Our Notes & References

Schoolchildren discussing fish, beer, corporal punishments, and Holy Scripture, in five languages. This copy with contemporary provenance: it copy bears the stamp of the Alexander Greek School in Nezhin (today’s northern Ukraine), and is inscribed, mostly in Greek, by the headmaster Spiridonov to his pupil Konstantinos in 1817. Originally the Nezhin Greek School, it was reorganised and granted the name “Alexander” in 1811. Nikolai Gogol attended a neighbouring school in 1820-28 and likely often encountered its students.

Scarce, with no copies of any multilingual edition traced at auctions. OCLC locates only one copy of this edition (University library in Warsaw), and a few of all other editions in libraries worldwide.

Memorising set dialogues was long considered an essential part of education for Russian youth, and “many shed tears, poor victims who struggled to the point of exhaustion over the task” (Rusneb catalogue, our translation here and elsewhere). Students of this manual faced dialogues in five languages: Latin, Russian, German, Greek, and French. Though not all were compulsory to learn, such a work was useful for students of different linguistic backgrounds across the Russian Empire.

The dialogues are divided into ten sections of conversations, typically between a teacher and pupil, or between two pupils—one always lazier and in need of correction. Topics range from waking, meals, and drink (“What kind of beer do you like? – I prefer light, as strong beer goes straight to my head and hinders study […] – I shall drink water from now on, as it does not go mouldy or sour – But water weakens the stomach – You deceive yourself”), to classroom exchanges (“Where did you stop reading? – I had lunch on my mind – You are such a glutton and sluggard”), as well as animals, nature, and more charged topics such as fears and death (as an example, one of the students talks about his sister’s passing)—all framed within religious and moral instruction. Many dialogues introduce proverbs and colloquial expressions on relevant subjects, from salt or eggs to bees and trees.

Some exchanges are strikingly specific, such as one on morning washing (“Take care not to knock over the basin, as yesterday, nor soil the towel in an indecent manner, as the day before”, or on corporal punishment: “I have been beaten […] – Truly, no one learns properly without punishment; hence the Latin ‘disciplina’ (punishment) derives from ‘discere’ (to learn). – You are right; I shall study hard and behave myself so that I don’t have to offer up my hand – or my bottom (pardon my wording) – to the cane”.

The influential original Latin dialogues, Tirocinium dialogicum, continens centuriam colloquiorum, were written by Joachim Lange (1670-1744), an ardent German Pietist theologian and professor at Halle, as an addition to his Latin Grammar, which proved so popular that “between 1703 and 1809 it went through some sixty editions” (Frich).

The first four-language edition (Latin, German, Russian, French) was published by the Academy of Sciences in 1738. The Russian translation was prepared by Martin Schwanwitz, rector of the Academy School’s German Section and “author of the first German grammar for Russian students (1730) (Dahmen); and Johann Eberhard Fischer, rector of the Latin Section, translated the Latin into German (ibid). Re-editions followed in 1749-50 (dated 1738), 1763, and 1789. In 1776, the Moscow University issued a five-language version, adding Greek, with further editions in 1785, 1800, and 1810, as here. Such dialogues “were indispensable in the lower German classes” (ibid), and Lange’s in particular served “not only for grammar and vocabulary, but also for mastering standard turns of phrase in natural conversational settings” (Kostin).

Provenance

Alexander Greek School in Nezhin, Russian empire (black stamp to upper fly-leaf and ink inscription – see details in description).

Bibliography

SK 1801-1825, 4302; Dahmen, Kristine. “Language-learning in 18th Century Russian Empire”, Deutsches Historisches Institut, Moskau; Frinch, Andreas. Obuchenie ustnoi rechi na latyni: istoriia, zadachi, vozmozhnosti, Moskva, Greko-Latinskii kabinet, 2017; Kostin, Andrei, Tatiana Kostina. “‘Russkii avtor’ v 1739 godu: G. B. Baier, I. I. Taubert i formirovanie russkogo shkolnogo kanona” // Slověne. 2019. Vol. 8, № 2, pp. 163–197; Rusneb catalogue description of the VGBIL copy of Georg Plats’ “Domashnie razgovory” (1749).