ARCHIVED LEXICOGRAPHY: THE GALLEY PROOFS OF THE UNPUBLISHED “GREAT JAPANESE-RUSSIAN CHARACTER DICTIONARY” AS A HISTORICAL SOURCE

Abstract

The inconsistent history of a large-scale lexicographical project of 1930–1940s (under N. I. Konrad, N. A. Nevsky, A. A. Kholodovich) is a remarkable milestone in development of the Far East ideographic languages’ lexicography in our country. The absence of published dictionaries as visible outcome of the lexicographical works poses the main difficulty for historians of science in reconstruction of the period and the treatment of the subject. Fund No. 152 of the Archive of Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences contains a massif of documents, together with other materials illustrating the project in detail, but not offering coherent interpretation in the absence of extra sources, that is lexicographically informative ones, in order to close the gap of the reliable source material. Yet until recently, the historiography of the subject was lacking. The gap could be closed by a unique lexicographical monument discovered in the Institute of Oriental Studies. It should be a copy of the first galley proof portion of the “Great Japanese-Russian Character Dictionary”. The source analysis of the monument and its criticism in the full context of relevant documentary evidence known up to date along with more meaningful interpretation of the data allow for precise qualification of a little-studied decade-long dictionary project in the history of Oriental lexicography and prewar Japan studies in our country. It may be determined that for the first generations of Soviet scholars of Japan the unpublished dictionary appeared to be a kind of school forging a vital link between the pre-Revolution and post-war Soviet lexicography of Japanese language: from D. M. Pozdneyev to N. A. Syromyatnikov.