The Google Doodle for the 22nd of November celebrates the great Russian lexicographer Vladimir Dal, on what would have been his 216th birthday.
Who is Vladimir Dal?
Considered to be one of the greatest and most influential Russian language lexicographers, Vladimir Dal was quite a polymath. Born to a Danish father and a mother of French and German descent who spoke five languages, Dal became versed in at least seven languages including English, German, Yiddish and Latin. Having served in the Russian Navy for 12 years, Dal went on to become a doctor. He worked as a military doctor in the Russo-Turkish War and the conflict with Poland in the 1830s.
Famous lexicographer Vladimir Dal poses for a portrait by Russian painter Vasily Perov
Growing up on the fringes of the Russian Empire, where Russian was enforced as the common language but Ukrainian continued to be spoken, Dal was exposed to a range of ethnicities and cultures. This sparked a lifelong fascination with the idea of Russia, its multifarious traditions, stories and languages. As the Google Doodle notes, he explored and documented them, visiting people across the country and recording ‘everything they could tell him about Russian tradition.’
‘Folklore, music, and crafts formed the base of this knowledge, but the thread tying it all together was the richness of the Russian language and its dialects.’
Dal put all of his experiences and observations into his magnum opus, the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. A monumental undertaking that was published in four massive volumes over the course of three years, the Explanatory Dictionary is an ambitious collection of 200,000 Russian words and 30,000 Russian proverbs. It became an incredibly influential scholarly work; Vladimir Nabokov said he took the Dictionary up to Cambridge and read ten pages every day, while the great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn reportedly took one of Dal’s volumes as his one and only book to the Ekibastuz gulag.
Google’s iconic logo is transformed today to celebrate renowned lexicographer Vladimir Dal
What happens in the Vladimir Dal Google Doodle slideshow?
To celebrate Vladimir Dal’s birthday, today’s Google Doodle is a slideshow that pays tribute to the lexicographer’s ‘tireless efforts roaming the countryside and interviewing hundreds to discover the thread of language that binds Russia together.’
Part of today’s Google Doodle depicts Vladimir Dal visiting his family to record their stories
In the first slideshow Dal is shown leaving the city behind and setting off into the countryside to experience Russia in all its glory firsthand. In the second slide, Dal visits a family and records their stories. There is also a famous fairytale fox present in the background. In the third slide Dal goes to the marketplace to experience the artistic, musical sides of Russia while the fourth shows him putting all of these experiences down to paper.
What is a Google Doodle?
Google Doodles are daily celebrations of cultural events that are referenced in Google’s logo on the homepage. The first Google Doodle was simply a stick man standing behind the second ‘o’ in Google. Drawn by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998, it marked their trip to that year’s Burning Man Festival.
After users responded positively to the frequent changes to Google’s homepage logo, Google Doodles became an everyday thing, with recent ones including tributes to the hole punch, Kimchi and Children’s Day 2017.
Today, there is a team of ‘Doodlers’ – illustrators, graphic designers, animators and artists who work on the Google Doodles. The logos are hyperlinked to provide readers with more information about the cultural event being celebrated. The latest Google Doodle celebrates Vladimir Dal with a special slideshow on what would have been his 216th birthday.