The encyclopaedia of V. I. Belov’s That’s How It Is [Privychnoe delo]: A monograph

Abstract

The Encyclopaedia of V. I. Belov’s ‘That’s How It Is’ [‘Privychnoe delo’] appeared fifty years after the novella’s publication in the Sever journal (1966). An exhaustive product of seven researchers, the monograph earned its place among such landmark philological projects as The Encyclopaedia of ‘The Tale of Igor’s Campaign’ [Entsiklopediya ‘Slova o polku Igoreve’], The Onegin Encyclopaedia [Oneginskaya entsiklopediya], and The Oblomov Encyclopaedia [Oblomovskaya entsiklopediya] currently in preparation by the Pushkin House. The scholarly commentary reconstructs an impressive context in its historical, cultural, social, spiritual, and psychological dimensions. The encyclopaedia’s lexical scope comprises thousands of vibrant words of the distinctive Vologda dialect. The spoken language functions in a literary space, evoking the ancient culture of Russian folk speech. The metaphysical inseparability of Life and Soul engenders Lad (a harmonising category crucial for the writer) that receives a lot of attention in the encyclopaedia as its key concept.