The head of the Total Dictation Foundation, Olga Rebkovets, reported on Facebook that Novosibirsk State University, where the Total Dictation project appeared, asked the foundation to change its legal address, and then to vacate the premises in the university building. Why did the university abandon one of the most high-profile projects associated with it? And is it connected with the loud scandals over the invitation of «politically incorrect» writers as the authors of the text for the dictation?
«Total dictation» appeared in 2004. It was invented by NSU humanities students who were members of the humorous Glum Club. At the university, almost every department has such clubs; on the basis of the two largest at one time, the NSU KVN team was created, which gave domestic television a number of brilliant comedians. Philologists have found their own way: to unite university faculties not with laughter, but with literacy and love for the Russian language.
At first, the dictation was held only at NSU, but over time the project began to grow; he needed a legal entity; The legal address of the foundation was the «Lenin room» of the tenth hostel, where the «Glum Club» met.
The organizers of the dictation worked closely with the Department of General and Russian Linguistics of NSU: its staff checked the text of the author, together with him thought out especially difficult passages (this work for the April dictation sometimes began as early as September), created instructions for inspectors with the analysis of difficulties, analyzed works, identified new problems in the review and were in touch with reviewers from other locations. This is a very big job that philologists have been doing on a volunteer basis for a long time. The more dictation-writers, the more verification; eyewitnesses say that philologists at that time did not sleep at night, in a hurry to do everything on time.
Teacher team after passing the dictation
The work turned out to be important from the point of view of philological science: there were annual linguistic conferences with leading Russian scientists, scientific collections, free courses “Russian on Fridays”; new data have appeared for the work of the Spelling Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which includes the head of the Department of General and Russian Linguistics at NSU Natalia Koshkareva.
“Total dictation” over time went beyond the boundaries of not only the university, but also the city, and then Russia:
this initiative was widely picked up in different countries where people who speak Russian live.
Photo: social media
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The Total Dictation team began to invite famous Russian writers to Novosibirsk, to their main site, who created new original texts for the dictation and came to NSU to personally dictate them to those who wanted to test themselves. Over the years, these were Dmitry Bykov, Guzel Yakhina, Dina Rubina, Zakhar Prilepin and others.
In recent years, however, the work of the «Total Dictation» has been increasingly accompanied by scandals, in the center of which were the political views of the chosen authors ,
their nationality and citizenship: to some fellow citizens they seemed insufficiently Russian and patriotic.
Rossotrudnichestvo refused to cooperate with Total Dictation when Dmitry Glukhovsky was chosen as the author of the text.
Dmitry Glukhovsky's invitation to the Total Dictation scared away the state partners. Photo: Evgeny Sofroneev/TASS
And in July of this year, the Ministry of Justice suddenly decided to subject the Total Dictation Foundation to an unscheduled inspection.
When the project became first federal and then international , its organizers realized that in order to work effectively, he needed to move to Moscow: this is inevitable in the Russian conditions of centralization of power. And Novosibirsk has ceased to be the only «capital» of the dictation: a new capital is chosen every year. The dictation has a lot of imitators: other «dictations» appeared — geographical, historical, ethnographic — which, strictly speaking, in fact, are not dictations at all, but control ones.