Natalia Y. Shvedova stated that her work always began with an abbot and finished with a zebra. At first Shvedova worked under the guidance of her teacher Sergey I. Ozhegov, but after his death in 1964, she headed the work herself. The gap between the abbot and the zebra housed the whole Russian language dictionary by Ozhegov and Shvedova. Every literate person has heard of it.
Natalia’s father – Yuly Eichenwald, a famous literary critic, was exiled from Russia in 1922 on the notorious “philosophers’ steamboat.” Natalia’s first research advisor was academic Vinogradov, the one whose name is given today to the Institute of the Russian Language. Natalia received the state prize in 1982 for the Russian Grammar in 2 volumes rather than for the Dictionary. Other significant academic works by N. Shvedova include Russian Semantic Dictionary and Russian Ideographic Dictionary: Human World and a Human in the Surrounding World.
