A naval officer turned doctor built Russia's great dictionary of living speech
Solzhenitsyn carried one book into the Ekibastuz prison camp: a volume of Vladimir Dal's dictionary. Nabokov, as a Cambridge student, read ten pages of it every night. The man behind it was a navy cadet, army doctor and provincial official who spent decades walking the countryside collecting words that were already starting to vanish.
Dal grew up amid languages. His Danish father, a physician, knew eight, including Hebrew, Yiddish and Greek, and his mother of German and probably Huguenot descent spoke at least five. Born in 1801 at Lugansky Zavod, a young industrial settlement in the south of the Russian Empire, he began noting down words while still at the naval cadet school in Saint Petersburg, from which he graduated in 1819.
His career zigzagged. After twelve years in the navy he studied medicine at Dorpat, treated soldiers during the war with Turkey and the Polish campaign of 1831 to 1832, then quarrelled with his superiors and moved into administration in Orenburg, joining a military expedition to Khiva in 1839 to 1840 under General Perovsky. Along the way he gathered fairy tales, folk songs, woodcuts and superstitions. His friend Pushkin turned some of those tales into verse, and when Pushkin was dying after his duel in January 1837, Dal sat with him through his final hours. As a writer of fiction, under the pen name Cossack from Luhansk, he was a sharp observer but weak at plot and character.
Collecting was his genius. The Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language appeared in four huge volumes between 1863 and 1866, followed by a book of proverbs with more than 30,000 entries. He championed native Russian words over borrowings, and early twentieth-century poets such as Vyacheslav Ivanov treated the dictionary like a newly discovered language. Because so much of the dialect it records has since died out, it remains a key linguistic source and underpins Vasmer's etymological dictionary. His awkward nested arrangement of words was only fixed in later editions by Baudouin de Courtenay.
A darker episode clings to his name. A secret 1844 report for Nicholas I endorsing claims of ritual murder by fanatical Hasidic sects is often attributed to Dal, though its authorship is contested, and it was republished anonymously during the Beilis trial of 1914. For his bicentenary, UNESCO nonetheless proclaimed an International Year of Vladimir Dal.
Source: Vladimir Dal
