At the end of last year, when the project of “Lived” barely five years, his collection had already exceeded 4000 personal diaries 1700 authors, the total is over 450 thousand daily records.
However, these figures are constantly changing on the website and then do the new diaries, and volunteers under the guidance of professionals to transcribe and digitize. Although Melnichenko says: “.Past.. is first of all archival project, hot present is not engaged” – he is sure the era of the quarantine will gather a rich harvest. As it is, for example, during the siege of Leningrad. By the way, the historian Polina Barskova thinks about the blockade not created great novels, precisely because the whole siege of literature – one great collective diary.
– Generally there are about five or six thousand personal diaries (from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day), and almost every twelfth of them is the diary of the siege of Leningrad, – says Mikhail Melnichenko. – The city was the incredible density of reference of the diaries – they know more than 450. If you delve into the motivations of the authors – many of them not only tried to fix the time, but, as one of them, “not oskotinitsya”, escape from hunger, fear, conflict with others… And of course, many included “mode of the historian.”
According to estimates by Mikhail Melnichenko, a surge of activity in the diaries is observed in our days.
– See it’s inner circle, he says. – The people around me in social networks to describe your feelings and admit that they started to keep a diary.
This surge is obvious for researchers in the West have a number of organizations that have begun to collect coronavirus diaries. They immediately backed up.
And yet – what are the reasons for such activity? Mikhail Melnichenko says that there is always a working combination of motives. One of them is to clear the memory. If the man in the head many important factography, he does write to them to restore the desired. People with literary ambitions use diaries as a space to hone your style. Often the diary is an appeal to the descendants – a man wants to leave a testimony of his life, to prove that it is not wasted. In addition, the diary is a powerful therapeutic function is one of the ways to cope with stress.
– taking notes, you reduce the level of internal feelings, – says Melnichenko. – After all, if you formulate your anxiety, ponder, analyze and describe, you inadvertently move from the position of “perejival” into “observer”. There are a few off the sharpness of feelings.
what is more important to future readers of the diary – recorded by the author of the facts of life or his feelings? Historians have no single answer to that ques��C.
– Each material is important to measure it’s own yardstick, – says Mikhail Melnichenko. – For some of the researchers (for example, a scientist-linguist), the most important may be the dictionary of the diary author’s word usage. For the anthropologist, or psychologist who is engaged, for example, the theme of growing up of teenagers or, conversely, the topic of aging in our country is more important than the psychological journals in which people on dozens of pages detain his own love or resentment toward loved ones. Folklorist important will be written anecdotes, rumors, jokes, limericks.
the Site is “Lived”, for example, readily accepts texts in which the researcher is faced with his “I”: diaries, memoirs and letters. In addition, it is planning to raise collection genre: naïve poetry and literature, folklore manuscript collections, dembelsky albums, school profiles, Chronicles, genealogy, children’s art and other documents.
Mikhail Melnichenko insists that authors should not think about future researchers, and to record in his diary exactly what he personally seems today the most important.
– they All speak of a world after a pandemic will be different. Yes, of course, he agrees. And a diary is a good way of fixing how exactly this other world comes. It is important to record how these changes occur not only in outer space, but inside a person.
Equivalent to whether keeping a diary “a stick in the notebook” posts in the blogs? The difference, of course, said Melnichenko. After all, a diary is a very intimate genre. But the blog was originally public history. The author draws from the beginning that what he wants to communicate to an audience. And he understands the audience.
But this does not mean that for future research a personal diary – a more valuable document. Most likely, the blogs will be analysed according to other principles, implying primarily a study of social relations and not personal issues.
by the Way, during the period of isolation of active volunteers helping to digitize the diaries for the project “Lived”.
– Now, when we began to work online, we were joined by volunteers from all over Russia, – said Melnichenko. In the last month we generally meet weekly and are always perfect, very interesting discussion. And participants became more – 20-25 people each time.
Frequent and the flow of diaries: apparently, many people in the mode of self-isolation began to dismantle the home archives.
“of grief began again to write. Interesting detail: the more I’m busy, the less I write in my diary”. (Yura Ryabinkin, 15.09.1941)
“got Tired of sitting and shaking in fear: the need to find a deal. Decided to start keeping a diary.” (Nina Dyatlova, 21.09.1941).
“And Leningrad all surrounded by… there is no Connection. Emails do not get. Write in d��of EUNIC in order to know family, the conditions in which we die. I hope he will fall into the hands of someone from the family. And I want to live, to wait for victory and the end of the war. All the same the victory will be ours. Pay the damn Hitler for the death of innocent children and mothers” (Nina Yastrubinsky, January 1942).
the Diary of a 15-year-old Vasi Malatova, which he led in 1926, the site of “Lived” gave the author’s daughter, living in Severodvinsk. In the diary of John, for example, talks about his math teacher, who taught him to multiply five-digit numbers in mind. He gave the answer in seconds, which the children then checked by multiplying the column.
In the St. Petersburg library “Rzhevskaya” is stored several thousand journals published by small publishing houses, they are also waiting for their turn to be digitized. Among them, for example, “Eight chapters of madness” – the diaries of Anne of Berkovoy, “proletarian Akhmatova”, three times subjected to repression. Or “the Diary of a woman no one liked” – the publication prepared in 1918 for the newspaper “Life” of Alexander Blok.
Among the Petersburg finds a diary of a teacher from Pushkin, where students in the 1930s he created a literary circle. Of them is imprisoned, accused of counter-revolutionary activities. But each retained a fragment of the personal diaries of the teacher. Coming out of prison, they are these parts joined. As a sign of loyalty shared memory.
