200th birthday of Vladimir Dal

UNESCO has proclaimed 2001 the year of Vladimir 1. Dal. He was born 200 years ago, in November of 1801.

Dal entered the history of Russian culture as an exquisite writer and a prominent scientist famous for his renowned Russian Explanatory Dictionary. He did most of this work in Nizhny Novgorod. This dictionary, which was published in 1863-1866, has always been a lexicography reference book for researchers and is still in high demand.

Vladimir 1. Dal lived here for ten years in the mid-1800s. He worked in the city as manager in the Nizhny Novgorod District Office that represented the royal family's interests in the region. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences at that moment already. The writer lived on the Bolshaya Pechyorskaya Street, 25, now housing the Nizhny Novgorod Research Institute of Radio Physics.

The man was a sort of "tourist attraction" for distinguished visitors of the time. Such famous people as literary Dobrolyubov, actor Schepkin, poet Shevehenko and many others would come by very often when in Nizhny Novgorod.

Vladimir I. Dal would study Russian dialects and collected a great number of proverbs and sayings for its detailed, scientifically structured compilation. Dal would amaze its contemporaries with his encyclopedic knowledge of the dialects' territorial distribution. He could easily tell a person's native area from the way he or she spoke. Perhaps, the most known is an incident with a runaway monk fleeing from persecution. Dal made no mistake determining the man's birthplace but spared him and did not deliver him up to authorities. That incident occurred in Nizhny Novgorod.

Nizhegorodians remember Vladimir 1. Dal. A memorial plaque was made in 1990 on the Bolshaya Pechyorskaya St., 25, and a street in the Kanavinsky district was renamed to become the Dal Street.

By the materials of book "Anniversary Nizhny"