THE STORY OF CREATING ONE DICTIONARY (Moscow–Petrograd 1921–1923)

The article briefly highlights the story of creation and gives a brief description of the unpublished “Dictionary of the Russian Living Literary Language”, which was being created from June 1921 to October 1923 on the initiative of V. I. Lenin and under the auspices of D. N. Ushakov. The interest towards the dictionary is caused by the fact that in 2023 a card index of this dictionary was found in the Great Dictionary Card Index of the Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg). The card in dex was moved from Moscow to Leningrad in 1934, and its fate was considered unknown for a long time. The materials of this card file, which includes about 140 thousand cards, as well as archival information about it, stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation and in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, allow us to make a number of practical observations about the principles of the dictionary, its content and design. For the first time, the article publishes samples of dictionary entries, and draws some conclusions about the principles of lexicographic work on the dictionary. The dictionary is unique in a number of historico-scientific and historico-cultural parameters. Interestingly, the author of the dictionary project was V. Bryusov and the selection of materials was carried out from the works of famous writers and poets of the early XX century, including poets of the Silver Age. The dictionary card index was created manually by the famous and young phi lologists from Moscow (G. Danilov, M. Peterson, A. Peshkovsky, E. Polivanov, A. Refor matsky, A. Selishchev, N. Sidorov, S. Solovyov, R. Shor and many others) and Petrograd (L. Shcherba, E. Istrina, V. Chernyshev, S. Obnorsky, V. Vinogradov, B. Tomashevsky, S. Shakhmatova, etc.), whose autographs are presented in large numbers in the card index. The materials of the dictionary card index turn out to be an invaluable source for studying the history of Russian explanatory lexicography of the 1920s and 1930s.