The richness of the Russian language – in the works of V. I. Dahl

As a result of the Presidential Library’s activities during the Year of the Russian Language, about 3,000 digital pages of one of the rare editions of the "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" by V. I. Dahl edited by Russian and Polish linguist Ivan Baudouin de Courtenay have been digitized and published on the library’s website.

Vladimir Dahl had been creating the dictionary for almost his entire life. He began to make observations of the Russian language in 1820, when he was 18 years old. With great interest Dahl spoke with farmers, sailors, soldiers, often recording their statements. In addition to colloquial words his collection includes many borrowings from Latin, French and German. V. I. Dahl used his own word order: not alphabetical, but alphabetical with the family of words, which allowed to understand not only the meaning of the word but also its origin, as well as the context in which it can be used.  

V. I. Dahl became famous in the 1830s, when the "Russian Fairy Tales" published by him in 1832 were banned due to a few misinterpreted words, for which he had even been imprisoned. Owing to the intercession of his friends, however, especially that of V. A. Zhukovsky he was immediately released. Among those who supported Dahl, there were other well-known personalities. For example, the book of the famous historian J. K. Groth "Memories about V. I. Dahl" includes excerpts from the author's correspondence with him.  

"All my life I’ve picked an occasion to travel across Russia, learn about the life of ordinary people... I have not spent a single day without writing down a word, an expression or a phrase in order to replenish my collection. Grech and Pushkin enthusiastically supported my initiative of the kind," wrote V. Dahl. At the age of 60 he devoted himself entirely to the dictionary making, and according to J. K. Groth, "...has given us the most complete Russian dictionary of all that we ever had."

"Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" is part of the "Collection of Russian (East Slavic) and Church Slavonic dictionaries", which contains more than 80 units, among which there are not only explanatory but also terminological, dialectological, etymological dictionaries. The Presidential library will continue to expand one of its major collections devoted to the Russian language as the official language of the Russian Federation.