V. I. Dahl's work as a storyteller is closely connected with other aspects of his philological activity. First of all, both in the fairy tales written down by him and in the fairy tales composed by him, one feels a linguist-lexicographer. But Dahl was interested not only in the peculiar verbal fabric of a folk tale, but also in the peculiarities of the syntax of folk speech. In addition, in all the works that came out from Dahl's pen, a subtle and observant ethnographer can be felt. Not only in the works related to the "natural school", but also in fairy tales written long before its appearance, there is an interest in folk life, traditions, and the peculiarity of human relations. Both through language and everyday life, Dahl tried to understand and reflect the peculiarities of the Russian national mentality. And, of course, Dahl believed that the full range of popular thinking is manifested in the language. Hence the writer's close attention not so much to the plot of the recorded fairy tales, but to all the features of their speech structure.

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Dahl began his philological activity by collecting materials for a dictionary (even at the time when he served in various departments), along the way he wrote down proverbs and sayings, as well as fairy tales. But, as Dahl himself wrote later," it was not the fairy tales themselves "that were important to him," but the Russian word, which we have in such a pen that it was impossible for it to appear in people without a special excuse and reason - and the fairy tale served as a pretext for him " (Dahl V. I. One and a half words about today's Russian in the Russian language // Moskvityanin, 1842, No. 20, p. 549).

For the first time, the fairy tales collected by Dahl were published in a separate edition in 1832. The book was called " Russian fairy tales from the folk oral tradition to the civil literacy transferred, adapted to everyday life and walking sayings decorated by the Cossack Vladimir Lugansky. Pyatok the first". The book was published in St. Petersburg, but the entire print run was immediately withdrawn by order of the Third division, as the authorities saw in the fairy tales a satirical beginning and a reflection of the difficult situation of the lower classes.

The originality of the fairy tales published by Dahl can already be seen in the title: the writer subjected them to some literary processing and, if possible, colored them with proverbs and sayings collected by him. This approach is quite understandable, since the principles of strict scientific writing have not yet been developed by folklorists. Dahl also believed that interspersing sayings, proverbs, and truly folk expressions that he noticed would help reveal the originality of truly folk thinking. At the same time, he tried to give the language of the recorded fairy tale a reliable character, preserving the vocabulary and syntax of folk speech.

At the same time, Dahl strengthened (and sometimes even informed) the shade of social irony in the folk tale, this contributed to a more explicit reflection of the social situation of the people, which, together with the reliable transmission of folk speech, alerted the authorities. And this publication practically did not reach the reading public.

Here Dahl first performed under a pseudonym, which he would later use frequently. He gave one of the surviving copies of the collection to Pushkin.

Dahl tried to release his fairy tales a year after the famous "fairytale competition" of Pushkin and Zhukovsky. Both poets, who spent the summer in Tsarskoye Selo, where Pushkin and his young wife rented a dacha, decided to create a literary fairy tale with a pronounced national flavor on a bet. Zhukovsky then wrote "The Tale of the Sleeping Princess", " The Tale of Tsar Berendey...", "The War of Mice and Frogs". Zhukovsky tried to give his works the spirit of a folk fairy tale.

As a creative competition, Pushkin wrote The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Zhukovsky took his own prose translation of the fairy tale "Rosehip"as the plot basis of the work

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from the collection of the Brothers Grimm, and also used the French prose fairy tale based on the same plot "The Beauty Sleeping in the Forest" by Charles Perrault. Pushkin used his own notes for his fairy tale, made in Mikhailovsky in 1824. He most vividly and reliably recreated all the poetry of the world of Russian fairy tales, and it was not by chance that Zhukovsky recognized his younger brother as the winner in this dispute.

Both Pushkin and Zhukovsky created a literary fairy tale, the genre of which especially flourished in the era of romanticism. And the competition itself had, of course, romantic roots.

In the literary fairy tale of the romantic period, a special, truly fabulous world is reproduced, which is given national features (the question of the national was extremely relevant in the literature of romanticism). It is characteristic that both Pushkin's fairy tale and Zhukovsky's fairy tale were poetic.

Dahl took a completely different path (by the way, it was unthinkable for him to use a story from a foreign-language source). Processing the recorded fairy tales, he emphasizes the specifics of folk speech and saturates his works with details of national life.

Pushkin appreciated Dahl's unique experience and insisted that the writer continue studying the Russian language and, obviously, insisted on the need to create a dictionary (see: Porudominskiy V. I. Zhizn i slovo, Moscow, 1985, p. 100). Pushkin expressed the valuable idea for Dahl that all the originality of Russian speech is most freely manifested in a fairy tale. When they met in Orenburg in 1833, Pushkin told Dahl the tale of George the Brave and the wolf. And while in St. Petersburg, Pushkin sent Dahl his handwritten copy of The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish with the inscription " Yours-from yours! Storyteller Cossack Lugansk-storyteller Alexander Pushkin".

The increased interest in the folk tale, and, first of all, Pushkin's interest (not only in the fairy tale, but also in the elements of folk speech) prompted Dahl to further record and edit Russian folk tales. Moreover, Dahl develops a new (in comparison with his older brothers in the pen) attitude to the recorded material: he does not seek to create his own works based on the received plots. Dahl sees himself more as a folklorist than a writer. He not only wanted to convey to the reader the flavor of folk speech, but also tried to convey the Russian language spoken by the common people, with all the lexical and syntactic features inherent in this language. Unlike other authors of the 20-30s who turned to the genre of Russian fairy tales, Dahl did not try to make the language of the work smoother, did not try to bring folk speech closer to literary speech. Already in the first book he published, he wanted to introduce the reader to folk life and show the value of national culture.

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It is no coincidence that the first edition of Dahl's fairy tales, which never reached the general reader, was preceded by a preface that resembles a manifesto, although it was processed in a folk-fairy style (later this preface was reprinted in the Collected Works of V. I. Dahl in 1861).:

"Where our heads are oiled and patterned, our beards are combed and fluttered, and our moustaches are twisted and fringed. Where are the dark, velvet caftans, the brown poyark hats, the silk-Bokharian sashes, the Tartar armyaks, the smart red shirts, the embossed silk mittens, the striped trousers, the stitched boots with a border, the faceted cufflinks on the shirts, the gilded clasps on the coats? Oh, there was, there was a time in Russia that a young man went in a caftan, a girl went in a sundress! Good people! Old and small, children on wooden cones, old men with sticks and props, girls, Russian brides! Go, old and young, listen to wonderful and whimsical fairy tales, listen to were-Russian fables! And who knows the Great Russian cursive literacy, sit down and write it down, write it down seven times, keep your mouth shut, don't drop a word! (...) Be quiet, valiant sons of the Fatherland, let us not put our land to shame! It is enough for our maidens-brides to go-to wear curls knitted-raw, braided-silk; in Russia, each dog walks in its own wool, and Russian braids are softer than Shamakhi silk, cleaner than Bohemian glass!" (Dal V. I. Stories, stories, essays, fairy tales, Moscow, 1964, pp. 460-461).

In this preface, Dahl addressed readers who love original Russia and cherish national traditions, and raised the question of purifying Russian culture from foreign borrowings. He tried to present them with a collection of Russian fairy tales, which the printed tradition did not yet know. An educated reader was prepared for the language of fairy tales by a preface full of colorful fairy-tale and ethnographic vocabulary.

With all the innovation of Dahl's approach to folklore material, there is a certain similarity between the narrator's speech in the preface to "Russian Fairy Tales" and Rudy Pank's pranks in "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka". No wonder these books appeared almost simultaneously.

Dahl himself in one of the fairy tales describes a storyteller, from whose mouth Russian speech could come, decorated with proverbs, sayings, colloquial expressions: "A fairy tale of adventures is composed, it flaunts with sayings, it responds to fables of the past, it does not chase everyday byli; and whoever is going to listen to my fairy tale, let him not be angry with Russian sayings," homegrown is not afraid; I have a storyteller in bast shoes; on the parquet floors did not wobble, the arches are painted, the speech is intricate only from fairy tales and knows " ("The tale of Ivan the Young Sergeant, A Dashing Head, without a family, without a tribe,

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just without a nickname " / / Dal V. I. Stories, stories, essays, fairy tales. Moscow, 1961. p. 393).

In the fairy tales that Dahl published in various magazines in the 30s, the plots characteristic of fairy tales prevailed. Their place of action is "the farthest kingdom, the farthest state". It is mentioned, for example, in the "Tale of Ivan the Young Sergeant": "In a certain autocratic kingdom that is far away, beyond the farthest state, there lived Tsar Dadon Golden Purse" (Ibid., p.394).

The described environment of Tsar Dadon is very similar to the bureaucratized Russian state. Such social specifics were completely new to the fairy tale.

In Dahl's fairy tales of the 30s, splint features appear. So, in the "Tale of poor Kuz the Untalented Head and the peremetchik Buduntai" the place of action is defined as follows:" Once upon a time there was in a distant land, between the Czechs and Lyakhs, the old man Guslyar and the old woman Guslyarka " ... (Ibid., p.424). Everything that is outside of its own world, its own state, seems distant, unfamiliar, and different peoples live there mixed up. This is a typical feature of the popular idea of the world, characteristic of a fairy tale.

In the same works, there are popular ideas about luxury - an Italian handkerchief (which his wife gave to the Young Sergeant on the road to Ivan), Shamakhi silks, etc.

The language of Dahl's fairy tales of the 1930s is closer to the language of Russian folk fairy tales than to the language of literary fairy tales. Dahl's style is distinguished by a large abundance of proverbs and sayings, which often join one another, forming a whole chain: "There is a parable shorter than a bird's nose: to marry is not to put on bast shoes, and some bast shoes are woven without measure, but they fall on every foot! And truly, a wife does not play the harp: after playing, you can't hang it on the wall, but with whom you go down the aisle, with whom you go to the grave - look closely, get used to it, and then marry; try it on ten times, but cut it off once; don't go to marry a hot nag! " (Ibid., pp. 395-396); "Free will, and saved paradise; and someone else's conscience-the grave; for every fly do not keep up with the butt, and my okrutnik for you will not chase!" (Ibid., p. 409). Such an abundance of proverbs and sayings makes the language of Dahl's fairy tales unique.

Sometimes he creates expressions that resemble proverbs. Often, they also form a chain, but not so much for coloring the language, but for a clear moral subtext. And if such a chain of aphorisms begins the work, then the mood is created in advance not only for entertainment, but also for deep reflection. So begins the "Tale of the adventures of the devil-novice": "There is a fish for vomit, there is also a spoon-bait-who has eaten enough of the rich, cloying byli, then go for a holiday snack with a tall tale of lean and spicy, radish, onion, pepper flavored! True on-

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halna and shameless: she walks like a mother in the world, in our time it's somehow shameful to fraternize with her. True - a dog is a chain; it only needs to lie in a kennel, and let it down - so it will cling to anyone! Byl - a skittish nag; it is a ridge-peasant; it rarely walks, but firmly steps, and where it becomes, it will rest as hard as it will put down roots! A parable is a good thing! She doesn't go around looking sloppy, she doesn't pretend to be open-mouthed, she doesn't stick like a knife to her throat; she goes out on a holiday, dressed up, sits outside the gate from idleness on a pile of rubble - bows to everyone who passes by boldly and affably: who is willing and eager-find out the okrutnik; who is not up to it-pass, as if by a mug, as if you do not see that people are throwing a nickel each!" (Ibid., p.409).

Such an abundance of moral conclusions, although dressed in folklore clothes, gives away the author's style of Dahl, who wanted to strengthen and emphasize the idea contained in the folklore source. These artfully constructed chains of the writer give his fairy tales a special charm, patterned, and at the same time-and wisdom.

In one of the fairy tales of the first collection, there is a very interesting case of understanding the peculiarities of national consciousness through the word. The "Tale of Ivan the Young Sergeant" tells about the numerous trials that the hero went through, but the most difficult of them was to keep his word and not sleep for three days. Ivan held on for a long time, but in the end he could not stand it and fell asleep, and when he was called out, "he woke up, but was not found, and uttered the Russian word with fright: guilty! He goes to the beer, but by the way he says: maybe, maybe somehow, and if, unfortunately, the ends don't meet: it's my fault! That is what is ruining our brother on Russian soil; that is why our brother is being beaten; yes, it is clear that it is still not enough; it is not enough! " (Ibid., p. 404).

Such attention to the word is extremely characteristic of Dahl; the word expresses the specifics of national consciousness. Dahl first conscientiously wrote down folk tales, and then supplemented them with the material he had and collected. A similar principle of operation remained with him in the following years. But in the 40s, the plot and language of Dahl's fairy tales changed. In the 30s, Dahl was attracted to fairy tales with a rather complex conflict, but the everyday beginning, nevertheless, was very clear in his fairy tales. In the 40s, the plot of fairy tales is simplified, the writer is more attracted to social and everyday fairy tales and fairy tales about animals, but special attention is paid to the everyday component. The writer came even closer to the popular environment and portrayed it without embellishment. This creative evolution is quite understandable: Dahl, as a lexicographer and ethnographer, constantly discovered and tried to show the reader more and more new layers of folk life, and this path naturally led Dahl to the "natural school".

The main task of the writers of the "natural school" is the aesthetic development of not yet mastered aspects of reality, including life.-

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personal estates. First of all, the writers of the" natural school " were attracted to the life of the lower classes. Dahl, with his deep knowledge of folk life, became one of the leading representatives of this trend.

V. I. Dahl reflected the life of the common people both in his short stories, novels and physiological essays ("The Petersburg Janitor", "The Orderly", "The Rusak", "The Dead Body", "The Bread Business", etc.), and in fairy tales. Dahl did not publish all the fairy tales he collected (it is known that he passed on about 150 fairy tales to A. N. Afanasyev). The writer published the fairy tales accumulated over many years already at the end of his life in the form of two books: "The first pervinka to a semi-literate grandson. Fairy tales, songs, games "(St. Petersburg, 1871) and " Pervinka, another. Grandson of a literate man with illiterate brothers. Fairy tales, songs, games "(St. Petersburg, 1871). Earlier, Dahl published two collections, which contained both recorded and processed fairy tales, and composed (the border between them is difficult to draw): "Soldiers' leisure " (1843) and "Sailors ' Leisure" (1853). In these collections, true to their own previously developed principles and principles of the "natural school". Dahl introduced the reader to the life, way of life, and thinking of soldiers and sailors - natives of the people's environment, who preserved her views and speech. In "Soldatskiye dosugi" and "Matrosskiye Dosugi", the writer showed national diligence and native Russian laziness, national ingenuity ("Soldatsky privar") and narrow-mindedness. And all this is reflected in the word.

The differences between the fairy tales of the 40s and those created in the 30s are quite obvious, for example, in an excerpt from the" Parable of the Woodpecker " (the fairy tale was included in the collection "Soldiers ' Leisure"): "It is good to repent and swear, if you remember your word and vow, and if you do something bad once, you will become ahead of yourself. there is no place to run; but if your oath and friendship are strong only until the evening, and in the morning you start doing the same thing again , then there is little good in your kind word " (Quoted from the edition: Fairy Tales of the peoples of the World. In 10 vols. Vol. 7. Moscow, 1989, p. 339).

It is obvious that Dahl tries at the beginning of the "Parable..." to maintain proximity to the structure of the proverb (both in terms of language and in the transmission of morality). You can also see the special simplicity of speech (there is no former embellishment, patterns that were characteristic of the fairy tales of the first collection).

How much the vocabulary of later fairy tales changed can be seen from the following passage: "The red-headed woodpecker climbed day and day on stumps and hollows and kept knocking its horn nose into the tree, all asking where the rot is, where the wormhole is, where the root is (a disease of a tree that dries up from the root. - I. A. ), where is flabby, where is hollow, and where is its place? " (Ibid., p. 339).

Some words from the fairy tales of this time were familiar only to the reader, who knew well the national way of life, the people's attitude to nature and the understanding of nature that was peculiar only to children.-

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groaning people. The same linguistic peculiarities are also inherent in the fairy tale "You have your own mind": "The goat got into the habit of going to the garden: it used to happen that as soon as the shepherds drove out their herd, then my Vaska first, like a good one, goes, wags his head, shakes his beard; and as soon as the children sit down in a ravine somewhere in pebbles to play, then Vaska goes straight to the cabbage." Once a stupid sheep strayed from the herd, "went into the thicket, into the nettles and into the lapushnik; stands, heartfelt, but screams, but looks around (...) When she saw the goat, she was as happy as if it were her own brother: I will go, they say, at least for him. This one will output: Me not pervina (me not for the first time. - I. A. ) to follow him" (Ibid., p. 340). But everything ends well for the goat, and the stupid sheep is caught and flanked. The moral expressed in the title was confirmed. And in this fairy tale, the purely domestic nature of the plot is obvious, the presence of purely folk vocabulary and simplified syntactic constructions.

Fairy tales written in the 40s and later usually express a simple moral, which is often reduced to a proverb. These fairy tales of Dahl resemble the stories of Leo Tolstoy, created by him for children, but the vocabulary and syntax of Tolstoy's fairy tales are very simple and accessible to a person from any class. In his stories for the people, Leo Tolstoy pursued pedagogical goals that were inseparable from moral ones. Dahl, relying on a deep knowledge of the vernacular, covered all aspects of the life and thinking of the people.

V. G. Belinsky wrote that Dahl knew and loved the Russian peasant, that "he knows how to think with his head, see with his eyes, speak with his tongue. He knows his good and bad qualities, knows the sorrow and joy of his life, knows the diseases and medicines of his everyday life... "(Belinsky V. G. Poln. sobr. soch. T. 10. Moscow, 1956, p. 80).

For Russian culture, Dahl's fairy tales will always retain their value not only because they capture the life of the people of a certain era and reflect the eternal and stable features of the Russian mentality, but also because they contain a treasury of the Russian language.

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