future writer to get the medical profession, considering it one of the most profitable.

Studies

Primary education Vladimir Dal, short biography which is in textbooks on literature, received at home. Parents from childhood instilled in him a love of reading.

At the age of 13, Vladimir, together with younger brother entered the Petersburg Cadet Corps. There they studied for 5 years. In 1819, Dahl graduated as a midshipman. By the way, he will write about his studies and service in the navy 20 years later in the story "Midshipman Kisses, or look back tenaciously."

Having served in the Navy until 1826, Vladimir entered the medical faculty of Dorpat University. He made a living giving Russian lessons. Due to lack of funds, he had to live in an attic closet. Two years later, Dahl was enrolled in state-owned pupils. As one of his biographers wrote: "Vladimir plunged headlong into his studies." He especially leaned on the Latin language. And for his work on philosophy, he was even awarded a silver medal.

I had to interrupt my studies with the beginning of the Russian-Turkish war in 1828. In the Transdanubian region, cases of plague increased, and the army in the field needed to strengthen the medical service. Vladimir Dal, whose brief biography is known even to foreign writers, passed the exam for a surgeon ahead of schedule. His dissertation was entitled "On a successful method and on a latent ulceration of the kidneys."

Medical practice

During the battles of the Polish and Russian-Turkish companies, Vladimir showed himself to be a brilliant military doctor. In 1832, he got a job as an intern at the St. Petersburg hospital and soon became a well-known and respected doctor in the city.

P. I. Melnikov (Dal's biographer) wrote: “Departing from surgical practice, Vladimir Ivanovich did not leave medicine. He found new passions - homeopathy and ophthalmology.

military activity

Biography Dahl, summary which shows that Vladimir always achieved his goals, describes the case when the writer showed himself as a soldier. This happened in 1831 when General Ridiger was crossing the (Polish company). Dahl helped build a bridge over it, defended it, and after crossing it, destroyed it. For non-fulfillment of direct medical duties, Vladimir Ivanovich received a reprimand from his superiors. But later, the tsar personally awarded the future ethnographer with the Vladimir Cross.

First steps in literature

Dahl, whose brief biography was well known to his descendants, began his literary career with a scandal. He composed an epigram for Craig, the commander-in-chief of the Black Sea Fleet, and Yulia Kulchinskaya, his common-law wife. For this, Vladimir Ivanovich was arrested in September 1823 for 9 months. After the trial, he moved from Nikolaev to Kronstadt.

In 1827, Dahl published his first poems in the Slavyanin magazine. And in 1830 he revealed himself as a prose writer in the story "Gypsy", published in the Moscow Telegraph. Unfortunately, within the framework of one article it is impossible to tell in detail about this wonderful work. If you want to get more information, you can refer to thematic encyclopedias. Reviews of the story can be in the section "Vladimir Dal: Biography". The writer also compiled several books for children. Biggest Success used "First Pervinka", as well as "Different Pervinka".

Confession and second arrest

As a writer, Vladimir Dal, whose biography is well known to all schoolchildren, became famous thanks to his book Russian Tales, published in 1832. The rector of the Derpt Institute invited his former student to the Department of Russian Literature. Vladimir's book was accepted as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Now everyone knew that Dahl was a writer whose biography is an example to follow. But trouble happened. The work was rejected by the Minister of Education himself as unreliable. The reason for this was the denunciation of the official Mordvinov.

Dahl's biography describes this event as follows. At the end of 1832, Vladimir Ivanovich made a detour around the hospital where he worked. People in uniform came, arrested him and took him to Mordvinov. He attacked the doctor with vulgar abuse, waving "Russian Fairy Tales" in front of his nose, and sent the writer to prison. Zhukovsky helped Vladimir, who at that time was the teacher of Alexander, the son of Nicholas I. Zhukovsky described to the heir to the throne everything that happened in an anecdotal light, describing Dahl as a modest and talented person, awarded medals and orders for military service. Alexander convinced his father of the absurdity of the situation and Vladimir Ivanovich was released.

Acquaintance and friendship with Pushkin

Any published biography of Dahl contains a moment of acquaintance with the great poet. Zhukovsky repeatedly promised Vladimir that he would introduce him to Pushkin. Dal got tired of waiting and, taking a copy of the "Russian Fairy Tales", which were withdrawn from sale, went to introduce himself to Alexander Sergeevich on his own. Pushkin, in response, also presented Vladimir Ivanovich with a book - "The Tale of the Priest and his worker Balda." Thus began their friendship.

At the end of 1836, Vladimir Ivanovich arrived in St. Petersburg. Pushkin visited him many times and asked about linguistic findings. The poet really liked the word “creep out” heard from Dahl. It meant the skin that snakes and snakes shed after wintering. During the next visit, Alexander Sergeevich asked Dahl, pointing to his coat: “Well, is my crawl out good? I won't crawl out of it soon. I will write masterpieces in it!” In this frock coat he was in a duel. In order not to cause unnecessary suffering to the wounded poet, the “creep out” had to be flogged. By the way, even Dahl's biography for children describes this case.

Vladimir Ivanovich took part in the treatment of the mortal wound of Alexander Sergeevich, although the poet's relatives did not invite Dahl. Learning that a friend was badly wounded, he came to him himself. Pushkin was surrounded by several distinguished doctors. In addition to Ivan Spassky (the Pushkins' family doctor) and court physician Nikolai Arendt, three more specialists were present. Alexander Sergeevich joyfully greeted Dahl and asked with a plea: “Tell the truth, am I going to die soon?” Vladimir Ivanovich answered professionally: "We hope that everything will be fine and you should not despair." The poet shook his hand and thanked him.

Being a gift, he gave Dal his gold ring with an emerald, with the words: "Vladimir, take it as a keepsake." And when the writer shook his head, Alexander Sergeevich repeated: “Take it, my friend, I am no longer destined to compose.” Subsequently, Dahl wrote about this gift to V. Odoevsky: “As soon as I look at this ring, I immediately want to create something decent.” Dahl visited the poet's widow in order to return the gift. But Natalya Nikolaevna did not accept him, saying: “No, Vladimir Ivanovich, this is for your memory. And yet, I want to give you his frock coat pierced by a bullet. It was the crawl-out frock coat described above.

Marriage

In 1833, Dahl's biography was marked by an important event: he married Julia Andre. By the way, Pushkin himself knew her personally. Julia conveyed her impressions of her acquaintance with the poet in letters to E. Voronina. Together with his wife, Vladimir moved to Orenburg, where they had two children. In 1834, the son Leo was born, and 4 years later, the daughter Yulia. Together with his family, Dahl was transferred as an official for special assignments under the governor V. A. Perovsky.

Ovdovev, Vladimir Ivanovich remarried in 1840 to Ekaterina Sokolova. She bore the writer three daughters: Maria, Olga and Ekaterina. The latter wrote memoirs about her father, which were published in 1878 in the Russky Vestnik magazine.

Naturalist

In 1838, for the collection of collections on the fauna and flora of the Orenburg region, Dal was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences at the department of natural sciences.

Dictionary

Anyone who knows Dahl's biography knows about the writer's main work, the Explanatory Dictionary. When it was assembled and processed to the letter "P", Vladimir Ivanovich wanted to retire and fully concentrate on working on his brainchild. In 1859, Dahl moved to Moscow and settled in the house of Prince Shcherbaty, who wrote The History of the Russian State. In this house passed final stages work on a dictionary, which is still unsurpassed in volume.

Dahl set himself tasks that can be expressed in two quotes: “The living language of the people should become a treasure trove and a source for the development of competent Russian speech”; " General definitions concepts, objects and words - this is an impossible and useless task. And the more everyday and simpler the subject, the more intricate it is. The explanation and transmission of the word to other people is much more intelligible than any definition. And examples help to clarify the matter even more.

To achieve this great goal, the linguist Dahl, whose biography is in many literary encyclopedias, spent 53 years. Here is what Kotlyarevsky wrote about the dictionary: “Literature, Russian science and the whole society received a monument worthy of the greatness of our people. Dahl's work will be the pride of future generations."

In 1861, for the first editions of the dictionary, the Imperial Geographical Society awarded Vladimir Ivanovich the Konstantinovsky medal. In 1868 he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences. And after the publication of all volumes of the dictionary, Dal received the Lomonosov Prize.

Last years

In 1871, the writer fell ill and invited an Orthodox priest on this occasion. Dahl did it because he wanted to take communion Orthodox rite. That is, shortly before his death, he converted to Orthodoxy.

In September 1872, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal, whose biography was described above, died. He was buried with his wife for six years later, his son Leo was also buried there.

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 fact is that tomorrow is a memorable date - October 4th. 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, the family of Ivan Dal 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 the future hero of Sinop and Sevastopol, the future admiral PS 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 to be 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, dressed to the nines, rode from St. Petersburg on a pair of post horses (at that time the Nikolaev railway had not yet been built, it would 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 he did not quite understand 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 at least something to 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 stiff 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 into which he entered dialect words, various stable turns, 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, Dal probably did not think that he would be 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'll tell the story famous writer P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky about this page of Dahl's military biography:

“... 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 the oral tradition of the people to civil literacy transcribed, adapted to everyday life and decorated with walking sayings by the 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 the folk language and dialect, which 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 portray the features folk life in its original 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 times? 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 parts of the world. 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 special 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 to any peasant business, what a perfection he is ... 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 Russia, the Russian state!

Zinaida Savinovna Deryagina

candidate of philological sciences”.

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (1801 - 1872), - a remarkable connoisseur of folk Russian speech in all its diversity of dialects and a passionate fighter for the reform of Russian literary language, for bringing it closer to the national language, by education and by profession he was not a learned philologist. He studied at the Naval Cadet Corps, where his parents managed to identify him.

Promoted to an officer in 1819, Vladimir Dal turned out to be completely unsuitable for naval service (he could not stand the pitching). A few years later, he retires and enters the University of Derpt (Tartu), and he chooses the Faculty of Medicine only because the medical library was left from his late father. After graduating from the university, a few years later, in search of a better income, he changed the profession of a military doctor and became an official. For eight years he served in Orenburg as an official for special assignments under the local military governor V.A. Perovsky, eight years - in St. Petersburg, in the office of the Minister of Internal Affairs, and ten years - in Nizhny Novgorod as manager of specific estates (with a population of several tens of thousands of peasants).

In 1859 V.I. Dahl finally retired to devote the rest of his life to putting in order and publishing those folklore and vocabulary materials that he had collected over the previous forty years.

Dahl was an exceptionally industrious and hardworking man, and at the same time a very prolific writer. The authorities assessed him in their own way literary talent, instructed him to draw up all sorts of "provisions", official notes and "most subject" reports and looked askance at his other literary activities ("Hunting for you to write something other than papers for the service", the Minister of the Interior, General Perovsky, once told him). But Dahl always found time to study literature. He wrote many articles (many of them were lost in the journals of that time and are still not known) on a wide variety of topics: medical, natural science, ethnographic, linguistics, journalistic; he published textbooks on botany and zoology; he wrote (under the pseudonym Cossack Lugansky) fairy tales, novellas, short stories and essays that filled nine volumes of the posthumous collection of his writings. But all this activity pales before greatest feat his life - by collecting the treasures of Russian folk speech, published by him in the form of "Proverbs of the Russian people" (1st edition was published in 1861 - 862) and "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" (1st edition went out of print in 1863 - 1866).

Dahl, a Dane by birth and a Catholic by religion, throughout his life had one powerful passion, joyful and painful, so powerful that it gave him strength for a number of decades without outside help, almost without encouragement from others, to perform a huge work, the dimensions of which seem to exceed the strength of one person. It was a passionate love, active, creative, for the original culture and language of the Russian people.

In the struggle for his idea, Dahl was bold and eloquent and loudly raised his voice against the cultural disunity between the people and the "educated society", against the isolation of the literary language from the folk element, against the imitation of everything foreign.Dahl’s reflections on the distortion of the Russian language with foreign words, on the constant looking back of the Russian person to the West (the writer treated this phenomenon very negatively), on the need to turn to the riches of the Russian folk language and spirit, remain relevant. In one of the letters of V.I. Dahl to the writer G.P. Danilevsky we read: “I don’t know where our writers, especially the younger generation, get this non-Russian warehouse of speech, this unforgivable distortion of our language, which is gradually weakening and vulgar under violent constriction him into german block". Let's take a few more statements. Or in letters to other recipients: “Yes, the West is not suitable for us, it’s time for us to collect our scattered sleepy members and get up and rub our eyes, at someone else’s feast with a hangover, take our share to work ...”. “Whoever says that we have nothing worthwhile and that everything must be uprooted in an overseas way, he does not know his fatherland, speaks at random and does a lot of harm.”

Dahl sought to infect his contemporaries with his love for the folk language. He started propaganda in a roundabout way, through fiction. In 1832, his first major literary work was published, the cycle literary tales"Five first". Ten years after that, in a magazine article, he wrote that for these tales he "was both praised and scolded by the writer ... but no one understood the purpose, the intention of the author." Not fairy tales in themselves were important to him, but the Russian word, "which we have in such a corral that it was impossible for him to appear to people without a special pretext and reason - and the fairy tale served as a pretext."

High appreciation of the fabulous creativity of V.I. Dahl was given by the literary critic V.G. Belinsky: "Dal loves a simple Russian person, ... knows how to think with his head, see with his eyes, speak with his language."

Dahl's official activities as a naval officer, and as a military doctor, and as an official, proceeded in constant communication with representatives of the "lower" classes of the population, with people from different parts of Russia. This gave him the opportunity to satisfy his early interest in the vernacular. He himself later said that “from the time he ... remembers himself, he was disturbed and embarrassed by the inconsistency of our written language with the oral speech of a simple Russian person, not bewildered by literacy, but therefore by the very spirit of the Russian word ... ". Eagerly grabbing native speeches, words and phrases on the fly, when they fell off the tongue in a simple conversation, he “wrote them down, without any other purpose and intention, as for memory, for learning the language, because he liked them. Many years passed, and these notes grew to such a volume that "during a wandering life, they began to threaten with the demand for a special cart for themselves ...". After reviewing his stocks, the collector was convinced that a lot of grains of bread had accumulated in the bulk of the litter, which, according to Russian belief, it is a sin to throw.

With his retirement in 1859, having secured the necessary leisure, Dahl began to finalize the huge vocabulary and phraseological stocks he had accumulated, and first in 1861 - 1862. published his "Proverbs of the Russian people", and then proceeded to publish a dictionary, including all the material of previously published proverbs.

In the "Explanatory Dictionary" not everything belongs to Dahl. He used the lexicographic work “Dictionary of the Russian Academy” that preceded him and the “Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Russian Language” of 1847 and “Experience of the Regional Great Russian Dictionary of 1852” published by the Academy of Sciences. But all this material (according to his calculations, about 120 thousand words ) he significantly revised and supplemented the vocabulary material he himself collected (according to Dahl's own estimates, about 80 thousand words).

Dahl strove for an exhaustive, if possible, completeness of his dictionary. He wanted, as he himself put it, "to capture everything that among the present Great Russian people can be heard or read." He placed in the dictionary "words, speeches and turns of all parts of Great Russia", while stipulating that he does this "not for their unconditional inclusion in written speech, but for studying, knowing and discussing them."

Dahl's dictionary is rich not only in words, but also in phraseological combinations of words - proverbs, sayings, folk jokes, riddles (totalthemmore in the dictionary30 thousand). Finally - and this is a special originalityandthe value of the dictionary - it includes a huge ethnographic material: a description of folk beliefs, customs, certain aspects of the economicandcultural life of the Russian people.

It just so happened that behind the really great works of V.I. Dal today his literary and journalistic works for adults and children, his reflections on Orthodox faith about education and literacy. Meanwhile, the current situation in culture and education again makes the legacy of V.I. Dahl.

This educational resource is addressed to high school students and consists of the following sections:

-

Main life and work of V.I. Dahl;

- works by V.I. Dahl for children's and school reading;

- presentation “The life and work of V.I. Dahl.

The creation of the resource was made possible by support of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, agreement No. 14.В37.21.0539.

The main dates of the life and work of V.I. Dahl.

November 22 (November 10 old style) 1801 Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was born in the city of Lugan (modern Lugansk, Ukraine).

1814-1819 Studied at Naval Cadet Corps, Petersburg.

1819-1824After graduating from the Naval Cadet Corps, he was promoted to midshipman and served in the Black Sea Fleet.

1823Arrest and trial for an epigram against the commander of the fleet, Admiral A.S. Greig.

1824-1825Served in the Baltic Fleet Kronstadt.

1826-1829 At retirement, studyDerpt (Tartu) University at the Faculty of Medicine.

1827The first publication of two poems in the journal "Slavyanin".

1829-1832He served as an army doctor, took part in the Turkish campaign (awardedOrder of Saint Anne ), fought plague and cholera in Ukraine, participated in the Polish campaign, (saved the infantry corps: he invented a floating bridge for crossing the Vistula, for which he was awardedVladimir cross with a bow and a letter from General Ridiger).

1830Publication of the story "Gypsy" in the magazine "Moscow Telegraph ».

1832-1833 Served about resident at the Military Land Hospital in St. Petersburg.

1832 Exit p the first book “Russian Tales of the Cossack Lugansk. First heel”, acquaintance with A.S. Pushkin.

1833-1840 served in Orenburg as an official for special assignments under the military governor V.A. Perovsky.

1833-1839“There were also fables of the Cossack Lugansk” published.

1833 18-23 Sept.Acquainted A.S. Pushkin with "the circumstances of the siege of Orenburg by Pugachev", traveled with the poet to the places of the uprising.

1838Elected as Corresponding Member Russian Academy sciences in the department of natural sciences.

1839-1840 Participated in Khiva campaign .

1840-1849He served in St. Petersburg as an official for special assignments, head of the office under the Minister of the Interior and secretary under the Minister of Appanages.

1845Participation as a memberfounder in opening in his own house in St. PetersburgRussian Geographical Society .

1846"Tales, fairy tales and stories of the Cossack Lugansk" were published.

1849-1859 Served in Nizhny Novgorod manager of the specific office.

1859Resigned, moved to Moscow, elected full memberSociety of lovers of Russian literature at Moscow University.

1860Society of Lovers Russian literature begins to print the Dictionary of V.I. Dalia in separate releases.

1861. Award Golden Konstantinovsky medal for the first issues of the Dictionary, the Complete Works in 8 volumes were published.

1862The collection "Proverbs of the Russian people" was published.

1863-1866The Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language was published in 4 volumes.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was born on November 10, 1801 in the town of Lugan, Yekaterinoslav province. Pseudonym - Cossack Lugansky, novelist, ethnographer, lexicographer. His father was a Russified Dane, a multilaterally educated theologian and physician. The mother, a German, also Russified, spoke five languages ​​and gave her children an excellent home education. The family spoke Russian, and Dal always considered Russia to be his fatherland.

Dahl's childhood passed in Nikolaev: his father was transferred there to the post of chief doctor of the Black Sea Fleet. At the insistence of his father, thirteen-year-old Vladimir entered the Naval Cadet Corps, where in five years he received excellent knowledge in astronomy, geodesy, fortification, navigation, geography, foreign languages, mechanics, and many other disciplines - sailors in Russia have always been taught to the conscience!

After the final exams, the brave officer was assigned to the Black Sea Fleet. On the way from St. Petersburg to Nikolaev, Dal, by a strange intuition, suddenly gives himself a vow for the rest of his life: to become a researcher folk life in all its manifestations.

What did Dahl intend to do?

1. Collect along the way all the names of local tracts, ask about the monuments, legends and beliefs associated with them ...

2. Find out and collect, wherever possible, folk customs, beliefs, even songs, fairy tales, proverbs and sayings, and everything that belongs to this category ...

3. Carefully enter everything into your memory book folk words, expressions. Sayings. Turns of language, general and local, but uncommon in our so-called educated language and style ...

He will not back down from his choice for the next 53 years, until his death. dal explanatory dictionary russian

After serving in the Navy for several years, Dahl retired and again followed the example of his father: he graduated from the medical faculty of Dorpat University. A certified doctor was sent to the active army - first to Turkey, then participated in the Polish campaign (1830-31). During the crossing of our troops across the Vistula, he showed special courage and ingenuity, ordering to build a bridge, his comrades defended it from the attacking rebels, and then personally blew it up when our troops had already crossed. For this feat, he received an award from the sovereign - the Vladimir Cross with a bow.

In 1832, Dahl settled in St. Petersburg, wanting to be closer to the center of cultural life and deciding to take up literature. AT northern capital he became close friends with Pushkin, Gogol, Krylov, Zhukovsky, Prince Odoevsky. His first book, "Russian Tales", was favorably received by readers, but it was soon banned due to absurd censorship nit-picking. Realizing that it would be difficult to publish under his own name in the future, Dahl decided to hide under a pseudonym. A year later, the first of four "Tales and Fables of the Cossack Lugansk" was published. In this pseudonym, memories of Lugan, Dal's homeland, are easily guessed. The book quickly made the name of the author famous.

But instead of shining in literary salons, the young writer again abruptly changes the course of his life: he enters to serve as an official for special assignments under the Orenburg governor V.A. Perovsky. Dal is eager to continue the work he started long ago: to collect materials for his dictionary of the living Great Russian language. Of course, Orenburg is the outskirts of the empire, a terrible wilderness, but here is expanse for the collector of folk sayings. People came here from all over Mother Russia, and in addition to Russians, Bashkirs, Kalmyks, Tatars, and Mordovians served in the Cossack troops. Cossack fortresses stretched for almost a thousand miles, and the governor's envoy happened to spend weeks, months in the saddle.

In addition to new words, he wrote down songs, fairy tales, riddles, beliefs. He went from house to house, asking about grandfather's customs. About vintage crafts

Ivan Dal in St. Petersburg married Maria Khristoforovna Freytag, they had four sons:

Vladimir;

Karl (born 1802), served in the Navy until the end of his life, lived and was buried in Nikolaev, had no children;

Pavel (born 1805), was ill with consumption and, for health reasons, often lived with his mother in Italy, where he was buried in Rome, died in early youth, had no children;

Leo (?-1831), killed by Polish rebels.

Maria Dahl was fluent in five languages. The maternal grandmother of Vladimir Ivanovich - Maria Ivanovna Freytag - came from the family of the French Huguenots de Malli, was engaged in Russian literature. Her translations into Russian by S. Gesner and A.V. Iffland. Grandfather Christopher Freytag is a collegiate assessor, a pawnshop official. He was dissatisfied with the philological education of the future son-in-law and actually forced him to get a medical education, since he considered the profession of a doctor one of the few "profitable and practical professions."

House of the Daley family in Lugansk, now a house-museum

Having received the nobility in 1814, Ivan Matveevich, the senior physician of the Black Sea Fleet, received the right to educate his children in the St. Petersburg Naval Cadet Corps at public expense.

In January 1837, while visiting St. Petersburg, Dal heard terrible news: Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel. He immediately rushed to the house on the Moika embankment, where he spent his last night next to the dying great poet: he changed compresses, consoled him as best he could. I recalled how he accompanied Pushkin to Pugachev's places in Orenburg, talking about his collection of words ... As a keepsake, from the already fading genius, Dal received a ring - a talisman that he never parted with later.

In 1840, the military governor of Orenburg, Vasily Alekseevich Perovsky, retired. But the nobleman did not forget his gifted official for special assignments and recommended him to his brother, the Minister of the Interior. So Dahl again ended up living in St. Petersburg. The next eight years were filled not only with the service, but also with the processing of extensive material.

In September 1845, the first meeting of the Russian Geographical Society was held in Dahl's house. According to the meaning of Vladimir Ivanovich, it should have contributed in every possible way to the collection of monuments of everyday life and word creation. Soon, an “Ethnographic Circular” was sent to all parts of Russia - a guide for describing “local rituals, beliefs, the way of life, family and domestic life of a commoner, proverbs, sayings, sayings, praises, sayings, were, legends, riddles, tongue twisters, lamentations, songs, thoughts ... the common people's language in their expressions, turns, syllable, stock and words. And soon similar materials flowed into the capital in streams, merging into a full-flowing river.

It would seem that nothing more is required to “feed” the “Daleva Dictionary”, which has already acquired visible outlines. And yet the author himself terribly yearned on the banks of the Neva for provincial life, by its spacious warehouse and harmony. That is why in 1849 he left (moreover, for a whole decade!) Nizhny Novgorod, wanting to personally collect the words. Being the manager of a specific office (she was in charge of the affairs of the peasants assigned to the royal family), Dal struggled with the "intolerable self-will of the police", built a hospital, and opened a school for peasant girls. I also had to do medicine. “Everyone went to him with his own concern: some for medicines, some for advice, some with a complaint about a neighbor ... And there was help for everyone,” Dalia’s daughter wrote in her memoirs. “And for a long, long time after Vladimir Ivanovich left for Moscow, the peasants sent him bows.”

Dal moved to Moscow, having received his resignation "according to the request", and here he completed work on the dictionary. He worked day and night, sometimes becoming discouraged from an unbearable, as it seemed to him, plan. And then in the manuscript, as an example for certain articles of the dictionary, bitter sayings appeared: “A dictionary is hard work”, “Then there will be leisure when they carry it out!” - or absolutely desperate: “For this work someday you will die without repentance!”

And yet, a bright day came, when it was explained the last word! Now it's up to the typography. But here's a hitch: for forty years of sovereign service, the most honest Vladimir Ivanovich did not save up money for the publication of his work, again according to the proverb: "You will be fed from your labors - you will not be rich." Thank God, the "Society of Lovers of Russian Literature" helped print the first editions of the dictionary. And from the ninth issue, it was announced that further printing was “undertaken with the highest donated funds” - the sovereign deigned to grant 2,500 rubles.

About the responsibility with which Dahl treated his offspring, says at least the fact that he personally read and corrected fourteen proofs - this is over 34 thousand pages of small text!

In 1866, after the publication of the entire Dalev Dictionary, the Academy of Sciences awarded its author the Lomonosov Prize, and the Geographical Society awarded the Konstantinovsky Gold Medal. Two years later, Dahl was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences.

However, more than all these honors, Vladimir Ivanovich rejoiced at the numerous letters from all over the state: teachers, colleagues, students, officials, writers thanked the one who, in half a century, had done, in essence, the work of an entire academy - erected a slender and majestic building of the Russian Language, introduced into it harmony and clarity, freeing from borrowed sayings, Church Slavonicisms. Wrong, distorted interpretations. And most importantly, he introduced into circulation a myriad of new words that were not in the previous dictionaries. By the way, Dahl continued his painstaking work after the release of the dictionary, preparing the second edition. Alas, it appeared only ten years after the death of the great linguist - he calmed down on September 22, 1872.

A year before his death, Vladimir Ivanovich - well, how not to see here again - the will of Providence! - received evidence that his paternal lineage was by no means Danish, but purely Russian.

It turns out that Dahl's ancestors, wealthy Old Believers, were forced to flee from Russia to Denmark under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, fleeing religious persecution.

Vladimir Ivanovich converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy with spiritual joy. Even without that, all his conscious life he considered himself a Russian person, all his life he struggled with the dominance of foreign words in our language, he was a Slavophile purer than any other Slav. And finally, he inherited the ancestral right to defend the honor and dignity of our ancient, great speech.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Professor I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay, a well-known scientist, the founder of the Kazan school of linguistics, undertook the third edition of the already famous Dalev Dictionary. By that time, the life of the Russian people had changed significantly: new sciences, new crafts, new words arose. “Out of respect for the monumental work, I understood my editorial task, first of all, in improving the details of the external finish of the dictionary, correcting errors and including words that Dahl missed for some reason, as well as those new words that have enriched the living Russian language in recent years,” wrote Baudouin de Courtenay. He worked on the third edition for seven years, adding about 20 thousand words to the dictionary - and not releasing a single one of the previous ones.

Baudouin's version appeared in 1903-09 and then was repeated before the First World War. The fifth edition of the "Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" appeared only in 1955, it repeated the second, with minor corrections.

Then, already in our time, several more reprint, phototype editions of Baudouin de Courtenay's version came out.

But after all, our country has been reading and writing according to the new spelling for almost a century. Therefore, the dictionary is perceived by many as historical monument. Here, among the familiar letters, there are unknown “yat”, “psi”, “fita”, “izhitsa”, “er” ... But the main difficulty is finding the right word. Go and understand why you need to look for the “shadow” after the word “thousand”, “ride” - after “squint”, “know” - after “pack”, “yawn” - after “gaze”, “Fekla - zarevnitsa” - after “ box"? And the whole thing is again in the arrangement of the letters of the old alphabet! In addition, in all previous editions, quite often the interpretation of one word is scattered in different nests, sometimes in different volumes. Isn't this the key to the unpopularity of the dictionary among the general reader?

Of course, only a publication that takes into account the current spelling could give Dalev Dictionary a new full-fledged life. But, as we see, in the 20th century, such a task turned out to be beyond the power of our academic science ...

First years of life

The pseudonym "Cossack Lugansk", under which Vladimir Dal entered the literary world in 1832, in honor of his homeland - Lugansk. He considered his homeland not Denmark, but Russia. In 1817, during a training voyage, cadet Dahl visited Denmark, and later recalled:

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.

In 1833 V.I. Dahl married Julia Andre (1816-1838). Pushkin knew her in Orenburg. Her impressions of the Orenburg days of the poet are conveyed in the letters of E. Voronina ("Russian Archive", 1902, No. 8. P. 658.). Together they move to Orenburg, where they will have two children. Son Leo was born in 1834, daughter Julia in 1838 (named after her mother). Together with his family, he was transferred as an official for special assignments under the military governor V. A. Perovsky.

Widowed, married in 1840 Ekaterina Lvovna Sokolova (1819-1872), daughter of the hero Patriotic War 1812. They will have three daughters: Maria (1841-1903), Olga (1843-?), Ekaterina (1845-?). Ekaterina Vladimirovna published memoirs about her father (magazine "Russian Messenger" (1878), almanac "Gostiny Dvor" (1995))

In the autumn of 1871, the first incident happened to Vladimir Ivanovich. light blow, after which he invited an Orthodox priest to join the Russian Orthodox Church and the giving of the sacrament of Holy Communion according to the Orthodox rite. Thus, shortly before his death, Dahl converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy.

On September 22 (October 4), 1872, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal died and was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery, along with his wife. Later, in 1878, his son Leo was buried in the same cemetery.

Grave of V.I. Dahl and his wife E.L. Dal at the Vagankovsky cemetery in Moscow.

Studies

He received his primary education at home. In the house of his parents, they read a lot and appreciated the printed word, the love for which was passed on to all children.

At the age of thirteen and a half, together with his brother Karl, who was a year younger, he entered the St. Petersburg Naval Cadet Corps, where he studied from 1814 to 1819. He was released on March 2, 1819 as a midshipman in the Black Sea Fleet, the twelfth in seniority out of eighty-six. Later, he described his studies in the story Midshipman Kisses, or Look Back at Life (1841).

After several years of service in the Navy, on January 20, 1826, Vladimir Dal entered the Medical Faculty of Dorpat University. He lived in a cramped attic closet, earning his living by teaching the Russian language. Two years later, in January 1828, V. I. Dal was enrolled in the number of state-owned pupils. According to one of Dahl's biographers, he plunged into the atmosphere of Dorpat, which "mentally encouraged versatility." Here, first of all, he had to intensively study the Latin language, which was necessary for a scientist at that time. For work on a topic announced by the Faculty of Philosophy, he received a silver medal.

The study had to be interrupted with the beginning of the Russian-Turkish war in 1828, when, due to cases of plague in the Transdanubian region, the active army demanded reinforcement military medical service. Vladimir Dal ahead of schedule "with honor passed the exam for a doctor not only in medicine, but also in surgery." The topic of his dissertation: "On a successful method of trepanation of the skull and on hidden ulceration of the kidneys."

Sphere of scientific activity

The scientific activity of Vladimir Dahl is extensive: a doctor, naturalist, linguist, ethnographer. greatest glory he was brought the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.

The Explanatory Dictionary is Dahl's main brainchild, the work by which anyone who is interested in the Russian language knows him. When the explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language was collected and processed to the letter "P", Dahl decided to retire and devote himself to working on the dictionary. In 1859, he settled in Moscow on Presnya in a house built by the historiographer Prince Shcherbatov, who wrote The History of the Russian State. In this house passed The final stage work on a dictionary, still unsurpassed in its volume. Two quotes that define the tasks that Vladimir Dal set for himself: “A living vernacular, who has preserved in the freshness of life the spirit that gives harmony, strength, clarity, integrity and beauty to the language, should serve as a source and treasury for the development of educated Russian speech. “General definitions of words and the objects and concepts themselves are almost impossible and, moreover, useless. It is the more sophisticated, the simpler, more everyday the subject. The transmission and explanation of one word by another, and even more so by a dozen others, of course, is more intelligible than any definition, and examples clarify the matter even more.

In 1861, for the first editions of the Dictionary, he received the Konstantinov medal from the Imperial Geographical Society, in 1868 he was elected an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and after the publication of the entire dictionary, he was awarded the Lomonosov Prize.

As a brilliant military doctor, Vladimir Dal showed during the battles of the Russian-Turkish war of 1828-1829 and the Polish campaign of 1831.

From March 1832 V.I. Dahl serves as an intern at the St. Petersburg military land hospital and soon becomes a medical celebrity in St. Petersburg.

Biographer Vladimir Dahl P.I. Melnikov writes:

Here he worked tirelessly and soon gained fame as a remarkable surgeon, especially an ophthalmologist. He has done more than forty-one cataract surgeries in his lifetime, and everything is quite successful. It is remarkable that his left hand was developed in the same way 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.

Later, leaving surgical practice, Dahl did not leave medicine, becoming especially addicted to ophthalmology and homeopathy (one of the first articles in defense of homeopathy belongs to Dahl: Sovremennik, 1838, No. 12).

Literary activity

First experiences

One of the first acquaintances with literature almost ended in failure. From September 1823 to April 1824, V. I. Dal was under arrest on suspicion of writing an epigram for the Commander-in-Chief of the Black Sea Fleet Greig and his common-law wife Yulia Kulchinskaya (Liya Stalinskaya) - a Jewess, the daughter of a Mogilev innkeeper, who after her first marriage posed as a Polka. .He was acquitted by the court, after which he was transferred from Nikolaev to Kronstadt.

In 1827, the journal A.F. Voeikov "Slavyanin" publishes the first poems by Dahl. In 1830, V. I. Dal was already acting as a prose writer, his story "Gypsy" was published by the Moscow Telegraph.

Confession

He was glorified as a writer “Russian fairy tales from folk oral tradition to civil letters, transcribed, adapted to everyday life and decorated with walking sayings by Cossack Vladimir Lugansky. Five first "(1832). The rector of Dorpat University decided to invite his former student, Doctor of Medicine Dahl, to the Department of Russian Literature. At the same time, the book was accepted as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philology, but it was rejected as a dissertation as unreliable by the Minister of Education himself.

“... it is printed in the simplest style, quite adapted for the lower classes, for merchants, for soldiers and servants. It contains mockery of the government, complaints about the sad situation of a soldier, etc.

Benckendorff reports to Emperor Nicholas I. In October or early November 1832, during his rounds in the hospital where V.I. Dal, he is arrested and brought to Mordvinov. He immediately brings down the square abuse on the doctor, jabbing his book in his face, and sends him to prison. Dal was rescued by Vasily Zhukovsky, who was then the mentor of the son of Nicholas I, the future liberator of the peasants, Emperor Alexander II. Zhukovsky described to the heir to the throne everything that happened in an anecdotal light, described Dahl as a man of exemplary modesty and great abilities, mentioned two orders and a medal received in the war. The heir to the throne went to his father and was able to convince that the authorities in this situation look ridiculous. And Nicholas ordered the release of Dahl.

This book has been withdrawn from sale. One of the few remaining copies, Dahl decided to give A.S. Pushkin. Zhukovsky had long promised to introduce them, but Dahl, without waiting for him, took "Tales ..." and went himself - without any recommendations - to introduce himself to Alexander Pushkin. Thus began their acquaintance.

In 1833-1839, "There were tales of the Cossack Lugansk" were published. Actively collaborated in the journal "Rural Reading".

Pushkin and Dahl

A.S. Pushkin and V.I. Distance in the form of Saints Cosmas and Damian. 19th century icon

Their acquaintance was supposed to take place through the mediation of Zhukovsky in 1832, but Vladimir Dal decided to personally introduce himself to Alexander Pushkin and present one of the few surviving copies of Tales ... that had recently been released. Dahl wrote about it this way:

I took my new book and went to introduce myself to the poet. The reason for acquaintance was “Russian fairy tales. Heel of the first Cossack of Lugansk. Pushkin at that time rented an apartment on the corner of Gorokhovaya and Bolshaya Morskaya. I went up to the third floor, the servant took my greatcoat in the hallway, went to report. I, worried, walked through the rooms, empty and gloomy - it was getting dark. Taking my book, Pushkin opened it and read it from the beginning, from the end, where necessary, and, laughing, said "Very good."

Pushkin was very happy with such a gift and in return presented Vladimir Ivanovich with a handwritten version of his new fairy tale “About the priest and his worker Balda” with a significant autograph: Yours from yours!

To the storyteller Cossack Lugansky, storyteller Alexander Pushkin

Pushkin began to ask Dahl what he was working on now, he told him everything about his long-term passion for collecting words, which he had already collected about twenty thousand.

So make a dictionary! - exclaimed Pushkin and began to ardently convince Dahl. - Desperately need a dictionary of the living spoken language! Yes, you have already made a third of the dictionary! Don't throw away your supplies now!

Pushkin supported Vladimir Ivanovich’s idea of ​​compiling a Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, and he enthusiastically commented on the proverbs and sayings collected by Dahl: “What a luxury, what a meaning, what a sense in each of our sayings! What a gold!” Pushkin suddenly fell silent, then continued: “Your collection is not a simple idea, not a hobby. This is a completely new business for us. You can be envied - you have a goal. To accumulate treasures for years and suddenly open chests in front of astonished contemporaries and descendants! So, on the initiative of Vladimir Dal, his acquaintance with Pushkin began, which later grew into a sincere friendship that lasted until the death of the poet.

A year later, on September 18-20, 1833, V.I. Dal accompanies A.S. Pushkin in Pugachev places. Pushkin tells Dahl the plot of "The Tales of Georgy the Brave and the Wolf." Together with Dahl, the poet traveled all over important places Pugachev events. In the memoirs of Vladimir Dahl:

Pushkin arrived unexpectedly and unexpectedly and stayed in a country house with the military governor V. Al. Perovsky, and the next day I transported him from there, went with him to the historic Berlin village, interpreted, as far as I heard and knew the area, the circumstances of the siege of Orenburg by Pugachev; he pointed to the St. George's bell tower in the suburbs, where Pugach had raised a cannon to shell the city, - to the remains of earthworks between the Orsky and Sakmarsky gates, attributed by legend to Pugachev, to the Trans-Ural grove, from where the thief tried to break through the ice into the fortress, open from this side; spoke of a priest who had recently died here, whom his father whipped for running out into the street to collect nickels, with which Pugach fired several shots into the city instead of buckshot, - about the so-called secretary of Pugachev Sychugov, who was still alive at that time, and about Berda old women, who still remember the “golden” chambers of Pugach, that is, the hut upholstered in copper brass. Pushkin listened to all this - excuse me, if I don’t know how to put it differently - with great fervor and laughed heartily at the following anecdote: Pugach, bursting into Berdy, where frightened people gathered in the church and on the porch, also entered the church. The people parted in fear, bowed, fell on their faces. Having accepted important view, Pugach went straight to the altar, sat on the church throne and said out loud: “How long have I been sitting on the throne!” In his peasant ignorance, he imagined that the throne of the church is the royal seat. Pushkin called him a pig for this and laughed a lot ...

He returned home and quickly wrote The History of Pugachev. Grateful for the help, in 1835 he sent three gift copies of the book to Orenburg: to Governor Perovsky, Dahl and Captain Artyukhov, who organized an excellent hunt for the poet, amused him with hunting stories, treated him to home-made beer and soared in his bathhouse, which was considered the best in the city.

At the end of 1836, Dahl came to St. Petersburg. Pushkin joyfully welcomed the return of his friend, visited him many times, was interested in Dahl's linguistic findings. Alexander Sergeevich really liked what he heard from Dahl, the previously unknown word “crawl out” - a skin that snakes and snakes shed after winter, crawling out of it. Once visiting Dahl in a new frock coat, Pushkin joked merrily: “What, is it a good crawl out? Well, I will not soon crawl out of this crawl out. I will write this in it! the poet promised. He did not take off this coat on the day of the duel with Dantes. In order not to cause unnecessary suffering to the wounded poet, I had to “crawl out” from him. and here he was present at the tragic death of Pushkin.

Dahl participated in the treatment of the poet from a mortal wound received in the last duel, until the death of Pushkin on January 29 (February 11), 1837. Having learned about the duel of the Poet, Dal came to a friend, although his relatives did not invite him to the dying Pushkin. I found a dying friend surrounded by noble doctors. In addition to the family doctor Ivan Spassky, the poet was examined by the court physician Nikolai Arendt and three other doctors of medicine. Pushkin joyfully greeted his friend and, taking him by the hand, pleadingly asked: “Tell me the truth, will I die soon?” And Dahl answered professionally correctly: “We hope for you, really, we hope you don’t despair either.” Pushkin gratefully shook his hand and said in relief: "Well, thank you." He noticeably perked up and even asked for cloudberries, and Natalya Nikolaevna joyfully exclaimed: “He will be alive! You will see, he will live, he will not die!”

Under the leadership of N.F. Arendt, he kept a diary of his medical history. Later I.T. Spassky, together with Dahl, performed an autopsy on Pushkin's body, where Dahl wrote the autopsy protocol.

"The bullet penetrated the general integument of the abdomen two inches from the superior anterior extremity of the ilium right side, then she walked, sliding along the circumference of the large pelvis, from top to bottom, and, having met resistance in the sacral bone, she broke it and sat down somewhere nearby. Dantes fired a large-caliber lead bullet at a distance of 11 paces. The bullet slipped between the small and caecum “in only one place, the size of a penny, the small intestines were affected by gangrene. At this point, in all likelihood, the intestines were bruised by a bullet."

Vladimir Dal, the dying Alexander Sergeevich, handed over his golden talisman ring with an emerald with the words: “Dal, take it as a keepsake.” And when Vladimir Ivanovich shook his head negatively, Pushkin insistently repeated: "Take it, friend, I won't write anymore." Subsequently, regarding this Pushkin gift, Dahl wrote to the poet V. Odoevsky: “When I look at this ring, I want to start doing something decent.” Vladimir Ivanovich tried to return it to his widow, but Natalya Nikolaevna protested: “No, Vladimir Ivanovich, let this be a memory for you. And I also want to give you a frock coat of Alexander Sergeevich pierced by a bullet. This one was the same frock coat. In the memoirs of Vladimir Dahl.

I got an expensive gift from Pushkin's widow: his ring with an emerald, which he always wore recent times and called - I don't know why - a talisman; inherited from V.A. Zhukovsky Pushkin's last clothes, after which they dressed him, only to be put in a coffin. This is a black frock coat with a small hole, the size of a fingernail, against the right groin. You can think about this. This coat should have been preserved for posterity; I don't know how to do it yet; in private hands, it can easily get lost, and we have nowhere to give such a thing for permanent preservation [I gave it to M.P. Pogodin].