In 1696, an important event occurred in the history of Russian culture, the value of which was determined much later. Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolph published the Russian Grammar at Oxford. And now, after more than three hundred years, Ludolph's work is interesting for us. First of all, this book is a valuable source on the history of the Russian language and colloquial speech of Muscovy in the second half of the 17th century. It also provides the reader with extensive material on the economic life, cultural and folk customs of the Russian state at the end of the XVII century.

Ludolf's grammar came about as a result of his stay in Russia throughout 1693, and it is possible that he was in Russia for some time in 1692 and 1694.

Ludolf Heinrich Wilhelm, nephew of the famous philologist-orientalist Job Ludolf, author of the Abyssinian grammar, was born in

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Erfurt in 1655. His father tried to give him a decent education, which was also attended by his uncle, who taught his nephew Oriental languages. Ludolf showed special success in studying Arabic and Hebrew. This knowledge Ludolf was able to demonstrate during his stay in Russia, when Russian eyewitnesses were struck by the dexterity with which Ludolf spoke to Jews in their language.

Ludolf always wanted to visit foreign lands, especially those that were little known to travelers, to learn their customs and learn their languages. Russia was the first country of its kind to arouse his curiosity. Even before leaving for Russia, Ludolf gained some knowledge of the Russian language.

Ludolph's abilities were diverse. He masterfully mastered various musical instruments, he demonstrated his art in front of Tsar Peter. He also showed great learning in conversations with the Russian clergy.

After returning to London, Ludolph set about compiling a "Russian grammar", which was primarily intended for merchants and travelers. In addition to Russian grammar, Ludolf was the author of numerous works on religious topics, including "Reflections on Distance from the World", "Contemplations on the Interest of the Universal Church", "Proposals for promoting the cause of religion in the Churches of the East", etc. Ludolph died in London in January 1712.

Ludolf used his time in Russia to collect material for his book, which appeared in England in 1696. We have already mentioned that Ludolph's Grammar is one of the few extant sources on colloquial speech of the second half of the XVII century. However, the special value of this work also lies in the fact that the author reacted with great interest to everything he saw in Russia.

The tradition of describing Russia by foreign travelers was born in the XV century. But these works are full of errors, inaccuracies, and direct distortions of Russian reality. This is largely due to the specific attitude of travelers who visited Russia, both to the country itself and to its people, as well as their inability or unwillingness to penetrate Russian life more deeply, to see it from the inside. The external manifestations that foreigners paid their attention to in the first place could not reflect all the complexity and diversity of this life.

Ludolf's attitude to Russia can be defined as benevolent. He showed great interest in everything he saw, which allowed him to create a work of considerable interest even for the modern reader. The dialogues in Ludolf's Grammar are accompanied by a German translation, as German was the most widely used language in the world.-

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It was more common among merchants who came to Russia. Ludolf wrote that he met many Russians who speak Latin and German. He mentioned the Moscow school where Greek and Latin were studied.

In the 17th century, there were several schools in Moscow that taught foreign languages. This is the Lutheran school opened in 1621 in the German settlement in Moscow, with Latin and German languages, and the school opened with the money of the boyar F. M. Rtishchev at the St. Andrew's Monastery, and the school mentioned by Olearius, where Greek and Latin were taught in 1649, the school of Simeon of Polotsk at the Zaikonospassky monastery, finally, The Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy is the first higher education institution in Russia. "It is clear from this," Ludolf writes, " that education and science do not contradict the basic Russian laws, as many have claimed. Rather, it can be argued that the present Tsarist Majesty seeks to raise the spiritual culture of its subjects "(Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf. Russian grammar / / Larin B. A. Three foreign sources on the colloquial speech of Moscow Russia of the XVI-XVII centuries. SPb., 2002).

Ludolf's work remained unappreciated for a long time, primarily due to the widespread use of M. V. Lomonosov's Grammar, which, according to the apt expression of B. A. Larin, "eclipsed" Ludolf's Grammar (Edict op.). At the same time, researchers forgot about the different historical conditions of the creation of both grammars, as well as about who these grammars were written for. From about the second quarter of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century, when M. Kachenovsky's article on Ludolf's Grammar appeared in Vestnik Evropy, Ludolf's work was almost forgotten. Researchers of the XIX century-academician I. Davydov, A. N. Chudinov, I. Balitsky-were unable to assess the historical significance of Ludolf's book. By focusing on errors and inaccuracies, which, of course, there were, they completely avoided analyzing the structure and content of the book, considering it as insignificant. What was Ludolph accused of? First of all, in poor knowledge of the Russian language, in literal adherence to the grammar of M. Smotritsky, in a large number of errors (Grammar of the Russian language by Academician M. V. Lomonosov in 1755, Ed. II department. Imper. Academy of Sciences in memory of the centenary of Russian Grammar. St. Petersburg, 1855).

At the end of the 19th century, there is a certain departure from straightforward, superficial and dismissive judgments about Ludolph Grammar. Professor S. Bulich highly appreciated the work of Ludolf, who was, in his words, "the first scholar to distinguish the Great Russian language from Church Slavonic and to draw attention to their difference in the first grammar of the living Great Russian language written by him."

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(Bulich S. Tserkovno-Slavyanskie elementy v sovremennom literaturnom i narodnom russkom yazyke [Church Slavonic elements in the Modern Literary and Folk Russian language]. St. Petersburg, 1893, part 32). Such a natural recognition of Ludolf's merits became possible only as a result of the historical study of his work, which S. Bulich conducted, first of all paying attention to the originality of Ludolf's work. The main merit of Ludolf, as S. Bulich noted, was that he was the first to oppose the Russian language to Church Slavonic, the first to recognize the independence of the Russian language and draw this distinction through the entire grammar. Ludolph's conclusions anticipated Lomonosov's grammar, which was still about sixty years away. All this time, the idea of an artificial Slavic-Russian language will prevail, a language completely remote from both the spoken language and the book language of the first half of the XVIII century.

In this interim period, grammatical works by various authors appear (Manductio in grammaticam in Slavonico-Rosseanam. Amsterdam, 1706, as well as the Grammar of Fyodor Maksimov, published in Novgorod the Great in 1723). However, they can in no way compete with Ludolf's Grammar, which was created as a result of thoughtful observations and recordings of live colloquial speech, which allowed the author to give a bold analysis of many grammatical phenomena. Ludolf noted the important role of verb prefixes, established a single subjunctive mood formed by adding the particle would (in contrast to Smotritsky, who wrote about the "supplicative" and "imperative" moods). It offered only three tenses (present, past, and future) instead of Smotritsky's six tenses (present, transitory, past, mimo-past, unrevealed, future). For comparison, we note that even in the middle of the XVIII century, the question of the specific-temporal system of the Russian verb was not yet fully resolved. So, Lomonosov in his Grammar counted ten temporary forms of the Russian verb (Russian grammar of Mikhail Lomonosov, St. Petersburg, 1755).

Ludolf dedicated his work to the tsarist adviser B. A. Golitsyn, a fairly educated man of his time, one of the few representatives of the ruling class who were very interested in Western culture in its various manifestations. Naturally, they took every opportunity to communicate with foreigners, especially knowledgeable ones like Ludolph, in order to get first-hand information about many things that interested them. The interest of the Russian upper aristocracy in Western culture especially increased from the middle of the XVII century, after the reunification of Ukraine with Russia. The intensification of cultural contacts between Moscow Rus and the newly annexed lands has led to

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to the appearance in Moscow of household items, musical instruments, books published in Poland and Western European countries, in much larger numbers than it was previously.

The most far-sighted representatives of the ruling class, realizing that the cultural isolation of Russia is a dead-end path of development, tried to expand their knowledge and ideas about the culture of Western countries. And this interest, which began as an applied one, quite often led to conscious thoughts about the need for closer cultural contacts between Russia and the countries of Western Europe. Naturally, to communicate with foreigners, knowledge of languages was required, first of all, Latin, since this universal language was necessary both for reading books and for live communication.

The fact that Latin was quite popular among educated Russians was noted by many foreigners who visited Russia at that time. Among the books distributed in this environment, there were many translations from Latin, a significant number of Latin-Russian dictionaries, Latin was widely used in medical clinics and herbalists.

Ludolph noted that by learning Latin, Golitsyn opened up access to communication with foreigners. But the problem of the language barrier also existed on the other side. Foreigners who came to Russia in increasing numbers rarely spoke Russian, and they had to learn to communicate with Russian people without having any prior knowledge of the Russian language. One of the reasons for this situation was the lack of any manuals on Russian colloquial speech for foreigners. In Russia, such manuals will appear only in the XVIII century, the first example is the book "Conversations of Druzhesky Desideria Erasma in Russian and Galan languages"published in 1716. However, the value of this book is much lower than Ludolf's work, both in the content of dialogues that are quite far from the actual Russian life and everyday life of the early XVIII century, and in the brightness and liveliness of speech.

Ludolf, while in Russia, communicated mainly with representatives of the ruling class. Therefore, its grammar is based mainly on their speech. The main part of the work consists of various dialogues that are of great practical importance. The phrases carefully selected by the author accurately reflected the realities of Russian life at the end of the XVII century, characterized the participants of the imaginary dialogue from the linguistic point of view. From the choice of phrases, you can definitely tell for whom, first of all, Ludolph's grammar was intended. These are numerous merchants who brought their goods to Russia - Dutch, English, Germans, Austrians. They were the ones who needed possession the most.-

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In this regard, they have learned a new language and grammar has become a valuable tool for them. Even individual phrases quoted by Ludolf give us an idea of the range of questions that foreigners faced when communicating with Russian people: "Cloth is brought from the Aglenskaya zemlya"; " We don't have Rensky, what can we give you?"; "I don't know Russian, German, or French" (problems that arise from not knowing the languages); "Where are you going? In Svitskaya, Tsesarskaya, Golan land" (direction of business trips); "They will say that pretty women are in the French land"; "But I did not go with them, the red ones did not look at me, and I did not want to get acquainted with the bad ones" (problems that arise during amorous adventures); "It was a great comfort to me to talk in foreign lands" (great benefit from traveling to foreign countries).

Even the fact that Ludolph's Grammar was published at Oxford, the oldest English university, indicates a high appreciation of it in Western European countries. Parts of the book have been translated into French and English, and the last part has been completely reprinted in Germany. Its fate in Russia was not easy, for a long time it was not accepted or recognized as a scientific work, because it was considered not to fit into the framework of the prevailing trends.

Ludolf very clearly defined the features of the cultural and linguistic situation that existed in Moscow Russia at the end of the XVII century. Its uniqueness lay in the existence of two types of written language used in different spheres of cultural activity, and both of them did not completely coincide with colloquial speech (Khaburgaev G. A., Ryumina O. L. Verb forms in the language of fiction of Moscow Rus of the XVII century. K voprosu o ponyatii "literaturnosti" v predpetrovskuyu epokhu [On the concept of "literature" in the pre-Petrine era]. 1971. N 4). This situation was reflected in M. Smotritsky's Grammar (1648) and Sobornoe Ulozhenie (1649) published in the middle of the 17th century. Both of these publications are clearly opposed to each other in terms of language, and the Sobornoe Ulozhenie "does not show any noticeable influence of the Grammar of 1648" (Chernykh The Language of the Code of 1649, Moscow, 1953). Ludolph believed that the Code was linguistically opposed to the literary works of the era, being the only book printed in a simple dialect.

The parallel existence of several linguistic norms led to a certain bilingualism, which was objectively an anachronism already in the XVII century, but the question of overcoming it and moving to a new, unified system of literary norms will arise only in the XVIII century. In Ludolf's modern Moscow Russia, the parallel use of Slavic and Russian languages was natural for each specific situation: it was impossible to write

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or to talk about "high matters" using everyday language, just as it was impossible to use only one Slavic language in home conversations. Ludolf said that the names of most things used in everyday life are not found in those books that teach the Slavic language. From this, he concluded that "one should speak in Russian, but write in Slavic" (Ludolf G. V. Edict, op.). And most Russians, in order not to seem ignorant, wrote words not as they are pronounced, but as required by Slavic grammar. For example, they wrote today (segodnia), and pronounced sevodni (sevodni).

Ludolph considered the main task of his book to be practical help for anyone who wanted to learn how to speak colloquial speech, so he transmitted words in letters denoting the sounds that were heard in pronunciation. Ludolf expressed the hope that his work might encourage and convince the Russians that it was possible to print some things in the vernacular. "After all, it can only serve the benefit and glory of Russian Science if they, following the example of other peoples, begin to cultivate their own language and publish good books in it" (Ibid.).

Ludolf's grammar was of great importance in getting Western Europeans acquainted not only with the Russian spoken language, but also with Russian realities and Russian life in general. Information about Russia that was used in Western Europe often came from completely unreliable sources, and often written by people who had never been to Russia themselves, but wrote from someone else's words. Ludolph, on visiting Russia, took with him to England sincere feelings of respect for the Russians and their language, which was reflected in his work, which was created with great diligence and love.

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