Early Life
His father was a Danish physician named Johan Christian von Dahl (1764 – October 21, 1821). He was a linguist versed in German, English, French, Russian, Yiddish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew languages. His mother, Maria Freitag, was of German and French descent (Huguenots). She spoke at least five languages and came from a family of scholars.
The future lexicographer was born in the town of Lugansky Zavod, in Novorossiya under the jurisdiction of Yekaterinoslav Governorate, part of Russian Empire, which is now Luhansk, Ukraine.
Novorossiya was part of Russian colonization, where Russian was imposed as a common language in cities, but the Ukrainian remained prevalent in smaller towns, villages, and rural areas outside the immediate control of colonization. On the outskirts, the ethnic composition varied and included such nationalities as Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Tatars, and many others. Dal grew up under the influence of this various ethnic mixture of people and cultures.
Dal served in the Russian Navy from 1814 to 1826, graduating from the St Petersburg Naval Cadet School in 1819. In 1826, he began studying medicine at Dorpat University and took part as a military doctor in the Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829) and the campaign against Poland in 1831–1832. Following disagreement with his superiors, he resigned from the Military Hospital in St. Petersburg and took an administrative position with the Ministry of the Interior in Orenburg Governorate, serving in similar positions in St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod before his retirement in 1859.
Dal was interested in language and folklore from his early years. He started traveling by foot through the countryside, collecting sayings and fairy tales in various Slavic languages from the region. He published his first collection of fairy-tales in 1832 in Russian language. Some others, yet unpublished, were put in verse by his friend Alexander Pushkin, and have become some of the most familiar texts in the Russian language. After Pushkin's fatal duel, Dal was summoned to his deathbed and looked after the great poet during the last hours of his life. In 1838, he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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