Best German/Russian dictionaries?

[Angelika Meyer]

>
>Date:    Wed, 1 Mar 1995 08:26:53 -0600
>From:    "John J. Ronald" <jamison at owlnet.rice.edu>
>Subject: Best German/Russian dictionaries?
>
>This question is probably strange comming from a native
>English speaker like me, but I speak German very well
>(fluent in everyday discourse, ok in technical/philosophical
>discussions) and am interested to know:  What is the
>best German/Russian dictionary on the market?  I positively
>detest Hyppocrine (sp?) dictionaries and Langenscheidts'
>for their lack of good examples.  Does Duden or Wahrig put
>out a good German/Russian, Russian/German set?  I know
>Russkij Yazik Moskva has a set, but those are designed for
>Russian speakers, not foreigners.  I want to avoid East
>German dictionaries for fear of distorted semantic meaning
>by the SED editors who wrote them.  How about the
>German PONS dictionaries?

I would not be so quick in dismissing East German dictionaries. There were
lots of good Slavic studies books published over there, in spite of all the
limitations imposed by the system.

As an undergraduate studying Russian in West Germany, I frequently made
trips across the border just to buy Slavica. Of course you had to be
selective, but you could find amazing things in Leipzig bookstores. East
German publishers brought out good dictionaries and grammars, marvelous
translations of literary works that were never translated in the West, and
excellent bilingual editions (u.a. Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam,
Akhmatova; I'll never forget the surprise of my friends in the Soviet Union
when I brought them a German/Russian edition of "Poema bez geroia"; that
was in the old days, long before glasnost - Western editions were
confiscated at the Soviet border, but books printed in a socialist country
got through without problems.)

I own a pile of Russian-German / German-Russian dictionaries, by West
German, East German and Soviet publishers, and by far the best general
purpose dictionary is the one by Edmund Daum/Werner Schenk, VEB
Enzyklopaedie Leipzig, 1966. (2 volumes, 40,000 words).

I doubt, though, that it is still on the market. After unification, the
inventories of most East German book publishers ended up in the recycling
bin. I sure wish I had bought all the specialized technical dictionaries
which they produced before it was too late...

Angelika Meyer
ameyer at leland.stanford.edu