XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Vladimir Dahl was a Russian lexicographer, ethnographer and writer. The greatest work of his life is the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian Language,” the first of its kind ever written or published in Russia. It is still one of the most popular and widely used resources of the Russian language.

Family background

Of the two essential things required for creating the most famous Russian dictionary – being Russian and having good linguistics genes - Vladimir Dahl had only the genes. His father, Johan Christian Dahl, was a Danish linguist whose brilliant career reached the ears of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great, and she invited him to Saint Petersburg to be a librarian. However, he later returned to Germany to continue his medical education and returned to Russia as a doctor. In 1779 he was granted Russian citizenship, got married and was sent to work in the little mining town in Lugansk, in modern day Ukraine. Dahl Sr. married Maria Freitag who was of German and French descent; she was the daughter of a translator and spoke five languages. On November 10, 1801 she gave birth to a son, Vladimir. Vladimir spent his childhood in the little town of Lugansk, which later gave him his penname Kazak Lugansky (The Cossack of Lugansk).

Lexicographic studies

In the following decade, Dal adopted the pen name Kazak Lugansky ("Cossack from Luhansk") and published several realistic essays in the manner of Nikolai Gogol. He continued his lexicographic studies and extensive travels throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Having no time to edit his collection of fairy tales, he asked Alexander Afanasyev to prepare them for publication, which followed in the late 1850s.

While living in St. Petersburg, Dahl greatly missed provincial lifestyle – its freedom and unpretentiousness. So in 1849 he moved to Nizhny Novgorod –where he spent the next ten years of his life collecting more words. Here as well he held an administrative position, which also obliged him to keep up his medical practice. However, Dahl soon realized that his life wouldn’t be complete if he didn’t organize all his findings into a dictionary. In 1859 Dahl resigned from his service and moved to Moscow to pursue his ambition. He wanted to systematize the materials he had gathered and to publish them. He tried to offer his “treasures” and his services to the Imperial Academy of Sciences, but his offer wasn’t accepted. He took the work upon himself, working day and night, many times in despair because of the tremendous responsibility of his undertaking. Since he didn’t have a philological education Dahl was learning on his own. This explains the reason why the dictionary gained such immense popularity. It was written from the perspective of a scholar, not an instructor. It didn’t display a haughty approach, but rather that of a person who worked hard gathering little grains of the living Russian language. After every word had been written and its meaning decoded the next big task was to have it all printed. The only problem was that in the 40 years of his government service Dahl hadn’t saved enough money to publish his work. The first editions of the dictionary were published by the Society of Lovers of the Russian Word. After the ninth edition it was announced that any further publication would be sponsored by the government. The work done by Dahl was unprecedented. He put together and explained nearly 200 thousand words and nearly 37 proverbs and sayings of the Russian people. He has been called the Magellan who sailed across the Russian language from A to Z. Many find it hard to comprehend that all that work was done by one person. He alone produced a work that would have taken decades for a humanitarian institute with a large staff and modern technology. The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, while studying in Cambridge, bought a copy of Dahl’s dictionary and read at least ten pages from it every evening. Alexander Solzhenitsyn took a volume of Dahl with him as his only book when he was sent to a prison camp in the 1940s. To this day Dahl’s dictionary remains the most popular and one of the most comprehensive resources of the Russian language and culture.

The latter years and legacy

By the time the dictionary came to print Dahl’s health had significantly deteriorated. The end of his work should have relieved him from pressure and helped his health. However, it turned out just the opposite – the long-term habit of hard work, once stopped, had a devastating effect on Dahl. He died on 22 September 1872 and was buried at the Vagankovskoe Cemetery. A year before his death, he received confirmation that his ancestors from his father’s line were not Dutch but Russian. It turned out that Dahl’s predecessors were wealthy Starovers, or old believers, who had to flee Russia for Denmark under Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich. When he learned this, Dahl converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity. He had thought of himself as a Russian all his life, dedicating his life to the Russian language and people, and in the end he learned that Russian blood did flow in his veins after all.