Vladimir Dal received a university medical education and during the war with the Poles was a resident at the St. Petersburg military ground hospital. But most of all he was interested in ethnography. He was friends with Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Krylov, Gogol, Yazykov, Odoevsky, and therefore there is nothing strange that he decided to try his hand at literature. True, his first book is “Russian Fairy Tales. First Friday”(1832) was banned. And only thirty years later saw the light of his large-scale brainchild - "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language". In our review, the strangest words that are not understood by everyone today.
