The Sreznevsky family comes from the village of Srezneva, inhabited by "state peasants", located on the high bank of the Oka River, 18 versts from the county town of Spassk, Ryazan province... With these words, the volume in memory of Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky, published in 1916, was opened. Now we are preparing for a new anniversary - 2012 will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian philologist and teacher, Academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences I. I. Sreznevsky. And even now, many of the facts of his biography are almost unknown to the general readership. But it is in them that the foundations of his personality lie, which was formed not without the influence of the family tree of the family and its traditions.

I. I. Sreznevsky's ancestors were priests of the village of Sreznev for more than one generation. "His grandfather, the priest Yevseny Ioannovich, burdened with a large family, having no means, was unable to give his children even the smallest education. Who among them was looking for science and was interested in it, had to get it himself, if only he had sufficient willpower, " wrote Sreznevsky's son Vsevolod Izmailovich (In memory of Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky. Book I. Pg., 1916. P. 1). The father of the future Russian scientist, Ivan Evseevich, graduated from the Russian Academy of Sciences-

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He continued his studies at the Moscow State University. After graduating, he worked for some time as a teacher, and "after reaching the degree of Master of Philosophy and Liberal Sciences in 1804, he was invited by A. G. Demidov to the Demidov Higher Sciences School, which was then opening in Yaroslavl, to the department of "literature of ancient languages and Russian eloquence"; then in 1812, after the death of Professor of Russian eloquence and poetry at the Kharkiv University, I.S. Rizhsky was chosen by the University council for this department and a year later was awarded the title of Doctor of Liberal Sciences" (Sreznevsky Vs.I. A brief sketch of the life and work of I. I. Sreznevsky // In Memory of Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky. Book I. Pg., 1916. P. 2).

Like his father, I. I. Sreznevsky" devoted himself to the education of youth more out of the good inclination of his soul than out of duty " (ibid., pp. 3-4). That is why his youthful hobbies were literature and music, poetry and folk folklore of Little Russia - in short, everything that can lift the spirit above the hardships of earthly life. And indeed, even such a strange and unusual name, which his father gave him against the will of his relatives-Ishmael ("God will arrange") - seemed to determine the future fate of I. I. Sreznevsky.

In 1826, Izmail Ivanovich entered the ethical and political department of Kharkiv University, where the main subject of his studies was law. After completing the university course, I. I. Sreznevsky entered the service of the Kharkiv Noble Deputy Assembly, and from 1834 he was a librarian in the Kharkiv City Library. At the same time, he did not leave his teaching career, working as a teacher of Russian language and literature, history and geography in private schools. In 1835, he passed the exam for a master's degree in political history, statistics and economics, and soon defended his dissertation on the topic "On the essence and content of theory in the political sciences". In September 1837, I. I. Sreznevsky was appointed associate Professor of the Department of Political Economy and Statistics at Kharkiv University. "Judging by the stories of the audience," his son writes in his memoirs, "I. I. Cha's lectures differed sharply from those of other professors; the lecturer shone in them both by the novelty of his views, the richness of data drawn from foreign works, and the skill and vividness of his presentation; his audience was full, and people were talking about the readings in the city" (Ibid., pp. 11-12).

Of great importance to him was the journey through the Slavic lands, which he went to in 1839. The scientist visited Berlin, where he studied Sanskrit under the guidance of the famous linguist F. Bopp. Then he visited Prague and studied the Czech language, visited major scientific centers of Slavic Europe-Vienna, Zagreb, Dresden, Krakow, Warsaw, met with prominent scientists - P. I. Preis, Karadzic, L. Stuhr. From his trip abroad I. I. Slice-

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Nevsky brought a variety of ethnographic and literary materials, unique observations on dialects (in particular, he studied the "Gorno-Luzhitsky dialect"). It was to Slavism, its past and present, that he devoted his further activity and from 1842 at Kharkiv University began lecturing on the history and literature of Slavic dialects.

I.I. Sreznevsky also draws on the experience of Russian scientists in his numerous investigations. Thus, he successfully continued the traditions of the scientific school of A. Kh. Vostokov. By the way, it was he who wrote the program for collecting materials for the "Experience of the regional Great Russian Dictionary", proposed and supplemented information on Vologda and Voronezh regional words, dialects of north-eastern Siberia. The remarkable work of the scientist - "Thoughts on the History of the Russian Language" - presented by I. I. Sreznevsky at the annual solemn meeting of St. Petersburg University on February 8, 1849, was largely programmatic and was sympathetically accepted by the public. The main achievement was that he introduced the Russian language into the comparative historical study of Slavic languages "and thus determined the main foundation on which the building of the historical grammar of the Russian language should be built... "(Shakhmatov A. A. Course of the history of the Russian language. 1908-1909 academic year. Ch. I. SPb., [1909] [Lithographed edition], p. 449). In his book, the author also presented his view on the correlation and differences between the folk language and the book language (see for more details: Sreznevsky I. I. Thoughts on the history of the Russian language, Moscow, 1959. p. 36-38 et seq.), gave a clear picture of the development of the Russian language and its formation as an independent cultural phenomenon.

In other articles and notes, I. I. Sreznevsky invariably continued to analyze the language data he had gathered from written monuments. So, in his work "On the ancient Russian language", he wrote, in particular:: "A solid foundation for the formation of the bookish Russian language, separate from the language spoken by the people, was laid in the XIII-XIV centuries, at the same time as the popular Russian language underwent a decisive transformation of its ancient system. In the fourteenth century, the language of secular letters and chronicles, which was dominated by the vernacular language, was already noticeably removed from the language of spiritual writings" (Ibid., pp. 82-85).

I. I. Sreznevsky drew his main conclusions from the extensive experience of studying Slavic languages and dialects and monuments of Russian antiquity. It can be said that he devoted his entire life to these precious sources, publishing and researching their history, texts, and language. Among the most significant works, we should mention first of all "Ancient monuments of Russian writing and language (X-XH centuries). General Time Review "(St. Petersburg, 1866) and information and notes on little-known and unknown monuments published in 1867-1891.

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Other scientific achievements of the scientist are also widely known: the discovery of the "Savva Book", "Undolsky's Leaves", "Kiev Glagolitic Passages", as well as his research on paleography (see, for example: Sreznevsky I. I. Slavo-Russian Paleography of the XI-XIV centuries, Moscow, 1885) and lexicography, which were based on extracts business and household content. "But it is not enough to read ancient texts; we must also understand them," A. I. Sobolevsky said in an article dedicated to the memory of I. I. Sreznevsky (Sobolevsky A. I. Merits of I. I. Sreznevsky / / In Memory of Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky. Book L-St. Petersburg, 1916, p. 178).

Izmail Ivanovich was intensively engaged in preparing a dictionary of ancient non-Church Slavonic and Old Russian languages, which was published later through the efforts of his children. Here the talent of I. I. Sreznevsky was expressed with the greatest force, and his linguistic flair and many years of work on collecting and publishing manuscripts were embodied in a consistent, scientifically based dictionary manual, where the theory and history of language are presented in a variety of its forms. Let us note in passing that the archive of I. I. Sreznevsky contains rare examples of unconventional, "carnival" business writing. Such is, for example, "The case of the escape of a runaway rooster from a hen" in the 1750s (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. f. 436. On. 1. Ed. chr. N 1021).

I. I. Sreznevsky wrote about the sources of his dictionary: "The data included in my dictionary are extracted from all the monuments of our antiquity that have come down to us in the original or in lists. The actual Russian monuments, as far as I know them - chronicles, charters, charters, words, legends, lives of saints, records and inscriptions - I have collected for the dictionary all without exception. The monuments of Slavic-Russian church writing have also been studied by me in terms of vocabulary, but not all of them. Unread monuments I continue to study one by one and constantly increase my stock" (quoted from the ed.: Kondrashov N. A. Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky (1812-1880) / / Russian speech. 1980. N 2. P. 101).

It is necessary to mention one more aspect of his activity, which, as it seems to us, is directly related to modern science. Observations of the word and text, folk dialects and the culture of the Russian language as a whole led the scientist to formalize a special linguistic discipline - geography of the Russian language, the progenitor of modern ethnolinguistics. And to this day, this idea of I. I. Sreznevsky is as relevant as it was a century and a half ago. "Geographical questions in linguistics," he wrote, "are the most up-to-date; newer and more interesting ones have not yet been found, and they have taken their place in research on the Russian language almost at the same time as in research on other European languages" (I. I. Sreznevsky, Remarks on Materials for the Geography of the Russian Language // Vestnik

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Of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society for 1851, Part 1. Books 1-2. Ed. V. 1851. P. 3). And then he explains the purpose of this science: "It is the task of language geography to study exactly what language, dialect, or dialect people speak in a particular region and what exactly was the influence of local circumstances on the state of language in different regions" (Ibid., p. 4). The program of studying language geography proposed by I. I. Sreznevsky also sounds modern:

"I. About the area occupied by the language: about the land and people in historical and geographical terms, about the settlement of the people and the settlement of foreigners in their land.

II. About the language, in relation to its characteristic features, to the influence that the terrain of nature and the languages of its neighbors made on it.

III. About folk literature as a work of a locality in the language of this locality.

IV. On the written processing of the language also as a local work" (Sreznevsky I. I. Rus ' Ugorskaya. Excerpt from the Experience of geography of the Russian language // Vestnik Imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva [Bulletin of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society]. Part 4. Kn. 1-2. Otd. II. 1851. P. 2).

At one of the meetings of the Russian Language and Literature Department of the Academy of Sciences in 1848, I. I. Sreznevsky was elected an adjunct for his academic achievements and "gradually began to revive the dull activities of the Department and soon for many years, until his death, became its center, its main scientific force" (Sreznevsky Vs. I. Kratkiy Ocherk zhizni i deyatel'nosti I. I. Sreznevskogo [Essay on the life and work of I. I. Sreznevsky]. Book I. Pg., 1916, p. 40). The first idea of the scientist in his new capacity was to organize a periodical devoted exclusively to Russian and Slavic philology. And in 1852, the first issue of Izvestiya ORYAS was published, the soul of which was I. I. Sreznevsky. In 1854, he was elected an academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and then he became the chairman of its Second Branch.

Students of I. I. Sreznevsky, among whom were many talented historians, ethnographers, philologists, and teachers: P. A. Lavrovsky, V. I. Lamansky, M. I. Sukhomlinov, N. S. Tikhonravov, A. N. Pypin, A. S. Budilovich, R. F. Brandt, and T. D. Florinsky-remained devoted to the work of their teacher by creating original works and continuing each in its own way to develop the ideas of I. I. Sreznevsky. Thus, one of them, P. A. Lavrovsky, published a detailed essay "On the language of the Northern Russian Chronicles", where he again outlined the idea of I. I. Sreznevsky about the uniformity of the Russian language before the XIII-XIV centuries, but after analyzing the language of Novgorod manuscripts, where some dialect features dating back to the era before the XII century were preserved, he introduced a significant amendment indicating the existence of local

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differences in the Russian language of the most ancient times (see: Lavrovsky P. A. On the language of the Northern Russian chronicles. St. Petersburg, 1852).

In the activity of I. I. Sreznevsky, there was an amazing harmony and strict comparative grammatical studies, and blessed work with dictionary materials, and folk folklore, and works on deciphering and publishing monuments of ancient antiquity. I. I. Sreznevsky, according to the memoirs of his daughter, was very musical, and in the performance of works he valued "not so much virtuosity as virtuosity". expressiveness" (O. I. Sreznevskaya. Khudozhestvennye raboty I. I. Sreznevskogo i ego otnoshenie k poezii obshchego [Artistic works of I. I. Sreznevsky and his attitude to poetry in general]. Book I. Pg., 1916, p. 263).

One of his acquaintances, S. A. Nikolaevsky, inspired by the scientist's story about the origin of his name, said::

During the great twelfth year,

When did Russia let its enemies know,

A citizen was born among the Russian people

To the Fatherland in honor and to the delight of us.

And, celebrating the feast of Ishmael,

We don't worry about him,

And we believe that it will not be impoverished for a long time.

And that God will arrange everything for him

(ibid., p. 277).

Indeed, for I. I. Sreznevsky, two concepts, two destinies were inseparable: science and the fatherland. Let the words spoken by him on the occasion of the centenary of Lomonosov's death be to some extent "parting words "to his present and future followers:"Love science not in yourself alone, but in all those who are devoted to it, everywhere and in everything, and warm this love in young people."

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