In the history of Russian culture of the 19th century, it is hardly possible to find a figure equivalent to J. K. Groth not only in the richness and depth of research interests and the originality of finds and discoveries, but also in the truly exceptional role that he played in the fate of Russian science. Suffice it to say that J. K. Groth was the only Russian philologist who at the end of his life held the responsible post of vice-president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and managed to do a lot of useful things in this field, which was picked up and developed later by his followers. Even now it is impossible to speak unambiguously about the Grotto, and disputes especially about some of its ideas in the field of spelling do not subside to this day. But the personality of the scientist, his bright life full of exceptional events and meetings cannot but be a subject of interest. Studying his biography and works, we involuntarily project what he has done to date - there is so much that is relevant and up-to-date in the works of J. K. Groth for literary historians, linguists, translators, and historiographers of Russian and world science and culture. In this short essay, of course, it will not be possible to tell about all the achievements of the scientist. Our task is to refresh our memory and analyze only a few of his works and acquaint readers with the inimitable personality of a man who devoted his entire life to the service of one museum - Science.

Yakov Karlovich Grot was born on December 15 (27), 1812 in a noble family. His great-grandfather was a lawyer in the residence of the duchy of Holstein-Plon, and his great-grandmother was the daughter of the court preacher Joachim Schmitten (here and further biographical data are given from sources: Groth K. Ya. Materials for the biography of Academician Yakov Karlovich Groth (1812-1893). Introductory essay. Predki, semya i detstvo [Ancestors, family and Childhood], St. Petersburg, 1912; Grot K. Ya. Materials for the biography of Academician Yakov Karlovich Grot (1812-1893). A chronological overview of his life and activities. St. Petersburg, 1912). Grandfather of the future academician, Io-

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Akim (Yakim, Yefim) Christian Groth, was born in Holstein in 1733. In 1751, he entered the University of Jena, after which he returned to his city, where he became a preacher. Since 1758, he was in the service of the Russian governor in Konigsberg, Baron N. A. Korf. When he was 27 years old, he came to St. Petersburg as a home teacher to the family of the widowed General Korf. Since then, Russia has become his second home. In 1770, Pastor Groth had a son, Karl, the father of Yakov Karlovich. At the behest of Empress Catherine II in 1785, he was invited "to practice the German language" to the heir Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich and his brother Grand Duke Konstantin. In 1795, Karl Groth, a former student of the Academy of Sciences, was assigned to the 3rd expedition to certify public accounts and was soon granted a position as a collegiate registrar. He died in 1818 as a collegiate adviser, head of the department of State Property.

A few years after her husband's death, J. K. Groth's mother wrote a petition to the emperor for admission of her two sons to the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum "at the state expense". The request was granted, and in January, 1823, the City of New York. Yakov Grot enters the lyceum boarding school. Since then, he has been at the center of cultural events and unforgettable encounters that have struck him (later he will return to this period of his life more than once). So, in 1828, when Pushkin arrived at the lyceum, he was among the people who accompanied him, and when he was already in his senior year, in 1831, he was again honored to see the great poet.

In the same place, in Tsarskoye Selo, the first scientific and journalistic experiments of Ya. are born. The grotto. In 1830, Delvig's Literaturnaya Gazeta published his translation of an article by Professor Tillot on Ferry de Pigny's Course in French Literature. At the lyceum, young Grot tries his hand at other types of literature: publishes the magazine "Lyceum Ant", studies Italian and writes an essay "On Italian verbs". In June 1832, he graduated from the lyceum, which he graduated with the first gold medal, and in September of the same year he entered the service of the Chancellery of the Committee of Ministers under the command of Baron M. A. Korf.

The first literary experiments of J. K. Groth date back to 1835-1837. Then he worked on the translation of Byron's poem Mazeppa, which was published in the famous Sovremennik (Vol. IX, 1838). In the 1830s - 1840s, he repeatedly published his poems in this magazine, as well as short stories and essays of a popular science nature in the children's edition - Zvezdochka.

In 1838, J. K. Groth first got acquainted with Finland and soon (1840) became an official on special assignments under the State Secretary of the Grand Duchy of Finland. During its pre --

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After visiting Helsingfors, he actively participates in the 200th anniversary of Alexander University and is elected a member of the Finnish Literary Society. An irresistible desire for literary works and academic studies in the field of philology leads him to think about the need to concentrate his activities in the direction of scientific research and teaching.

In 1841, Grota was appointed an ordinary Professor of Russian Literature and History at the Imperial Alexander University. His first lecture took place on September 8, 1841. While in Finland, he gets acquainted with the epic "Kalevala". In the late 1830s, when Ya. K. Grot was a professor at Helsingfor University, he was "the most diligent and competent intermediary between Russian and Scandinavian cultures" in his published works, speeches, and trips to the Northern countries (Ospovat A. L. [Grot Yakov Karlovich] // Russian Writers. 1800 - 1917. Biograf, slovar', vol. 2, Moscow, 1992, p. 49). And indeed, without specifically addressing the study of this issue, one can notice quite a clear and prominent line in Groth's creative biography of the 1830s-1850s: he learns country studies as a cultural process by immersing himself in the origins of Scandinavian folk culture, which is largely understandable and close to the Russian person. Hence arise translations and articles about "Kalevala", which in fact opened this wonderful monument to our readers, works on the folklore of the peoples of the North, travel notes, etc.

All this, like a bridge, is held together in the mind of J. K. Groth as tangible branches of one big tree - philology, which is hardly possible to know without feeling the differences and at the same time the similarity of languages and plots of different peoples, their bizarre interweaving and metaphorical "illusions". After all, the Scandinavian epic is surprisingly impulsive and consistent with our northern traditions and, of course, was close to J. K. Groth himself - a European who tended to study the origins, antiquities resting on the pillars of folk, oral conversations, and bizarre dialect...

It should be said that this period of life was also full of other impressions and events: acquaintance with P. A. Pletnev and collaboration in Sovremennik, meeting with V. A. Zhukovsky and the latter's flattering review of the manuscript translation of Frithiof by J. K. Groth, acquaintance with Odoevsky and Krylov, Dahl, Panaev and Pogodin. Thus, even at a young age, Groth was involved in the circle of the most enlightened people of that time.

We do not have the opportunity to touch on the other side of his work here, but we will note in a nutshell that J. K. Groth also showed himself as an outstanding researcher of the history of Russian literature of the XVIII-XIX centuries. At the same time, the works of this cycle differed in documentary content.-

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It is based on the study of archives, combined with the use of some innovative techniques (see, for example: Grot Ya. K. Pushkin, his lyceum comrades and mentors. St. Petersburg., 1887,1889; Same name. Pushkin Lyceum. (1811 - 1817). Papers of the 1st year collected by Academician Ya. K. Grot (St. Petersburg, 1911, etc.). While studying Derzhavin's work, Grot made a detailed historical, literary and biographical commentary, a reference device to his collected works, which in Russian science is rightly called the first academic and most complete.

Groth's first experiments in linguistics date back to the mid-1840s. Then he was assigned to oversee the printing of the Swedish-Russian lexicon, published in Helsingfors in 1846-1847. In the magazine Sovremennik (vol. XXXVIII, 1845), his first major article "On the basic forms of the Russian verb" appears. At the same time, he is also interested in literary research, especially seriously studying the work of Derzhavin (later, as is known, he prepared for publication the collected works of the great poet, wrote his biography and compiled a "Dictionary to Derzhavin's poems"). In addition to the actual Russian linguistics for Russians, even during his work in Scandinavia, J. K. Groth was engaged in printing Swedish manuals on the Russian language.

The first relations of the scientist with the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Imperial Academy of Sciences date back to 1851. During these years, Izvestiya of the Second Department began to be published, and Ya. K. Grot was attracted to academic work. As a specialist in Scandinavian languages, he is initially useful in this area as well. So, back in 1851, ORYAS asked him to identify Russian words borrowed from Scandinavian languages for the upcoming "Experience of the regional dictionary of the Russian language". Later, as we know, J. K. Groth's activity will be focused more on the comparative study of the Russian language, and in this field he will make many discoveries. Here, works on the history and ethnology of the Russian language, grammar and lexicography, which are still considered authoritative, are of particular importance.

In 1876, the second, "significantly expanded edition" of Groth's Philological Investigations was published in 2 volumes, which included the main works on the Russian language. The review of these works itself may take up more than one page, but still here you can note such parts, highlighted, probably, by the scientist himself. These are: 1) "Folk and literary language", 2)" To the consideration of future compilers of the dictionary "and 3)"Controversial issues of Russian spelling from Peter the Great to the present". The last (2nd volume) was an extensive book by J. K. Groth (more than 400 pages), significantly expanded and revised, in comparison with the previous edition (St. Petersburg, 1873), with the aim of,

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as before, "in a historical way to explain to the thinking reader the present state of Russian orthography and contribute to a greater uniformity of writing" (Grot Ya. K. Controversial issues of Russian spelling from Peter the Great to the present / / Grot Ya. K. Philological Research, Vol. 2. SPb., 1876. p. IV). In the first paragraph of the book, the scientist strongly advises:" (...) let our physiologists finally study the sounds of the native language: then linguists will gratefully use their instructions "(Ibid., p. III). The most popular and controversial book "Russian Spelling" was devoted to the same problem, which has passed 22 editions (the last one-St. Petersburg, 1916).

It was this guide that became known to everyone, since it largely regulated the norms of Russian spelling that existed with some changes before the reform of 1917-1918. Even at one time, it caused a lot of complaints and was subjected to analysis. There is, for example, a pamphlet by A.V. Mirtov with the characteristic title: "The Russian-German spelling of Academician Yakov Karlovich Grot" (Pg., 1915), in which the author, at that time a teacher of the 1st Petrograd Gymnasium and Smolny Institute, believed that " the spelling of Grot is the legalized pronunciation of Petrograd Germans "(Ibid. p. 4) and that, "banishing the generally accepted expressions, Grot replaces them with his clumsy innovations" and ignores the laws of Russian pronunciation (Ibid.). The book provides a word-by-word analysis of unsuccessful, in the author's opinion, examples such as nameless instead of nameless, Great Britain instead of Great Britain, lot instead of lot, etc., some grammatical and accentological positions of the academician's work are also analyzed.

However, A. V. Mirtov was not right in everything, if we keep in mind modern norms. So, he writes: "Grot ignores the more common and quite literary norm of military commander, replacing it with the rarer "military commander" " (p. 10), or about the word compass (A.V. Mirtov insists on the accent-as, in contrast to Ya.K. Grot. Such examples are not isolated. It is worth saying that right now the work of J. K. Groth is extremely relevant.

The last significant achievement of academician Ya. K. Grot, which is still reverently spoken about by researchers of modern language and lexicographers, was the idea of preparing and publishing an explanatory "Dictionary of the Russian Language", which incorporated as much as possible the entire lexical structure of the almost two-hundred-year tradition of Russian literature in its modern literary forms. This work was in fact the first academic normative publication with a fairly broad synchronous cross-section of the language. It made more extensive use of the legacy of Russian classical literature and lexicographic sources from the time of Lomonosov to the end than ever before

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Since 1891, J. K. Groth led the work on it together with the Second Department of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. During the scientist's lifetime, three issues were published (issues 1-3), which were later combined into the 1st volume (St. Petersburg, 1895).

Kotoshikhin, Peter I, Lomonosov, Shuvalov, Catherine II, Derzhavin, Zhukovsky, Karamzin - this is not a complete list of people who were not once in the center of attention of Ya. K. Grot; he wrote about them more than once, creating colorful portraits of distant and near times. And he did it like no one else. Probably, the reason for this is not only a keen interest in extraordinary personalities, but also in the genealogy of the Grotto family, in which the destinies of these people indirectly or directly intersected.

During the jubilee celebrations of 1882 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the scientific activity of Academician Ya. K. Grot, many heartfelt speeches were made. One of the speakers, Academician A. F. Bychkov, expressed his attitude to the hero of the day:"<...>) you constantly stand for everything beautiful and useful, fair and honest; < ... > ..> you value the success of the national enlightenment, because you love Russia;<...> you respect and appreciate Russian scientists;<...> you put science above all else and distinguish it from everyday relationships, which are often petty and selfish; finally, you have not for a moment deviated from what you yourself said more than 40 years ago:

I am before the good angel

I promise goodness and truth

Always serve with my pen!

And if I break my vow,

And if baseness is a snake

Will it ever creep into my soul

And my speech will be corrupted,

Let my white guest come back

To you will rush away, pomrachas,

And the verse will disappear gracious...

And you did not break this beautiful vow" (Bibliographic list of works, translations and publications of the ordinary Academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences J. K. Groth. St. Petersburg, 1883, p. 39).

In conclusion, it is necessary to say that the figure of academician Ya. K. Grot requires closer attention, and his ideas and developments remain largely relevant for modern philology. I would like to hope that our short story about this original personality will interest readers and turn their interests in the direction of "grotto studies".

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