Dictionaries were hardly a nineteenth century invention. Even in Eastern Europe, whose progress in the philological sciences tended to lag behind that of its Western European neighbors, the lexicographical tradition existed for centuries before Vladimir Dal’’s dictionary was written. The first dictionaries of Russian date to the seventeenth century, most notably Tönnies Fenne’s 1607 Low German Manual of Spoken Russian, which contains a small Russian-German dictionary. This dictionary and those that immediately followed, however, would be unrecognizable to the modern user. Their lexicons are limited, their definitions provide little information, and their chief purpose is simple translation. But perhaps the most distinctive feature of this pre-modern period of lexicography is the casual organization of the dictionary. Headwords are listed in any combination of thematic and alphabetical order and the overall structure of the text is without principle. These earliest Russian dictionaries might be described as lexicons without lexicography, the text as a whole incidental to the information contained within.
The period of modern lexicography begins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when, in both Eastern and Western Europe, national dictionaries began to assume the form they retain today. During this period national dictionaries became monolingual and soon came to occupy a special space in society. As lexicographical historian Henri Béjoint writes, “[The monolingual-general purpose dictionary] is the one that every household has, that everyone thinks of first when the word ‘dictionary’ is mentioned, it is the type that plays the most important role in the society that produces it.”^[1] The dictionaries’ authors became real lexicographers, putting time and thought into developing a vocabulary of generic strictures. Definitions describe the etymology and substantive and figurative meanings of the headword, while the entries provide grammatical information and examples of usage. In this modern period – to which the French, Italian and Russian Academy dictionaries all belong – the dictionary becomes a genre: a recognizable and reproducible kind of text.
Despite the relative youth of modern lexicography when it was compiled and published, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal’’s Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivago velikoruskago iazyka (1861-1868) [Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language] represented a departure from the lexicographical status quo, and was perceived immediately as an exceptional intellectual document by the Russian reading public. Much of its uniqueness resides in its having a single author. Just as Samuel Johnson and J. C. Adelung had before him, Dal’ rejected the committee authorship of the Academy dictionary that had quickly become the dominant model of lexicography in the modern period, in favor of a one-man lexicography. The idiosyncrasies that results from having one man – and often an eccentric one at that^[2] – solely in charge of a dictionary’s contents may very well account for the lasting fame of these dictionaries. Among other notable one-man monolingual dictionaries from the period that occupy similar places in national memory are Samuel Linde’s Dictionary of the Polish Language (1807-1814), Vuk Karadžić’s Serbian Dictionary (1818), the Grimm Brothers’ Deutsche Wörterbuch (though it technically has two authors and was completed only in 1860), and Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).
The historic status of the aforementioned dictionaries in their respective national cultures has nothing to do with the quality of the lexicography contained in their pages. Most, in fact, are quite problematic from the point of view of modern lexicography. (One could point here to Baudouin de Courtenay’s extensive reworking of Dal’’s nesting system into a more usable format in the dictionary’s third edition.) Their weight instead comes from their symbolic significance as proof, through language, of the existence and legitimacy of their corresponding nations. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is among those who identify the importance of dictionaries like these in the nation-building process. He writes, “only when the making of the ‘nation’… creates new uses and functions does it become indispensable to forge a standard language… and by the same token to undertake the work of normalizing the products of linguistic habitus. The dictionary is the exemplary result of this labor of codification and normalization.”^[3]
For nations without states like Serbia, Poland, or Germany, a dictionary served as a sign to one’s peers and the rest of the world of their legitimacy. For the Russian Empire, however, national legitimacy was not an issue, which perhaps explains why Russia was among the last of the Slavic nations to produce such a dictionary, and why Dal’’s dictionary looks so different from those produced in the first half of the century by his fellow Slavs. Published shortly after the repeal of serfdom, Dal’’s dictionary belongs to a period of dramatic internal socio-political transformation for Russia. The expansive area the dictionary, while it corresponds to the empire’s physical borders, traces a linguistically impossible Russian nation by extending the language’s borders far beyond Russian and into the empire’s Turkic languages. Rather unique among his peers in never having spent any substantive amount of time in the cultural capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow, Dal’ creates in his dictionary a Russia without a geographical or referential center, which appears to grow like a cancer to envelop much of the Russian Far East in its territory.

* * *

Dal’’s four-volume dictionary can rightfully be called its author’s life’s work. The one-time surgeon began collecting words at the age of eighteen and continued to work on his dictionary even after it was published until his death in 1872. During this extended period of time Dal’ remained remarkably faithful to a view of language as its own master and the writer, lexicographer and linguist as language’s servant.
In 1852, before he began the work of compiling his own dictionary, Dal’ described his vision for the ideal Russian dictionary in his article, “On the Dialects of Russian.” The role of the dictionary as he saw it was to facilitate Russian literature’s return to a rodnoi iazyk, to the discernment of truly Russian modes of expression. Dal’ thought then, as he had thought before and would think until his death, that the best resource for the literary renewal he envisioned was the language of the simple folk [prostonarodnyi iazyk] and regional languages [oblastnye iazyki]. To the anticipated protests that these languages were rooted in contexts irrelevant to the literary needs of the contemporary Russian writer, Dal’ responded that these non-standard forms of speech could easily adapt to milieus other than those in which they were born: “Let us not forget that all of these kinds of expressions are capable of taking on figurative meaning…. [T]he very Russian composition of speech can be learned not only from books but from the speech of the folk [narodnyi govor].”^[4]
For Dal’, finding a lexicography that would work for his goals meant first identifying models that did not, in his opinion, succeed. Chief among these failures was the Russian Academy’s Attempt at a Regional Dictionary of Great-Russian (1852), the first real dialectal dictionary of Russian, which he felt failed in both content and presentation by enabling Russian authors’ use of foreign words. Despite having 18,000 entries, Dal’ wrote, the dictionary had “nothing,” since “most of these words do not exist in reality and they never did or will.”^[5] The academy’s manipulations of language, Dal’ conceded, merely reflected the current state of the literary language: “Gifted Russian writers who know the folk way of life and take their stories and images from it nonetheless gild their own language with foreign words and their style [slog] with non-Russian flourishes – totally unnecessarily and only because it is their habit and it is how they were raised.”^[6]
Compiled under the auspices of the Russian Academy with direction from the linguists Aleksandr Vostokov and Izmail Sreznevskii, the dictionary described the dialects of “Great-Russian” and noted the geographical provenance of each of its headwords,^[7] but for Dal’ its organization was so unwelcoming that it caused him to consider how to structure a dictionary to better suit the user’s comfort: “I think the question would occur to anyone who pounced on the newly released dictionary with avid curiosity but who, flipping through it, did not know how to approach it.”^[8] The dictionary’s lack of readability was anathema to Dal’, who believed that a dictionary, as a tool of literary enrichment, should not be consulted to verify one’s existing knowledge but perused for new linguistic material. Dal’ writes, “We would be in large part incorrect if we were to note that a word is from Kursk, Nizhegorod [province], etc., just because that is the first place it was heard. But we are so little accustomed to folk language [narodnyi iazyk] that this is the only chance – especially for our writers – to hear non-written expressions.”^[9] For Dal’ the academy’s dialect dictionary was a mausoleum – a place to store and preserve the dead. The dictionary that Dal’ envisioned was more like a zoo, where living specimens could be observed in their natural habitats.
Dal’ dreamed of a dictionary that would act as an organ for linguistic change rather than a vehicle of preservation. His rejection of the imposition of any outside order on words remained his priority ten years after publishing his article. He wanted to apply only the minimum of structure to the lexical material necessary to make his dictionary usable to a reader. In an 1860 speech to the Society of Lovers of the Russian Word, Dal’ reiterated his belief in accessibility as the ultimate objective in lexicography: “I wanted the dictionary to be accessible: it could be, if not read, then paged through, and the apparent visual relationships and formation of words would greatly benefit.”^[10]
To structure the dictionary so as to encourage the user to treat it as an almanac rather than a textbook meant that Dal’ would have to invent a new lexicography; but throughout his life he had passionately denounced “grammar” as a framework imposed on Russian by foreign languages and cultures. Dal’’s lifelong aversion to this kind of “grammar” complicated his work as a lexicographer substantially, since he felt that the imposition of, say, alphabetical order on his lexical material, would be grammatical heresy. His solution was his now infamous nest system, in which the verb acts as a root of sorts and serves as the headword under which all of a particular verb’s “derived” forms can be found, including nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and other parts of speech. (Here, Dal’ seems to share the opinion of Herder and later German Romantics like Wilhelm von Humboldt on the primacy of the verb.^[11]) It was important to Dal’ that the nest obey a clear visual logic, which meant that prefixed verbs had to move into a different nest, so that all of the words in a nest would begin with the same three or four letters. Best of all, in Dal’’s view, was that the nest was a structure internal to Russian because the “families” found in his nests are “clear” when one looks at a nest of words. On a more theoretical level, these “obvious” relationships constituted what he called a “general and particular law” [osobyi i obshchii zakon] in the Russian language.^[12] The macrostructure of his dictionary did not distort the natural shape of Russian but simply reiterated it.

* * *

Given his creation of a lexicography based on visual similarity, it is no surprise that the clearest and most logical entries in Dal’’s dictionary are for words that belong to the physical realm. The demands of visual consistency shaped the rules of Dal’’s nesting system, and it is arguably visual logic that dictates how the user “reads” Dal’’s dictionary. How and why Dal’ creates visual structures in his dictionary becomes clearer when one considers some of the dictionary’s entries related to the topic of ethnicity. Most intriguing is what words one must look to in order to find information on the Russian empire’s numerous ethnicities and peoples, and what information is considered most central in the definition of these terms. Case in point is the entry for kalmykovatyi (“Kalmyk-like”). The entry is the only one in the dictionary whose headword contains any form related to Kalmyk and it begins as follows:

Kalmyk-like, with a face like a Kalmyk; flat-faced with broad cheekbones and eyes of a particular slant.
Kalmykness of the face, a Kalmyk-like mien.^[13]

The user finds neither ethnographic information about lifestyle and cultural mores, nor geographical information about where in the empire Kalmyks might be found. All the definitions contain is a racial profile, meaning that the dictionary leaves the user capable of doing one thing vis-а-vis the Kalmyk – visually identifying him or her.
But the appearance of actual Kalmyks is not even the main focus of the definition. It is not kalmyk (“Kalmyk”) or kalmytskii (“Kalmyk, adj.”) that serves as the entry’s headword but kalmykovatyi (“Kalmyk-like”). This headword is far from the only instance in which the suffix –vatyi (“-like”) appears in Dal’’s dictionary. In fact, many person-related entries contain a sub-heading ending in –vatyi, including kazakovatyi (“Cossack-like”) (under the headword kazak/kozak (“Cossack”)) and durakovatyi (“fool-like”) (under the headword durak (“fool”)). The preponderance of this suffix in the dictionary, particularly in the context of ethnicity, seems perplexing since, in order to say whom someone resembles, one must first be able to say what that who “is”.
But imparting information is not Dal’’s main pedagogical goal. That Dal’ places more importance on describing how something or someone might resemble the phenomenon in question than on describing the phenomenon itself is entirely in line with his desire to evoke a state of mind and his overriding fear of putting words in users’ mouths. His reasons for providing such limited information about the people in question should not be immediately chalked up to ignorance or prejudice. When the user who seeks information about, say, the Kalmyk exhausts his resource after finding out what someone who looks like a Kalmyk looks like, Dal’ has accomplished a task; the dictionary’s user has acquired communicative competency on the topic. In other words, the user who before knew nothing about the Kalmyk people now has an easy reference point to return to the next time the topic comes up. And this reference point is all the more tangible because it is a visual image.
For other nests centered around group identities, an ethnonym serves as the entry’s headword, but these definitions likewise reduce the ethnic group to what Dal’ believes to be an identifying characteristic, as is the case for the entry zhid (“Jew [pejor.]”), which begins as follows:

Zhid m., zhidovin, zhidiuk, zhidiuga, zhidova, zhidovshchina, zhidovie, a miserly skinflint, mercenary miser; A born Jew is an exemplary enemy, like a nursing wolf. [more like proverbs]…
zhidomor m. zhidomorka f. A Jewish spirit or mercenary miser;

Here Dal’’s character assessment replaces phrenology as the defining feature of the group in question and, lest the user be tempted to think that this mercenary quality that Dal’ describes does not apply to every Jew, the proverb he introduces quickly dispels the notion. As was the case in the Kalmyk entry, this simplistic portrayal of the Jew is swiftly drawn into the realm of resemblance:

zhidovat’, zhidomornichat’, zhidomorit’, to live and behave as a zhidomor, to be miserly; to grab a penny by extortion, underpaying; zhidiukat’, -sia, to call someone a Jew; zhidovstvo n., zhidovshchina f., Jewish mores, way of life, zhidovstvovat’, to be of these mores. The judaizing heresy or the Subbotniks.

Although here Dal’ deals with a group that likely would have been more familiar to the user in the capital than the Kalmyk, he follows the procedure of the previous entry. He begins by reducing the group to one salient quality (here, being miserly), which then becomes the point of reference for the verbs of resemblance that follow, which are cited with no definitions of their own.
A less obviously pejorative treatment of group identity can be found in Dal’’s definition of kazak (“Cossack”), which, at first blush, seems to be much more informative than the preceding two. The definition begins with a hypothetical etymology of the word and then provides some detail on the social and martial organization of the group:

Cossack m. (of all origins the most evocative is the verb kazat’, -sia, i.e. gartsevat’ (to caracole, prance); but it is probably an Asian word) a military citizen, a deportee of wars that belongs to a particular class of light mounted Cossacks, obligated to serve when called on their horses, in their dress and with their weapons. There are also walking Cossacks, most famous among them the Black Sea infantry. Generally, Cossacks are divided into juveniles from 17 to 20 years; serving or service to 50 or 55; then there are 5 more years as stay-at-home, and then retired. Little Russian Cossacks are peasants and train recruits in their laws. In occupied lands that are controlled as a unit, Cossacks of each name form separate hosts, each under the direction of a hetman: The Don Cossack Host, the Ural, Orenburg, Ter, [and] Kuban [hosts].

The user gets more concrete information from this definition, including the names of various regional guards, differences in means of transportation and differentiation within the group based on age. And because this information subdivides the members of the (non-ethnic) class “Cossacks” by age, geography and method of transportation, the word kazak seems to map to multiple semantic fields, unlike the singular mapping of kalmyk (to “flat-faced”) and zhid (to “miser”).
A closer reading of the definition reveals that the information it provides, while varied, does indeed map to just one semantic field – “martial organization” – and that the terms that compose it are impossible to pin down. Although the exact years that correspond to different fighting statuses are given, what each status means is never explained. Moreover, Dal’’s attempted etymology of kazak is almost comically vague. It is unclear how his linking of the word “to prance” or “an Asian word” broadens the user’s understanding of the term.
Here, too, despite greater detail, reigns the same under-specificity that typifies the dictionary’s other people-related entries. The definition of kazak informs the user that the Cossack has a way of dress, a system of rank, and receives his orders from outside sources; but precisely what “dress,” “rank” and “orders” correspond to is never stated. Combined with the entry’s subsequent subheadings of resemblance, the picture here is arguably vaguer than that of the Kalmyk and Jew, as one can see in the subheading kazakami:

Cossack-like, as-Cossacks, [is what] they sometimes call young house serfs dressed like Cossacks, also messengers, delivery boys.

If all that the user knew was that Cossacks have a unique dress, all it can mean to hear that someone is dressed like a Cossack is that he is dressed “uniquely.”
Such under-elaborated descriptions of the various groups of peoples that populate the empire seem to be tautological. Dal’ appears to say that a Cossack is person who is a Cossack, but this should not be surprising in a lexicography that deals not with information but relationships. The relations Dal’ indicates can take the form of sameness versus difference; i.e., “with a different looking face” or “with different looking dress”; or they can take the shape of a value judgment – a plus or minus next to a member of a given group. (The Jew would receive a minus in Dal’’s system of relations as someone of lower moral substance.) These relations are durable or, perhaps, insidious, because their starting point is the self. One might say that the dictionary’s definitions of peoples tell the user not who he is interacting with, but how to orient himself in relation to various peoples.
The relational nature of these definitions raises the question of their reference point. Who is the self to whom Dal’’s definitions implicitly refer? The question is one of broader significance to the dictionary, but one can begin to look for evidence of the ethnic self to whom Dal’ refers in his definition of rusak. Unfortunately, or perhaps predictably, the definition begins with an apparent tautology, but here one finds no defining characteristic, not even an empty reference like those found in the entry for Cossack:

Rusak m. generally, a Russian person, rusachka, Russian [female]...

More confusing is the turn the definition takes after informing the user that a Russian is a Russian person:

he who particularly russianizes, wants to be Russian, russianize him. Russify to turn, to become, Russian. All Mordvinians russify.

The entry one might expect to provide the point of reference that would snap the dictionary’s other entries on ethnicity and group identity into focus eludes providing a concrete reference and steps quickly back into the realm of the relational. The dictionary’s only morphologically “Russian”-related entry does not explore what it means to be Russian, but rather the phenomenon of non-Russians russianizing. The result of this lack of reference is that even the main term in the dictionary’s equation of group identity remains a variable, albeit one with obvious prestige.
A user looking to find what it means to be Russian would be even more perplexed by what follows in the nest in the definition of rusak, where Dal’ lists flora and fauna that contain the “Russian” morpheme:

Rusak, a Russian hare, a gray hare that is bigger and stronger than the European hare; it is so called to distinguish it from the beliak [white rabbit]; the first remains gray all year, the second is all white in winter, only its spine is black. The rusak is found in the steppe and in ploughed fields, the beliak in the forest and at the forest’s edge. Rusak, Simbirsk a stone being milled (Naum.) The rusak is under a stone, the beliak under a bush. The rusak loves fields. The rusak is a steppe-dweller.
Rusak, Black Sea the biggest, simplest herring. Rusak broadcloth, from Russian wool: 8.75 inches wide, gray peasant [cloth]. Rusachina is before me like a bright candle! The rusak’s toes are wider and the beliak’s are fuzzier. Rusak hide. Rusak places. Rusak is tastier than white rabbit, meat. Trading in rusak, in hides.

Dal’’s definition of these animals differs sharply in its narrative structure from the procedure he uses for humans. The user is told exactly which hare and herring are in question, providing a glaring contrast to the first (human) part of the entry.
Other definitions’ non-human, biological subheadings share the same level of specificity as that of rusak. For example, the entry for tatarin (“Tatar”) begins with a list of grasses along with their Linnaean classifications:

Tatar and Tatarnik [thistle], the name of various prickly, weedy grasses, Cardus, Cirsium, pustosel, repei [burdock], rep’iak, bodiak, delovnik, volchets, chertopolokh, osot [pastor’s lettuce], mordvin, repeinik [burdock], lapushnik and in places Echinops, Onopordum, Serratula…

Similarly, under kalmykovatyi one finds:

Kalmyk-incense [lit.], the shrub Ephedra monostacha.

The concrete points of reference Dal’ gives these plants and animals are even more perplexing when one considers where else such concrete reference is lacking. None of Dal’’s entries on ethnicity discuss the geographical provenance of the groups in question. The user is told neither where these groups of peoples originated nor where their members can be found today. And not only are such geographical reference points mostly lacking in the dictionary’s definitions, one cannot find any headwords in the dictionary for geographical landmarks such as cities, rivers, or regions.
Dal’’s unwillingness to concretely correlate ethnicity and geography makes his theoretical account of Russian’s dialect map equally amorphous. He wrote, not incorrectly, that Russian did not share the complicated dialect maps of German and Italian, but veered into severe hyperbole when he stated that, unlike other European languages, Russian did not have any dialects [narechiia], just “speaks” [govory] (for Dal’, a level of linguistic variation much less differentiated from a language than is a dialect). He writes of these govory, “our local speaks are the legitimate children of the Russian language and are formed more correctly, truthfully and economically than our written language.”^[14] In Dal’’s picture of Russian historical linguistics there is no divergence. Instead, a Russian core gives birth to children that, with each generation, more perfectly express a mystical Russian essence.
Dal’’s aversion to the idea of linguistic differentiation in Russian was total. He believed that Russian did not have zhargony (which he defined as what would today be considered pidgins or creoles) like other languages because “even our foreign tribes quickly Russianize and take on the spirit of our language.”^[15] Bordering languages and ethnicities are drawn in to Russianness by a mysterious force that causes them to lose their integrity in a manner that Dal’ never elaborates. In other words, the Russian linguistic entity is just as nebulous and all-consuming as its corresponding ethnos, and ethnic and linguistic Russifications envelop their non-Russian counterparts similarly.
In his definitions of the linguistic terminology relevant to dialectology, Dal’ remains faithful to the undifferentiated picture of the Russian language he paints in his theoretical statements on dialectology. His definition of zhargon, for example, avoids characterizing the level of difference between a jargon, a “speak”, or an accent.

Jargon Fr. a dialect, a “speak”, local speech, a pronunciation;

If the user tries to chase down the other linguistic terms used in the definition, for example, by looking up rech’, he finds (as a subheading under the entry for rechi):

speech f. A “speak”, a dialect, a variety of expression and pronunciation;

The user would find much the same if he looked up govor (under the headword govorit’ (to speak)):

speak f. a local, oral dialect, pronunciation, accent, parlance

After looking up every synonym of zhargon Dal’ provides, the user is left with a rotating wheel of interrelated but undifferentiated terms – rech’, govor, proiznoshenie, narechie. The definition for narechie (found under the headword narekat’) is the only one of these linguistic terms that gives the user any means to sort out the relative status of dialect terms in their Dalian usage:

dialect – A local language that deviates insignificantly in pronunciation or by having words with different meanings from the root language.

But even this more detailed definition, which tells the user that the differences between a language and its dialects are phonological and lexical, undermines those differences as “insignificant.”
Once again, while Dal’’s theory of Russian dialectology is muddled, his practical knowledge of Russian dialectology was much more perceptive and widely lauded by his peers.^[16] In the dictionary’s lexicon, Dal’ never states precisely what he considers to be the various “speaks” or dialects of Russian, but in other writings he draws a much more concrete line around the linguistic borders of Russian. In his 1860 speech to the Society of Lovers of the Russian Word on the status of his dictionary, Dal’ begins his lecture with the following distinction:

The dictionary is called Dictionary of the Living, Great-Russian Language. In it one will find the entire living speech of this generation of Great-Russian. Little and White Russia are excluded: these are special dialects. However, some words from these dialects, having crossed over into Great-Russian regions, have made it into this dictionary.^[17]

Dal’ was consistent on this point in other writings. His “On the Dialects of the Russian Language” likewise excludes Ukrainian and Belarusian from the discussion of Russian dialectology at the outset. The article’s subheading, “On the Dialects of Great-Russian,” begins with: “The very title of this section shows that the Little-Russian language will not be discussed here. The Belarusian language in some respects resembles Great-Russian, in some it does not. The passage from one to the other, however, is gradual and its grammar is almost the same as Great-Russian’s.”^[18] This opening statement and the remainder of the article demonstrate that, in his work with the languages of the empire, Dal’ had developed stable phonological, syntactic, and lexical criteria for distinguishing between language and dialect, and for determining to which of the families of Great-Russian a dialect belonged.
The distance between Dal’’s theory and practice is nowhere greater than on this point. A reader familiar with his various theoretical writings would know that when Dal’ said “Great-Russian,” he was referring to a relatively limited linguistic area. The casual user of his dictionary, however, could easily presume that Great-Russian covered a much broader expanse, including elements from the empire’s Turkic and other indigenous languages as well.
Other entries in the dictionary confirm that Dal’ actually knew better in practice than he lets on in his theoretical statements. Dal’ defines govor as something that does not quite reach the level of a dialect. This govor was the most substantive deviation from the Russian “core language” to which Dal’ would concede. Dal’’s treatment of what today would be considered actual “speaks” or argots, however, differs dramatically from the generalized statements on dialectology found in his definitions of linguistic terminology. In practice, Dal’ both acknowledges argots’ lexical differences and elaborates on them in great detail. One remarkable example of his practical sophistication with language variation is his treatment of thieves’ argot:

Mazurik Novg. Mazurnik, mazurin (from mazur, Pole, or from mazul’, slob, ragamuffin?) a pickpocket, house thief and street robber in cities, esp. in the capitals where they invented their language [my emphasis. – K.V.], baikovyi [baika = fairy tale] or muzyka [music]. Do you go along to music? Do you speak our language? Pharaoh, police patrolman; butyr’, policeman; fig, look-out; kliui, constable; mikhlutka, gendarme; strela [arrow], Cossack; arshin [28 inches], merchant; meshok [sack], inspector of stolen goods; uborka [harvesting; tidying], burial; sara, babki, money; shishka [lump], wallet; shmel’ [bumble bee], purse; teplukha [teplyi = warm], fur coat; golubi, laundry on a garret; skameika [bench], horse; lokhanka, snuff box; vesnukhi and stukantsy [stukat’ = to knock], watches; kambala [flounder], lorgnette; lepen’, scarf; serezhka, lock; strikantsy, scissors; zhulik, [zhulit’ = to swindle] knife and helper boy; vynachit’, srubit’ [to fell], take from the pocket.

A standard Russian equivalent is provided for each term in the small, but substantial thieves’ lexicon Dal’ inventories. Why would Dal’ allow this “language,” as he calls it, to exist independently when elsewhere he consistently undermined the legitimacy of regional variance?
For the answer to this question, one must look more closely at how this entry differs from previous entries. Like the Cossack, the thief’s membership in this group is not determined by genetics, but a choice of some sort. Moreover, both thievery and being a Cossack involve a dual identity that does not threaten the integrity of one’s Russianness – one could ostensibly be both a Cossack and Russian just as one can speak thieves’ argot and Russian. The possibility of dual identity most likely explains why definitions like those of kazak and mazurik differ from those for kalmykovatyi and zhid. Dal’ allows these definitions to provide the geographical location of the phenomena in question (i.e., the Don, the capitals) and they can use standard Russian as a meta-language (music = “language”).
In the definitions of terms relevant to the study of Russian dialectology, on the other hand, the definition is composed of whatever terms remain after the headword is removed. The resulting definition is virtually indistinguishable from the word it was defining: govor = “narechie”, “vygovor,” “rech’”; rech’ = “govor,” “narechie,” “vygovor,” and so forth. This interchangeability means that an user who did not come to the dictionary with a clearly differentiated understanding of the terms in question would leave it no differently.
The problem with using the same language on both sides of a definition is brought into sharp focus when one tries to translate one of these entries, such as that of priskazka (“embellishment”):

embellishment [under * “to retell”] f. a catch-phrase, small addition [pribavka], adornment [prikrasa] added to a story with hints as to its logic.

Although the end of the definition – “with hints as to its logic” – gives the user some concrete information about what priskazka means, one would be hard-pressed to find three different synonyms for the definition’s first three terms – pribautka, pribavka, prikrasa k skazke. Their best equivalent would be something like “pre-story,” which does not do much to elucidate the unique meaning of the word they are supposed to define. Dal’ here violates one of the cardinal rules of lexicography by not creating an accessible meta-language to use on the right side of his entries;^[19] he does not use a language in his definitions that would enable an user to figure out an unknown word by comparing it with a known word or words.
A dictionary most often uses a neutral language to define its target terms. In a bilingual dictionary, this neutral language would be the user’s native language, while a dialect dictionary would use the standard language as its meta-language. Even an etymological dictionary would rely on a set of agreed-upon terms or symbols to define its roots. But Dalian lexicography is unique in this respect in that it refuses to retreat into an idiom more familiar to the dictionary’s user, defining the target language with the target language.
Dal’ retreats from this position, however, in his definitions of words that belong to professional jargons. Perhaps the clearest example of his use of meta-language for jargon-related entries can be found in the definition of kompas (“compass”).

compass […] In our navy the Dutch names of the compass points are used, but on the White Sea they have their own, appended here *) with a common Russian translation. The letters N, S, O, W mean, in sea-speak, noord, zuid, oost, west (north, south, east, west), and the letter t is pronounced ten’, meaning toward.

The definition provides the user with clear Russian synonyms for the Dutch derived compass points and even appends the following table (here only partially reproduced) lest there be any confusion.

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/Dal.jpg>

In the table the user finds not one but two meta-languages – the symbols for the compass points (column one) and their standard Russian equivalents (column four), which translate two professional jargons – the Dutch names for the compass points used by Russia’s professional sailors (column two) and the names for the compass points used by sailors along the White Sea (column three). The user cannot but understand what the unfamiliar items in columns two and three mean when he is provided recourse to two familiar idioms.
The different origins of the two kinds of language in question – professional jargons and dialectological terminology – likely motivates Dal’’s use of two radically different kinds of lexicography to treat them. The lexical variation one finds described in the entries for kompas and mazurki originates in their corresponding professions. Thieves and sailors have developed specialized lexicons for use at work in order to meet their specific needs; as these languages are used primarily in their appropriate professional context, they present no threat to the linguistic integrity of Russian. Dialectal variation, on the other hand, whatever its degree of difference from what Dal’ terms the “Russian core” may be, does threaten the integrity of the Russian linguistic organism. Every narechie, govor, and rech’ threatens to turn into something distinct, something non-Russian. And as Dal’’s earlier theoretical discussion of dialectology has shown, this is a directionality that he does not allow. For Dal’, languages and peoples can Russify, but they cannot become less Russian.
In what might be considered an effort to fortify the borders of this core, Dal’ does more than merely describe the phenomenon of Russification. He actively participates in it. Many definitions of clearly non-Russian headwords begin by acknowledging the word’s foreignness but conclude on a decidedly Russian note. Case in point is his definition of kalym:

Kalym m. among Tatars: the price for a bride, repayment [okup], ransom [vykup], discharge [vyvodnye]; among Russians where this custom exists, a kalym is called a drop [kladka], table money [stolovye den’gi], on-table [na stol]. Bribe [vziatka], wrest [sryv], fetch [slaz], leave-behind [otstaloe]; an extortion of any kind.
Kalyn archaic recompense, to assess, customs; a sum for buying out a pledge. Kalymnyi, related to kalym.

Dal’ – who, incidentally, learned Tatar and pondered writing a Tatar-Russian dictionary during his stay in Orenburg in the late 1830s^[20] – begins the entry with the word’s Tatar meaning and then moves into a series of Russian synonyms. The definition’s final subheading, kalymnyi, holds tremendous visual significance. What begins the definition as a Tatar word ends it morphologically Russian.
The definition for kalym includes a Russian definition of the word that legitimates its inclusion in a monolingual Russian dictionary. If Dal’’s definition is correct, then the word – as a foreign borrowing – can be considered Russian. The Russian-language status of other linguistically non-Russian items is not so clear. Dal’ returns to Tatar for the word kunak.

kunak [in Tatar = guest] m. Tat. along all of our Asian borders: friend, acquaintance, one with whom I break bread [lit. go bread-salt]. Kunachnyi, related to this.

Like the definition of kalym, the definition of kunak concludes by making a Russian adjective of the foreign word. Unlike kalym, kunak, based on Dal’’s own definition, does not seem to be a word or concept that Russian needs to borrow. Thus, Dal’’s goal in the entry appears to be ethnographic rather than linguistic. He attempts to make his ethnic Russian user comfortable with Tatar culture by showing its similarities to his own. His definition seems to say that kunak is not a word but a common human relationship.
Dal’ similarly grants cultural familiarization priority over definition in the entry for mazarki:

mazarki m. pl. East. graveyard; Tatar and non-Russian graveyard; ancient, abandoned graveyard or the place where traditionally they once were. It’s not far from the bathhouse to the mazarki, from life to death.
Mazarkovyi, -rochnyi, related to the mazarki.

His definition of this material object follows much the same narrative structure as do his definitions of domestic material objects, moving from material and familiar meanings to more ephemeral or unfamiliar definitions.^[21] He begins the definition with an accessible synonym, kladbishche (“graveyard”), gently defamiliarizes this term first in origin (tatarskoe kladbishche, i.e., “Tatar graveyard “), then further in time (drevnee, i.e., “ancient”); pokinutoe, i.e., “abandoned”), before defining mazarki as a place where graves once were. The definition concludes with a Russian proverb and a final linguistic Russification – a Russian adjective made from a foreign word.
Nowhere in the definition does Dal’ indicate that this ancient Eastern graveyard differs from what the dictionary’s user might be accustomed. The implied sameness is elegantly cemented in the definition’s proverb, the only item in the definition that indicates that the word mazarki exists in Russian – and perhaps (or even likely) the only Russian usage of the term. In the proverb “It’s not far from the bathhouse to the mazarki,” mazarki stands in for death, a human reality with which all of the dictionary’s users would be familiar.
Dal’’s use of a meta-language in his definitions of foreign words like these makes them easier for the lay user to use than his entries on the topic of ethnicity and folk genres. The different varieties of meta-language Dal’ uses to convey the meaning of these foreign words include bilingual translation (e.g., kunak = znakomyi, i.e., “acquaintance”) and extra-linguistic description. With their preponderance of description over linguistic information, entries like these would seem better suited to an encyclopedia than a dictionary, but for one lacuna – the lack of any account of what makes Tatar hospitality and burial customs uniquely Tatar. While Dal’ may seem to foray into ethnographic territory with these Tatar entries, the definitions he gives cannot properly be considered ethnographic. He identifies exotic practices and objects and gives their names but never tells users (to whom they would likely be unfamiliar) what makes these things exotic, or even how one can distinguish a Tatar grave from a Russian grave.
The lack of differentiation is not exclusive to these Tatar entries. In fact, this technique is so prevalent in his dictionary that one might call Dal’ an ethnographer of sameness. His foreign service experience in the far reaches of the empire – he served as a military doctor during Russia’s campaigns in Poland and Turkey, then took up positions in Orenburg (where he served in the empire’s ill-fated campaign to Khiva) and Nizhnyi Novgorod before spending his last days in Moscow – made him uniquely qualified to catalogue the varied ways of life of its different peoples. But when it came to describing what he had seen during his travels, Dal’ was as uncomfortable acknowledging differences in the ways of life of Russia’s many peoples as he was acknowledging Russia’s linguistic and dialectal variation.
Dal’’s aversion to differentiation also lays at the heart of his methods for cataloguing the ethnographic material he accumulated over the course of a lifetime. For instance, Dal’ traveled far and wide collecting proverbs, but when faced with choices about how to organize them in his Proverbs of the Russian People (1862), he opted to arrange the proverbs by vague topics such as “loneliness–marriage,” and included no mention of where or in what context he had heard the proverbs uttered. The specificity and variety of the collection of proverbs was sacrificed in order to emphasize their comparability.
Dal’ struggled with the Society of Lovers of the Russian Word over his commitment to this methodology, namely on the issue of his refusal to identify the sources of the words he collected:

“Having begun copying down every word that was new to me in 1819, wherever I may have come upon it, could I have foreseen demands like this and fulfilled them? Did I really go in search of words like mushrooms, carrying a basket to the forest so that I could bring them home and copy them down? […] What should I write down next to a word – and there are thousands of them – whose name or witness should I put under it? The name of my interlocutor? But no scholar knows him and there are tons of Nikolaevs and Vedernikovs in Russia and, of course, he could have invented the word, just like I could have.”^[22]

The society was then concerned with sniffing out words that Dal’ had invented himself, and his anger at the mere suggestion indicates his sensitivity on the issue of sources. For Dal’, it was imperative to emphasize the underlying commonality of the words, objects, and practices he described so that he could convey to users their linguistic availability. He wanted users to incorporate words describing exotic realia into his linguistic repertoire, and in order to convince users to do so, Dal’ would have to persuade them that the practices and things that these foreign words corresponded to were just like those with which the users were already familiar.
Dal’’s efforts to highlight linguistic and cultural sameness seem at odds with the contempt for the incursion of foreign words and “grammars” he expressed repeatedly in his theoretical statements. One possible explanation for this seeming paradox is that Dal’’s vitriolic statements against foreign incursions into Russian were preceded by a generous reapportioning of what “ours” and “theirs” corresponded to. Peoples, things and practices that belonged geographically to the Russian Empire were proprietarily Russian and, thus, exempt from Dal’’s rules about muddying the Russian pot with foreign influences. Proof that practices and words not indigenous to the empire received different treatment can be found in Dal’’s definitions of these non-nested terms, most of which he borrowed from the second edition of the Russian Academy Dictionary (1806-1822).

iguana f. a big American lizard, longer than an arshin [28 inches].

In this definition the organism’s foreignness is emphasized. No attempt is made to provide the user with an equivalent creature with which he might be more familiar, or to form a Russian adjective from the noun. The iguana’s difference from the Russian user’s experience estranges him not only from the object and the word that describes, but from the exotic American context to which it belongs.

* * *

Defending autochthony lay at the very heart of Dal’’s motivations, both in his early literary career and his subsequent scholarly work. He felt compelled to assert repeatedly that no literary muse inspired his work – claims that fellow academician Iakov Grot repeated for him in his memoirs:

“Many of Dal’’s stories about the folk and the soldier’s way of life, his fairy tales and legends were written, by his own admission, more in the interests of ethnography and linguistics than out of an artistic goal or in the fulfillment of some creative impulse.”^[23]

Dal’ made a similar disavowal of scholarly achievement in his 1860 speech: “The [order of words in the dictionary] doesn’t follow strict scientific logic. That I did not achieve.”^[24] When discussing his preparations to become a lexicographer Dal’ would almost brag of his lack of any professional philological training: “Out of a lack of book learning and knowledge, life itself was my teacher and befriended me on all sides with language.”^[25] He saw himself not as someone who used language but who was used by it and served as its conduit.
The inclusion of invented words – for Dal’ one of the most hurtful accusations leveled against his dictionary – would seem to counter-indicate the scholarly self-annihilation of which Dal’ boasted. Although the Ethnographic Division of the Russian Geographical Society agreed to award Dal’ its Konstantin Medal for his dictionary, they demanded that he account for words they believed he had himself created. Dal’’s response to the accusation was uncharacteristically irate. In his 1867 rebuttal (his “Response to the Verdict”) Dal’ tracks down three words he was accused of fabricating and defends their inclusion. He argues that two of the words do exist in Russian – soglas (“agreement, accord”) in the language of contracts and zhivulia (“automaton”) in folk language.^[26] He concedes to inventing the third word, lovkosilie (lit., dexterous strength), but protests that the word was only used as part of the definition of the headword gimnastika (“gymnastics”). He would never invent a headword.^[27]
To Dal’, the distinction between definition and headword meant everything, which explains why he reacted so sharply to this particular critique, calling on his “adversary” to “either prove not with one and not even with three examples that ‘Dal’ often puts in words of his own invention without indicating them,’ or acknowledge that he made a mistake and retract his words.”^[28] For Dal’, to put a word of his own invention on the left-hand side of a dictionary entry would be the same as forcibly changing the language, a vanity that constituted a cardinal sin in his self-effacing theory of lexicography. To put an invented word on the right-hand side of an entry, on the other hand, was precisely the kind of linguistic experimentation that Dal’ advocated. He himself was merely trying out the word lovkosilie to see if the language would accept it.
For the same reasons, the suggestion that Dal’ cite his informants for folk and regional words seemed ridiculous to him. Knowing that a certain person had uttered a word did not prove that the word was Russian; that was something only language itself could do:

“To what do I refer if they demand an accounting of where I found a particular word? I can’t point to anything but nature itself, the spirit of our language. I can only refer to the world, to all of Rusґ, but I don’t know if something was in print, I don’t know when and where and by whom it was said. If the verb posobliatґ, posobitґ (“to assuage,” impf, pf) exists, so too will posablivatґ, although it may not be in our books, and posablivanie, posoblenie, posob, posobka, and so forth also exist. Whom do I call to witness that these words exist, that I didn’t make them up? To the Russian ear, and nothing else.”^[29]

Dal’ takes the privilege of linguistic change entirely out of the hands of Russian’s speakers and returns it to the language itself, which he believed could somehow show its approval or disapproval of language constructed on the basis of its rules. New words or linguistic constructs could be novel, but after being vetted by Dal’’s mystical Russian core, they could not be different.
In Dal’’s view, Russian could perform such miracles because language was an organism with the ability to evaluate and reason. His language acts as a life-force, the link between body and soul – “Man’s verbal speech is the visible, palpable link, the connecting link between body and spirit: without the word there is no conscious thought; there is only sensation and mumbling.”^[30] Language provided a link between body and soul that was universal; but for Dal’ (as well as his German Romantic contemporaries, like von Humboldt), in each of language’s national iterations this relationship expressed itself differently, and it was the internal structures of each language that determined the way of life of its corresponding people.
The importance Dal’ placed on linguistic structure’s role in determining one’s national identity explains his investment in the outcome of Russia’s debates on language reform. The situation as he saw it in 1856, when Russian philologists began to practice the same kind of linguistics as their Western colleagues, was particularly precarious:

“I blame this whole muddle […] on the Western scholarly view of our language. […] This foolish trend can have two outcomes: either we will be followed by more independent people that will search for the key to the secret lock, decipher Russian grammar and construct it anew, throwing off today’s; or our language will gradually lose its independence and, with an irrepressible deluge of foreign expressions, turns of phrase and even thoughts, will submit to the laws of Western languages.”^[31]

Here, as in his other discussions of language, Dal’ makes no distinction between the structure of a language and the structure of the meta-language used to describe it. To him they were one and the same. For Dal’ the stakes were high because the choice, as he saw it, was between adopting a foreign scientific model and therefore becoming foreign, or letting Russian itself articulate its own language of description and thus remain Russian. While he considered other languages to be legitimately governed by grammar (Dal’ cited German and Latin), Russian was not similarly governed. According to Dal’, other related Slavic languages had suffered by allowing foreign grammars to be imposed upon them. These languages had “melded with Western languages [slilsia s zapadnymi iazykami],”^[32] and in so doing, they also lost their souls. They lost what made their languages unique and “became new languages, filled with things adopted from other sources.”^[33] Russian alone, then, had the opportunity to discern its inherent structures.
The wager may have been particularly important to Dal’ given that his father’s foreign birth and his Danish last name sometimes led others to question his loyalties. He seemed to respond to these concerns in his response to his one-time assistant Melґnikov’s question as to whether he considered himself Russian or German:

“It’s not one’s tribe that determines one’s allegiance but a person’s spirit, their soul. That’s where you have to look to find out whether a man belongs to one people or another. But how can one define the belonging of a soul? By the manifestation of the soul, of course, that is, thought. The language you speak in is the people you belong to. I think in Russian.”^[34]

* * *

As Pypin points out, if Dal’ belonged to any generation it was the generation of the thirties, the decade in which he published his first literary works.^[35] He claimed friendships with the decade’s dominating literary figures, including Zhukovskii and Gogolґ and was even the addressee of Pushkin’s dying words. Dal’ claimed to have convinced these peers of the need to document folk language and integrate it into literature in an effort to force out foreign influence. As he told Grot, “Pushkin and Grech heartily supported this inclination of mine; so did Gogolґ, Khomiakov, Kireevskii, Pogodin.”^[36] At least in his own estimation, Dal’’s ideas on sources for renewing the Russian literary language held considerable weight among his Romantic cohort.
Although Dal’ cites no sources for these theories on language, the relationship of his ideas on language as a self-regulating organism clearly echo the organic nationalism of the Jena Romantics. And while it is most often Herder to whom intellectual historians trace the nineteenth century vogue for the language and customs of the folk in Eastern Europe, it is arguably another pupil of Kant’s – Fichte – with whom Dal’’s statements on the high stakes of Russian linguistic purity share a closer relationship. In the thirteenth of his Addresses to the German Nation (1806-1807) Fichte asserts the necessity of preserving linguistic purity in order to maintain cultural coherence.

“The first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.”^[37]

For Fichte, the Germans’ superior ability to maintain a close relationship to the roots of their language meant a corresponding clarity of thought of which Germans were uniquely possessed, and in light of which the threat of foreign words (particularly those from French or, as he termed it, “neulateinisch”) became especially acute. Dal’ had expressed these same fears for the independence of Russian.
Dal’’s apparent silent borrowing from German Romanticism seems a perfect example of a special kind of “Romantic” irony. Dal’ could certainly transplant these justifications of linguistic and cultural chauvinism to the Russian context, but to acknowledge their source would nullify their message. Thus, the linguistic tradition he referred to scornfully as “grammar-based” was one to which he was likely far more bound (if not beholden) than he would have liked to admit.
As an aging relic of Russian Romantic thought, Dal’ would eventually fall victim to the bifurcation in Russian conservative thought that coincided with his dictionary’s publishing. As the period of Great Reforms got underway and Slavophilism gave way to conservative and nationalist descendants in the wake of the Crimean War, the question of Russianness had become politicized. Conservative dynasticists such as Nikolai Grech and Faddei Bulgarin advocated Russian isolationism, while nationalists such as Mikhail Pogodin and Feodor Tiutchev sought the expansion of Russian cultural and political influence. Neither was a comfortable fit for Dal’, whose emphatically linguistic Russian nationalism, which had been entirely appropriate to Slavophile ideology, was perhaps now too emphatically nationalist for monarchists and too domestic for nationalists. (Moreover, Dal’’s Danish parentage made him a problematic icon for nationalists like Pogodin and Iurii Samarin, who were on the attack against the presence of “foreign” elements like Baltic Germans in the empire.) In light of this intellectual sea change, it was ultimately Dal’’s characteristic self-effacement that saved his dictionary’s legacy in the turbulent days of its publishing – since he considered the Russian language itself to be the dictionary’s author, he could leave the work open for posterity to do with it as it pleased. As he would later tell Grot, “this is not a dictionary, but the stock [zapasy] for a dictionary”.^[38]