Let's take an example which is close to our purposes. Say you have the task of developing the principles and foundations for processing the language of some Pacific islanders; it is supposed to transform, to re-educate these savages, to give them literacy, upbringing and to adjust their baby-like babble. . . . What would you begin with? Of course, you would start from the very beginning, from the study of their language, as coarse, wild, poor, and unprocessed as it is. Then on this foundation . . . you would build further on. This is what we have to do. (Dal 2002a: 424)
Writing the Dictionary
A close friend of Pushkin, Vladimir Dal nursed this poet in his mortal agony after a duel in 1837. Dal was trained as a Navy officer and military doctor; he was also an engineer, ethnographer, linguist, and popular author. His father was a Danish Lutheran, his mother a French Huguenot. He was born in Lugan, on the territory of contemporary Ukraine, a colony which was shaped in the mid-eighteenth century by refugees from the Balkans. A few decades later, a Scottish engineer found ore and coal there and Dal's father, the German- trained theologian, settled in Lugan to serve in the mining factory. Vladimir learned Russian from his St. Petersburg-born French mother, who spoke five languages. His written Russian was beautiful, but there is little doubt that his foreign origin contributed to his interest in this language. The author of the most famous dictionary of Russian, Dal completed most of this enormous work far from the Russian heartlands; his informants were soldiers, craftsmen, and other folk involved in imperial projects.
Dal started to work on his Russian dictionary during his Navy service in 1819 on the Baltic Sea. Interviewing soldiers, he enriched his collection of Russian words when he served as a military doctor in imperial campaigns in Turkey, Poland, and Central Asia. The major work on the dictionary was done during his service as a civil official in Orenburg, the steppe frontier of the Empire, where he also took part in the military expedition to Khiva (contemporary Uzbekistan) in 1839-40. Though this ill-conceived expedition was a tragic failure, it paved the way for the Russian colonization of Central Asia. Dal completed his dictionary while he served in St. Petersburg as head of the personal chancellery of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Lev Perovsky. His unusually long and rich career as an imperial officer creatively combined the tasks of external and internal colonization. His multiple moves between geographical locations and bureaucratic offices reflected the shifts between what were then "the external" and "the internal" in the Empire.
Wherever Dal's uniformed body fulfilled his imperial duties, his unquiet mind remained in the heartlands of Russian language and folklore. Walking before a dinner near his friends' estate near St. Petersburg, Dal met a cleric who introduced himself as a monk of the Solovetsky monastery. In a brief conversation, Dal recognized his Volga accent and was able to identify the province and even the district of his actual dwelling. A moment later the alleged monk, who was a runaway serf, was groveling at the feet of the linguist (Melnikov- Pechersky 1873: 289). Besides his magisterial dictionary, Dal published multiple volumes of Russian fairytales which he allegedly heard from the common people and wrote down during his travels. "I think in Russian," he wrote. "A human mind belongs to those people whose language this mind uses" (Dal 2002b: 258). But he was pursued by nationalist hostility throughout his entire career. In 1832, he was arrested for his fairytales, in which authorities found political hints that they found unacceptable. Dal's literary friends helped him get out of jail. In 1844, Lev Perovsky commissioned Dal to compose a study of the Skoptsy, the Russian sect that castrated its followers for pious reasons. When Nicholas I learned that the author was a Lutheran, he ordered Perovsky to find an Orthodox author for such a delicate subject (Nadezhdin reworked and signed this essay). Also in 1844, Perovsky ordered a new investigation of the old question: did the Jews of the Empire commit ritual murders? The ministry issued an anti-Semitic pamphlet in two versions, though neither of them was circulated; one pamphlet was signed by Dal.
In the late period of Dal's life, his essays took a distinctively counter-Enlightenment turn. From objecting to the spoiling of the Russian language with foreign words, he switched to an outright denial of the value of literacy for the folk. A radical historian who belonged to the next generation noted that Dal and his circle perceived a "dissonance between the life of the educated class and the life of the common folk. They hoped that this dissonance could be ameliorated by their new cult of the people, but they had no idea how. . . . The writers and ethnographers of this school actually
«Л. С. Пушкин [i В. II. Двл ь н ;iii.ic снятых Косьыи н Дамргаия».
№она XIX в.
Figure 14: Pushkin and Dal presented on an icon as St Kozma and St Damyan.
Source: Pravoslavie i ateizm v SSSR. Muzei istorii religii i ateizma. Leningrad: Lenizdat 1981