Vladimir Dal
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Vladimir Dal | |
---|---|
Владимир Даль | |
Born | November 22, 1801 |
Died | October 4, 1872 | (aged 70)
Resting place | Vagankovo Cemetery, Moscow |
Known for | Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Lexicography |
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal.
Early life
Vladimir Dal's father was a Danish physician named Johan Christian von Dahl (1764 – October 21, 1821), a linguist versed in the German, English, French, Russian, Yiddish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew languages. His mother, Julia Adelaide Freytag, had German and probably French (Huguenot) ancestry; she spoke at least five languages and came from a family of scholars.
The future lexicographer was born in the town of Lugansky Zavod (present-day Luhansk, Ukraine), in Novorossiya – then under the jurisdiction of Yekaterinoslav Governorate, part of the Russian Empire. (The settlement of Lugansky Zavod dated from the 1790s.) Dal grew up under the influence of varied mixture of people and cultures which existed in that area.
Dal served in the Imperial Russian Navy from 1814 to 1826, graduating from the Saint Petersburg Naval Cadet School in 1819. In 1826 he began studying medicine at Dorpat University; he participated as a military doctor in the Russo-Turkish War and in the campaign against Poland in 1831–1832. Following disagreement with his superiors, he resigned from the Military Hospital in Saint Petersburg and took an administrative position with the Ministry of the Interior in Orenburg Governorate in 1833. He took part in General Perovsky's military expedition against Khiva of 1839-1840.[2] Dal then served in administrative positions in Saint Petersburg (1841–1849) and in Nizhny Novgorod (from 1849) before his retirement in 1859.
Dal had an interest in language and folklore from his early years. He started traveling by foot through the countryside, collecting sayings and fairy tales in various
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. Joachim T. Baer wrote:
While Dal was a skilled observer, he lacked talent in developing a story and creating psychological depth for his characters. He was interested in the wealth of the Russian language, and he began collecting words while still a student in the Naval Cadet School. Later he collected and recorded fairy tales, folk songs, birch bark woodcuts, and accounts of superstitions, beliefs, and prejudices of the Russian people. His industry in the sphere of collecting was prodigious.[4]
His magnum opus,
Dal was a strong proponent of the native rather than adopted vocabulary. His dictionary began to have a strong influence on literature at the beginning of the 20th century; in his 1911 article "Poety russkogo sklada" (Poets of the Russian Mold), Maximilian Voloshin wrote:
Just about the first of the contemporary poets who began to read Dal was Vyacheslav Ivanov. In any case, contemporary poets of the younger generation, under his influence, subscribed to the new edition of Dal. The discovery of the verbal riches of the Russian language was for the reading public like studying a completely new foreign language. Both old and popular Russian words seemed gems for which there was absolutely no place in the usual ideological practice of the intelligentsia, in that habitual verbal comfort in simplified speech, composed of international elements.[5]
While studying at Cambridge,
For his great dictionary Dal was honoured by the
He is interred at the Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow. To mark the 200th anniversary of Vladimir Dal's birthday, UNESCO declared the year 2000 The International Year of Vladimir Dal.
Legacy
- In 1986 a museum in Moscow, Russia, was opened in honor of Dal.
- In Luhansk, Ukraine, the home of Dal has been converted into a Literary Museum where the employees managed to collect the lifetime editions of Dal's complete literary works.
- In 2001, a Luhansk (Ukraine) university was named after Dal, the
- In 2017, the State Literary Museum in Moscow, Russia received a new official name: the State Museum of the History of Russian Literature named after V. I. Dal.
- On November 22, 2017, Google celebrated his 216th birthday with a Google Doodle.[9]
Damascus affair
Dal served in the Ministry of Domestic Affairs. His responsibilities included overseeing investigations of murders of children in the western part of Russia.
In 1840, the
In 1914, 42 years after Dal's death, during the blood libel trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kyiv, the then 70-year-old report was published in Saint Petersburg under the title Notes on Ritual Murders. The name of the author was not stated in this new edition, intended for the general public.[11]
Notes
- ^ Alternatively transliterated as Dahl, the original spelling of his father's surname in the Latin script.
References
- ^ Blagova, G. F. (2001). "Владимир Даль и его последователь в тюркологии Лазарь Будагов" [Vladimir Dal and his follower in Turkic studies Lazar Budagov.]. Voprosy yazykoznaniya - Topics in the Study of Languages (in Russian) (3). Moscow: 22–39.
- ^
Baer, Joachim T. (1972). "Biography". Vladimir Ivanovič Dal' as a Belletrist. Slavistic Printings and Reprintings. Vol. 276 (reprint ed.). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG (published 2018). p. 25. ISBN 9783110908534. Retrieved 9 May 2019.
In 1839 Dal' took part in the ill-fated expedition against the Sultan of Khiva, directed by his superior, the administrator of the Orenburg region, V. A. Perovskij.
- ^ Русские сказки из предания народного изустного на грамоту гражданскую переложенные, к быту житейскому приноровленные и поговорками ходячими разукрашенные Казаком Владимиром Луганским. Пяток первый. Saint Petersburg: Plyushar, 1832.
- ^ a b Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, p. 92.
- ^ Maximilian Voloshin, "Поэты русского склада," in Sovremenniki (Russian text).
- ^ Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 171.
- ^ "Constantine Medal of the IRGS". Russian Geographical Society. Retrieved 25 August 2015.
- ^ official website East Ukraine Volodymyr Dahl National University – History section Archived 2009-04-25 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Vladimir Dal's 216th Birthday". Google. 22 November 2017.
- ^ Poliakov, Léon. The History of Anti-Semitism: Suicidal Europe, 1870–1933. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2003. p.84.
- ^ Léon Poliakov. The History of Anti-Semitism: Suicidal Europe, 1870–1933. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2003. p.357.
Sources
- Dal, Vladimir, Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, Vol.I, Diamant, Sankt Peterburg, 1998 (reprinting of 1882 edition by M.O.Volf Publisher Booksellers-Typesetters)
- Terras, Victor, Handbook of Russian Literature (Yale University Press, 1990), ISBN 0-300-04868-8
External links
- Vladimir Ivanovich Dal (in Russian)
- Dal Dictionary on-line Dal's Dictionary (in Russian)
- Searchable version of Dal's dictionary
- Searchable version of Dal's, Ushakov's and Ozhegov's dictionary
- Bicentennial tribute