Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

When I was in Kyrgyzstan in June, I lost my Russian-English-Russian dictionary, Random House’s pocket dictionary that had served me well for over six years. I looked around for a new one in Bishkek, but options were few and in the end I got a cheap dictionary that evidentally had been made by a local would-be lexicographer who just copied definitions from an assortment of other, reputable English dictionaries. The result may have adequately served a Russian student of English, but for someone who uses both English-Russian and Russian-English sections often, I found its coverage spotty. In Yoshkar-Ola last week, in a fit of anger at this monstrosity, I tossed it into the rubbish bin.

Though I was without a dictionary for a couple of days, I luckily soon visited Kazan’, one of the few cities in Russia with decent bookstores. Suprisingly what I really had in mind, the Pocket Oxford Russian Dictionary, was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it’s not sold in Russia at all. What I eventually got was the Collins Gem Russian Dictionary, though in a printing by Astrel’ of Moscow who put their own cover around it. I’ve long been a fan of the Collins Gem dictionaries, and regret that I never purchased their Russian one. I’m quite happy with this so far.

But the buyer of a Russian-English-Russian dictionary in Russia must tread lightly. The vast majority of dictionaries for sale are reprints—photocopies, even—of two antiquated dictionaries of many decades ago. The first is by one V. K. Müller, the second by one M.A. O’Brian. I’ve had the darndest time finding out when either of these was first published, since the reprintings themselves never tell. Of the Müller, I’m thinking very early 20th century, based on the nature of the English. But I know only that all editions before the 7th, published in 1961, are in the public domain. Of O’Brian’s, this must have first been published between the wars, as early editions available in the West touted its listings in the then-new Russian orthography. Dover has reprinted this, but even they don’t tell when it was first published, which is odd indeed considering that they are usually upfront about things like that.

The attraction must be the price, since reprinting something in public domain costs little and you can get these big dictionaries for only 50 rubles (approximately 1.50€). But you wouldn’t get much use of them, because they would fall apart soon. Yes, there is paper of even lower quality than Eastern European toilet paper, and it is used for such reprints. With many of the dictionaries I flipped though, one would find it difficult to use them at all, because the quality of the photocopy and reprinting was so bad. You just can’t make out the text at all.

The situation with Russian is not like that with Lithuanian, Romanian or Bulgarian, where one would do well to buy a dictionary while visiting those countries because at home there’s just overpriced Routledge offerings or shoddy Hippocrene dictionaries. The best selection of Russian-English-Russian dictionaries is in English-speaking countries, so take advantage of that before your trip to the Bear.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 08:59 and is filed under Russian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.