The creative career of B. A. Moiseev is a rare example of scientific long-life love of the language legacy of the Orenburg region.

Boris Aleksandrovich got interested in Orenburg local dialects and various Orenburg geographical names already in the 9-th form, when in autumn of 1941 his classmates and he were sent to take the crop in the Orenburg district. There they took interest to the name of the village Panika, which they read as Panika. However, the local villager explained to them, that the village should be called Panika as it was named after the river, which had been called Ponika as it had a tendency to seasonal drying out and disappearance (TN: Russian verb “поникать” —– “dissapear”). Though ahead of the scientist there lay a difficult road of research of far-away spots of Central Russia and different villages of the Orenburg region as well as numerous talks with old residents, he never stopped wondering how metaphoric the Russian language is and 70 years later after that funny error he still marvels at the science that allows to find the true meaning of the word and the reasons for making up different geographical names.

Being demobilized for grave disease after the Great Patriotic War, B. A. Moiseev went to school again, into the 10-th form, finished it and entered the Chkalov (Orenburg) pedagogical institute, the faculty of history and philology. From the very first year he got involved into studying Russian dialectology under the guidance of professors of the Department of Russian Philology, who collected and analyzed the dialects of the Orenburg region. Professor B. I. Lytkin was the first to notice the persistence and determination the student showed and recommended him to take up studying the dialects of his native Sol-Iletsk district. Associate professor N. I. Zorin, summing up the results of 150-year study of Orenburg dialects, highlights the commitment with which student Moiseev continued his studies during postgraduate training, presented his thesis in 1955 at MSU under the supervision of an acknowledged expert in Russian local dialects, an intelligent lexicologist and a historian of the Russian language S. A. Koporskiy. It was he whom B. A. Moiseev devoted his main work — “Orenburg regional dictionary” (Orenburg: OSPU Publishing, 2010).

Close connection with the Orenburg region didn’t let Boris Aleksandrovich stay in Smolensk, where he had been sent to as a teacher after postgraduate training, or accept the invitation to the Leningrad Department of the Linguistic Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, so in 1958 he returned to his native Orenburg pedagogical institute.

For more than 30 years B. A. Moiseev has been scrupulously studying and describing Orenburg linguistic space, introducing this world to his students. It was hard work – writing down dialectal speech in the field, compiling a catalogue of thousands of cards from Orenburg press, literary works… This selfless labour was accurately described by our first word-collector B.I. Dal: “It means collecting the traces of a living language, not from books or scientific references; it resembles not even the labour of an architect or a builder but of a hod carrier; however, it’s a life time labour, which will save dozens of years to the toiler” [Dal V. I. Defining dictionary of the living Russian language. Vol 1. Moscow, 2000. P. XLVIII].

In the meantime the scientist has written articles on dialectology and toponymy of the Orenburg region, has made reports at scientific conferences, has prepared the long awaited “Chrestomathy of Orenburg dialects” and “Orenburg regional dictionary” for publishing. B. A. Moiseev is still working: he is correcting the old information, collecting new one, adding to it and systemizing his card-catalogue of the living Russian language. In 2013 OSPU published his monograph “Local names of Orenburg region. Historical and toponymical sketch”.

The scientist doesn’t even want to get all the credit, he is dreaming only of sharing his scientific discoveries with the people of the local Orenburg region. The work of our local historian was honored by N. N. Kazansky, the director of the Institute of Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the letter of recognition. This academic institution is releasing a unique “Dictionary of Russian dialects”, and the materials of B. A. Moiseev have been used as one of the sources.

We can honour our colleague only in our scientific works. The range of the published articles of different philologists is a tribute to this great worker, local historian and dialectologist.

Elena Nikolayevna Bekasova, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, Department of Linguistic Studies and Methodology of Teaching Russian, FSBEI HPE “Orenburg State Pedagogical University”