Traveling exhibition "The Image of the Word"

About exhibition

In 2026 Russia will mark the 225th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Dal. This year the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, signed a decree to commemorate the event, which will be important for everyone who values the Russian language and culture. Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was a Russian writer, ethnographer and lexicographer, folklorist, and military doctor. He became most famous for the unparalleled-in-scope Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, the compilation of which took 53 years. The idea of the exhibition "The Image of the Word" is to illustrate, bring to life, and figuratively present certain words and concepts of the Russian language that were collected and recorded by Dal in the 19th century. Times change and language evolves, but the wisdom of the people and the cultural values of Russians remain unchanged. An engaging talk by a research associate about the exhibition will reveal information not only about the language but also about the everyday life of the people in the places where these words originated. Contemporary schoolchildren will find it interesting to learn how the Russian language has changed and to understand generational continuity. The exhibition presents 10 works by artists from Volzhsky: Gennady Chernoskutov, Leonid Gomanyuk, Anatoly Kozlov, Galina Kuznetsova, Elena Prutskova, Viktor Myzgin, Alexander Denisov, Viktor Filimonov, Lyudmila Petrenko, and Olga Krayneva. Their works will help modern young people recall and analyze more than 30 meanings of words and concepts, which also contain substantial knowledge related to the subjects in Vladimir Dal's dictionary.