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Dossier : Movere Littérature, corporéité et mouvementMovere.
La polysémie de ce verbe latin révèle
une
typologie de mouvements par lesquels corps et monde entrent en
relation. L’aspect double de sa transitivité (qui
met en
mouvement ou qui est en mouvement) place l’accent sur le
procès plus que sur le résultat,
c’est-à-dire l’échange. Au
cours du XXe
siècle, l’expérience de ce rapport
devient une
expérience d’accélération,
corrélée à une logique de croissance
ininterrompue
pour l’affectation des corps et l’extraction des
ressources
au nom du progrès. L’augmentation de la vitesse
des
transmutations mutuelles entre les corps et un monde exponentiellement
connecté apparaît comme le véritable
moteur de la
modernité. Les auteur·es puisent dans la
littérature pour réfléchir aux
mouvements entre le
corps humain et l’environnement (naturel,
matériel, social
et transcendantal), pris dans ce flux
d’accélération continu. Ils concourent
à
montrer en quoi la littérature est idéalement
placée pour observer et expérimenter la
convergence du
corps et du monde selon des modalités et des effets qui lui
sont
propres, à la fois témoin et actrice du
Tout-Monde
– pour reprendre la formule glissantienne.
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| RÉSUMÉ Alexis PERI, Les journaux intimes soviétiques à l’époque de la Grande Guerre patriotique Soucieux de mieux comprendre les ravages inouïs causés par la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les historiens de l’Union soviétique ont manifesté un intérêt croissant pour les journaux intimes, afin de saisir la manière dont ce conflit avait été vécu et perçu par les citoyens. Dans cet essai, j’explore les récentes approches historiographiques des journaux de guerre soviétiques, en examinant les méthodes révolutionnaires et néanmoins différentes d’Oleg Budnitskii, Jochen Hellbeck et Jeffrey K. Hass, avant de développer ma propre recherche. Budnitskii s’est appuyé sur des journaux personnels de soldats pour mettre en lumière certains aspects méconnus, voire tabous, du service au front, compliquant de la sorte à la fois l’illustre mythe de la Grande Guerre patriotique et l’idée selon laquelle, en écrivant, les diaristes de l’URSS restaient prisonniers du cadre de l’idéologie soviétique. Analysant la pratique du journal intime à l’époque stalinienne, Hellbeck y a vu un outil d’autoperfectionnement, utilisé par le diariste pour purger en soi l’individualisme bourgeois et aligner sa conscience sur le collectif; il en a déduit l’existence d’un concept de soi (ou d’une subjectivité) soviétique unique, distinct de la subjectivité libérale occidentale. Privilégiant une approche historico-sociologique, Hass s’est penché sur les journaux personnels du siège de Leningrad afin de déterminer dans quelle mesure une situation de famine avait pesé sur certaines normes et logiques comportementales au sein de la communauté assiégée. Inspirée de l’ensemble de ces chercheurs, ma propre recherche – également centrée sur la ville de Leningrad en temps de guerre – porte sur les stratégies cognitives et narratives déployées par les Léningradois pour appréhender l’état de siège. Ce faisant, je traite le journal comme un texte producteur de sens plutôt que comme un laboratoire du soi. |
Soviet Diaries of the Great Patriotic War |
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| Alexis PERI Boston University |
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| The Second World War was waged on a massive scale, inflicting unprecedented death and devastation. Nowhere was this truer than in the Soviet Union, which mobilized the largest army, some 34.5 million people, and which, in absolute terms, suffered the highest death toll. Scholars estimate that between twenty and twenty-six million Soviet soldiers and civilians perished. (1) Given the enormous scale of the conflict, which in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation today has been dubbed the Great Patriotic War (Velikaia otechestvennaia voina), there has been a persistent hunger for a more personal and granular view of how individuals experienced and processed this traumatic ordeal. (2) There have been concerted efforts, both state- and privately-driven, to uncover and collect individual accounts, especially memoirs, oral histories, and diaries, which might shed light on the private, intimate, and everyday aspects of life in total war. This effort actually began just a few months after the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941. Recognizing the war’s monumental importance, local Communist Party authorities in major centers like Leningrad and Moscow started campaigns that encouraged citizens to keep diaries of the experience. They later arranged interviews and collected reminiscences when the war ended. The thinking was that such sources would provide crucial data for future scholars writing the history of this conflict. However, just as these initiatives gathered steam in the late 1940s, they were abruptly halted, their collections were shelved, and their organizers were fired and sometimes arrested. (3) The political danger of preserving alternative interpretations of the war’s meaning, which might conflict with the official Soviet war myth, ultimately outweighed any historiographical considerations. (4) | ||
| Since the Soviet collapse, there have been considerable efforts to bring these and other personal accounts of World War II to light. Thousands of war diaries and memoirs have been published, oral histories conducted, and newly-opened archives mined in what has been called “the source revolution” of the 1990s and early 2000s. In this hunt for individual stories, some scholars have placed a premium on diaries, assuming they are free from some of the methodological limitations posed by memoirs and oral histories. Of course, reminiscences and retrospective interviews are subject to the frailty of human memory and the influence of public commemoration and collective reinterpretation. But can diaries, especially those written under conditions of total war and Stalinism, be considered more accurate, immediate, authentic, and private than other genres? What scholarly advantages and drawbacks do they offer? How was diary-writing viewed, culturally and ideologically, in the Soviet Union? To what degree did the war alter existing practices of diary writing in the USSR? | ||
| To address these questions, this essay surveys some of the chief historiographical approaches to Soviet diaries of the Great Patriotic War, which have emerged in the past two decades. It highlights the specific contextual considerations, stumbling blocks, and interpretive opportunities that such sources raise. In particular, I highlight the work of Oleg Budnitskii, Jochen Hellbeck, and Jeffrey K. Hass as well as my own research, which stands on the shoulders of these scholars. By no means is this discussion exhaustive. Indeed, a sizable number of researchers in other disciplines, especially literary scholars, have analyzed Soviet wartime diaries – particularly those kept by professional writers – and have contributed immeasurably to the genre’s theorization. (5) Given the limits of my own expertise as a historian and the limited space for this discussion, I have confined my remarks to historical and historical-sociological approaches with the hope of illustrating their diversity and range rather than aiming to be comprehensive. | ||
| Diaries of Frontline Intimacy | ||
| Oleg Budnitskii was one of the first historians of the Great Patriotic War to make extensive use of Soviet soldiers’ diaries, analyzing them in conjunction and comparison with other kinds of sources. Budnitskii has argued that, compared to soldiers’ letters and memoirs or to internal surveillance reports (svodki), diaries best capture combatants’ perspectives on frontline life, particularly those aspects of it that were taboo. Because the post was highly regulated, Red Army men and women wrote their letters “with an eye to the military censor.” (6) Soldiers’ memoirs too “were meticulously unified and levelled after 1945.” (7) Meanwhile, svodki may have been fabricated or embellished by Soviet officials trying to overfulfill their quotas, Budnitskii has cautioned. (8) Comparing svodki and diaries, Budnitskii argued: “in the former case, we generally find monolithic official language, while in the latter, the peculiarities and ‘irregularities’ of individual voices are preserved.” (9) Based on such comparisons, Budnitskii has regularly cast diaries as more “reliable”, “spontaneous”, and “authentic” than other genres. (10) He has privileged the humble accounts of the rank-and-file and cited their literary simplicity as evidence of accuracy or neutrality. “These texts are lapidary, devoid of any stylistic extravagances and they accurately reflect the atmosphere [...] of battle”, he has argued. (11) | ||
| Since the late 2000s, Budnitskii has published several articles that shed light on particularly verboten or countervailing themes of frontline experience. These include Soviet defeatism during the first months of the war, sexual relations – both consensual and coerced – between men and women in the Red Army, the prevalence of antisemitism in the Soviet military, and the massive sexual assaults perpetrated by Soviet troops when they invaded Hungary, Austria and Germany at the end of World War II. Uncovering a wealth of both published and unpublished diaries, Budnitskii has made landmark interventions into the prevailing view of the Great Patriotic War. | ||
| For instance, based on diary evidence, Budnitskii has demonstrated that the war caused a veritable “sexual revolution” in the norms and behaviors of the frontline generation. (12) Such changes were to be expected during a time when there was a severe shortage of men in the rear and of women at the front, but this phenomenon was taboo in postwar memoirs and interviews. Female fidelity in particular has been a constant trope of the Great Patriotic War myth. (13) Using diaries, however, Budnitskii not only recuperated stories of sex at the front, he brought complexity and nuance to prevailing views that women at the front were either victims of rape or sexually promiscuous. Budnitskii certainly has acknowledged that both of these phenomena occurred, especially the sexual exploitation of women. Indeed, he uses diary evidence to show how “access to a female body became a currency during the war.” (14) However, drawing on journals like that of army translator Irina Dunaevskaia, Budnitskii gives insight into the mix of emotions and motives that colored many consensual frontline romances, broadening our scholarly purview beyond victims and villains. Dunaevskaia was indeed harassed by fellow soldiers for sex, but she also experienced subtler pressure for intercourse from close male friends and confidants about whom she generally cared. For three years she refused their advances; as a widow, she was afraid of loving and then mourning another husband. But her fear of grief was matched by equally strong feelings of loneliness and disconnection. In her diary entry for 20 May, 1944, Dunesvskaia wrote of her struggle between dueling emotional impulses: | ||
| I am neither morally nor physically able to bear loneliness anymore – after all, I am only human and a woman! Everything is so short-lived in the war that there can be no talk of any justified, serious, deep intimacy, since tomorrow there may not be a person who is anyway dear today. I already experienced it. […] But even so, it is unbearable. Surely I can’t stand it! Surely I will not live to see my dream and, unable to stand it, I will give myself in exchange for half-thoughts, half-feelings, half-passion. (15) | ||
| Within several months of this entry, Dunaevskaia indeed took a chance on love again, legally marrying a fellow soldier and beginning a frontline romance with him. However, it seems that her fears about “giving herself” without being fully passionate came true, and within two years, the couple separated. | ||
| Just as Budnitskii shed light on the emotional complexities of the “sexual revolution” at the front, he also analyzed how Jewish soldiers negotiated aspects of their Jewish and Soviet identities. Using their journals, he reconstructed “the everyday life of a ‘Private Abram,’” “his frame of mind”, and “his feelings.” (16) Here again, the diaries document emotional conflict and ambivalence. Budnitskii found that many Jewish soldiers expressed an aversion to killing in their diaries even as they felt morally justified in taking the lives of Hitler’s troops. They also endured anti-Semitic remarks from the same Red-Army commanders who resoundingly condemned the Nazis’ annihilation of Jews. (17) Budnitskii’s article creates a composite picture of “Private Abram” without leveling or homogenizing the individual voices of the diarists. It eschews stereotypes and pat social types, just as his piece on frontline sexual relations did. Still, Budnitskii has aimed to illuminate soldiers’ experiences that were shared, not just personal and taboo. Thus, one of his main reservations about diaries has been the difficulty of generalizing from a small number of accounts to collective experience. He himself has questioned whether the diaries he has uncovered are “sociologically representative” enough to make claims about troops’ experiences. Although he has carefully considered aspects of ethnicity, gender, class, and education to qualify any claims he has made about soldiers’ journals, Budnitskii has identified the small size of his data set as a persistent and unavoidable shortcoming of his research. (18) | ||
| Budnitskii’s scholarship has corrected the longstanding misconception that Red Army soldiers were prohibited from keeping diaries at the front, an assumption that prevented some scholars from searching for such accounts. Although troops occasionally referred to a ban on diary writing, citing the security risk if they fell into enemy hands, Budnitskii discovered there was “no special order to that effect, and the treatment of those caught keeping a record of the war was usually determined on an individual basis.” (19) In fact, some soldiers learned how to keep diaries from political officers, and they read their journals aloud to comrades and commanders. One such diarist, a Sergeant Vladimir Gel’fand, recorded his political officer-turned-writing coach’s advice in his journal: | ||
| He says the diary should be only about what work the company does, about how the battles go, about our skillful commanders, and the political instructors’ talks with the soldiers, about the Red Army men’s reaction to these talks, etc. This is the way I will write from now on. (20) | ||
| This notion that a frontline diary should record military engagements, political lessons, and collective experiences rather than personal reflections or mundane details – which the political officer called “silly things” – stemmed from a widespread Soviet anxiety that diary writing might foster unhealthy self-absorption, egoism, or bourgeois individualism. Yet, these “silly” details, Budnitskii observed, were often the most interesting parts of the diary. (21) Gel’fand’s journal underscores how Soviet diaries were seldom considered private but rather accounts that should serve a societal good and tell a collective story. I discuss these points in greater detail below. | ||
| Beyond illuminating personal and prohibited aspects of soldiers’ experiences, Budnitskii has used troops’ diaries, and the range of views recorded in them, to demonstrate that the Soviet rank-and-file were capable “of independent thought, of reflection, and of a critical perspective of the reality that surrounded them.” Even under conditions of martial discipline, “Soviet people clearly were intellectually much freer, observant, and daring in their conclusions than is generally believed. At least some of them were.” (22) In this way, Budnitskii has pushed back against western, Cold War-era assumptions that Soviet people were either brainwashed automatons blindly obeying the regime or else they were secret dissidents, outwardly conforming but privately rejecting Soviet ideology and patriotism. Diaries help expose the folly in both of these overly simplistic views of Soviet individuals. The thoughts they recorded were discerning and varied. “Soviet society was still not homogenous”, Budnitskii reiterated, even when the Nazi invasion led to an upsurge of Soviet patriotism. Just as thousands rushed to enlist, “a significant part of it (society) would have been happy to witness the disappearance of the Bolsheviks.” (23) And the diaries of those who were opposed to or ambivalent about Soviet power further complicate the triumphant myth of the Great Patriotic War, which casts World War II as a time of complete unity, solidarity, patriotism, and willing sacrifice among Soviet citizens, especially Red Army soldiers. (24) Indeed, one of Budnitskii’s major contributions has been to spotlight diversity and discord between the classes, ethnicities, and sexes that comprised the Soviet military. And he has relied on diaries to do so. | ||
| In sum, when researching the frontline experience, Budnitskii has favored diaries as a preferable alternative to other genres of everyday life because journals shed light on aspects of the Great Patriotic War that are less well known or recognized. In this way, he has found diaries to be more authentic and accurate than retrospective accounts, which adhere more closely to the officially sanctioned and celebrated myth of the war – its Soviet and postSoviet iterations. | ||
| Diaries as Laboratories of the Self | ||
| Budnitskii’s interest in opposing and sometimes oppositional narratives of war distinguishes his work from another major scholarly approach, whereby researchers use diaries to study how individuals integrated themselves into Soviet society and inscribed their stories into that of the Revolution. (25) From this perspective, the diary was a tool of self-transformation through which Soviet citizens could demonstrate that they had acquired proletarian consciousness, internalized socialist values, and fashioned themselves into ideal New Soviet People (novye sovetskie liudi). Thus, unlike Budnitskii’s Gel’fand, who tried to focus his account on military encounters and collective experiences, these Soviet diarists turned to their journals to work on themselves and to purge themselves of bourgeois, egoistic tendencies, expunging them onto the page. Coal miner Vladimir Molodtsov, for instance, rebuked himself in his diary when his thoughts – even unconscious ones – drifted away from the task of building socialism through Stalin’s Five Year Plan and toward personal, psychological reflections | ||
| It is interesting how there is a lack of accordance between psychology and ideology. Ideologically, I myself mobilized myself [sic] to catch up with the [Five Year] plan, and although I am working actively, my psychology still draws me back home, to my hearth. This is evidenced by the increasing numbers of dreams over the past two days, in which I saw my mother. But ideology will raise psychology, this has to occur. (26) | ||
| In this journey of self-transformation, diarists like Molodtsov often reread their previous entries to track their progress in the reorientation of their thoughts and identities toward the Soviet collective. Playwright Aleksandr Afinogenov, for instance, resolved to flip back through the pages of his journal often, “always LOOKING BACK and EXAMINING MYSELF, NOT ALLOWING MYSELF TO BECOME MY FORMER SELF, if even only a tiny bit.” (27) What Gel’fand, Molodstov, and Afinogenov have in common is the notion that the diary was not a place for “silly”, self-absorbed musings but rather a practice that should contribute to the betterment of society by replacing individualistic tendencies with a communalist ones. | ||
| Scholars who approach Soviet diaries as tools of self-transformation have traced the phenomenon to the 1920s and 1930s, a time when individual citizens were called to monitor and narrate their personal and political growth in autobiographical narratives ranging from memoirs and Communist Party applications to confessions and court testimonies. (28) This longstanding practice became ubiquitous in the Stalin era. The diaries of Molodstov and Afinogenov are just two of hundreds of diaries analyzed by the historian Jochen Hellbeck. Hellbeck has centered his research more on diaries of the 1930s than on those of World War II, but his methodological approach has been so influential, it has shaped how scholars analyze diaries from the Stalin era more generally. In the late 1920s, Hellbeck demonstrated, party representatives asked workers building the Moscow Metro as well as exemplary laborers (udarniki) from a variety of worksites to keep diaries in order to showcase how they had honed their proletarian consciousness through discipline and toil. Moreover, they were asked to read excerpts from their journals at union meetings or publish them in wall and brigade newspapers, where they could serve as models for fellow workers still developing themselves. Here again, diaries were not considered “purely private”. (29) They served a societal function, and they always had a potential reader – be it a political officer, a fellow worker, an official reviewing party applications, or a secret police agent. During the Great Purges of the 1930s, party and police officials seized diaries and mined them for evidence of counter-revolutionary thoughts or deeds. These agents also treated diaries as windows onto the interior self, whereby they could access and assess the writer’s subjectivity (or inner sense of self). | ||
| Most scholars agree that the practice of diary writing was critical to the Soviet regime’s project to mold and perfect its citizens. However, many disagree over whether the journals capture genuine efforts at self-transformation or if they should be treated as politically expedient performances of Sovietization. Historians Igal Halfin, Jochen Hellbeck, and Oleg Kharkhordin have argued the former position. Diaries, they suggest, demonstrate that Soviet citizens had a distinct self-concept predicated on the fusion of their individual selves with the collective; to keep a diary was to write oneself “into the social and political order.” In this respect, they argue, Soviet subjectivity differed from liberal, western subjectivity, which centered on the pursuit of individual privacy and autonomy. (30) By contrast, other historians like Shelia Fitzpatrick and Golfo Alexopoulos have argued that Soviet diaries should be read as displays of a “useable self” crafted for the purpose of social or political advancement. (31) Undoubtedly, citizens had to learn to “speak Bolshevik” in order to thrive in Stalinist society. The debate has been over whether these speech acts indicated actual belief. (32) For Jochen Hellbeck, such utterances were constitutive of thought and of the self. Diary writing facilitated the internalization of Soviet ideology and models of subjectivity. In this way, like Budnitskii, Hellbeck has used diaries to combat the application of liberal assumptions to Soviet people by arguing that they conceived of themselves in unique terms that were distinct from western culture. | ||
| One area where Budnitskii’s and Hellbeck’s approaches diverge is on the question of authenticity. While Budnitskii has argued that frontline diaries were more spontaneously and sincerely written than other types of personal accounts, Hellbeck has argued against classifying journals as private, accurate, or authentic. These concepts themselves are all historically specific and evolving – even for the diarists themselves. The diary form, Hellbeck wrote, has “bedeviled literary and historical scholars alike” for its “‘uncertain’ nature between literary and historical writing, between fictional and documentary, spontaneous and reflected narrative, has frustrated many a literary specialist in search for canonical clarity.” (33) Even if diarists intend to pour their souls onto the page with the utmost sincerity, this does not mean their narratives do not contain stylized, fictionalized, and constructed elements. As such, Hellbeck argues, these texts need to be deconstructed rather than taken on face value. And although he has amassed and examined hundreds of diaries, Hellbeck’s publications tend to examine a small number of journals in-depth, each one a unique “laboratory of the self.” (34) He has been less concerned about numerical generalizability than Budnitskii. | ||
| While Hellbeck himself has not declared Soviet diaries to be authentic windows onto the soul, he has argued that this is how they were perceived in the 1930s and 1940s. And not only diaries penned by Soviet citizens. Hellbeck has demonstrated how the Soviet wartime press made a concerted effort to publish excerpts of German soldiers’ diaries and letters, which were found in the rubble of smoking battlefields like Stalingrad. A leading voice in this campaign was the celebrated Soviet writer and war correspondent Il’ia Ehrenburg. Whether in military newspapers like Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda) or all-union ones like Pravda and News (Izvestiia), Ehrenburg published excerpts from enemy diaries in order to portray Germans as barbaric savages and thus to fuel Soviet hatred and bloodthirst. Soviet readers, Hellbeck argued, assumed that diaries were spaces for candidly reckoning with one’s failings as part of the ongoing “quest for moral self-improvement.” So, when they read excerpts of German soldiers’ journals, which described committing atrocities “without any moral scrutiny”, Soviet readers took this as evidence that they were inhuman monsters unworthy of mercy. (35) The diary, they believed, was the key to unlocking German souls as well as Soviet ones. In this way, Hellbeck has theorized the Soviet diary and its meaning based on the perspectives of both writers and readers. Both assumed “that a diary or letter disclosed the moral character of its writer and that the purpose of writing was to further moral improvement.” (36) | ||
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| ¹ Recent figures in: Schechter, Brandon. The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019, pp. 21–22. ² Due in part to low literacy rates, there have been far fewer studies of diary writing during the Russian empire’s participation in World War I or during Russia’s civil war of 1918–1922. Studies of these conflicts tend to examine oral testimonies, songs, memoirs, and letters as well as some diaries. They include: Steinberg, Mark D. Voices of Revolution, 1917. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003; Rosenberg, William G. “Reading Soldiers’ Moods: Russian Military Censorship and the Configuration of Feeling in World War I,” American Historical Review, vol. 119, no. 3 (2014): 714–740; Novikova, Liudmila. An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative: The White Movement and the Civil War in the Russian North. Translated by Seth Bernstein. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. ³ Leningrad’s wartime diary-writing initiative is described in: Peri, Alexis. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 13–14, 245–251; Leningrad’s postwar oral history project is analyzed in: Zemskov-Züge, Andrea. “Remembering the War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Official and Unofficial Practices of Remembering,” in Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke, eds., Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010, pp. 199–217. The Moscow-based Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the History of the Great Patriotic War, which recorded some 4,000 interviews, is discussed in: Budnitskii, Oleg. “A Harvard Project in Reverse: Materials of the Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the History of the Great Patriotic War. Publications and Interpretations,” Kritika, vol. 19, no. 1 (2018): 175–202. ⁴ Budnitskii, “A Harvard Project in Reverse,” op. cit.; Boldovskii, Kirill. Padenie ‘blokadnykh sekretarei’: Partapparat Leningrada do i posle ‘Leningradskogo dela’. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2018; Peri, Alexis, The War Within, op. cit., pp. 249–252. ⁵ Literary scholarship on Soviet wartime diaries includes: Paperno, Irina. Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009; Barskova, Polina. “The Spectacle of the Besieged City: Repurposing Cultural Memory in Leningrad, 1941–1944,” Slavic Review, vol. 69, no. 2 (2010): 327–355; Barskova, Polina and Riccardo Niccolosi, eds. Blokadnye Narrativy: Sbornik statei. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2017; Simmons, Cynthia and Nina Perlina. Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2002. Other literary studies of the diary, which have fundamentally impacted how historians approach the genre include: Paperno, Irina. “What Can be Done with Diaries?” Russian Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (2004): 561–573; Aronson, Alex. Studies in Twentieth-Century Diaries: The Concealed Self. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991; Nussbaum, Felicity A. “Toward Conceptualizing a Diary,” in James Olney, ed., Studies in Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 128–140; Lejeune, Philippe. “The Autobiographical Contract,” in Tzvetan Todorov, ed., French Literary Theory Today: A Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 192–222; Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 2009; Lejeune, Philippe. “The Practice of the Private Journal: Chronicle of an Investigation (1986–1998),” in Rachel Langford and Russell West, eds., Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999; Kuhn-Osius, K. Eckhard. “Making Loose Ends Meet: Private Journals in the Public Realm,” German Quarterly, vol. 54 (1981): 166–176. ⁶ Budnitskii, Oleg. “The Intelligentsia meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945.” Translated by Susan Rupp. Kritika, vol. 10, no. 3 (2009): 631. ⁷ Budnitskii, Oleg. “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front,” in Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds., Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014, p. 58. ⁸ Budnitskii, “The Intelligentsia meets the Enemy,” op. cit., p. 631. ⁹ Budnitskii, Oleg. “The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society: Defeatism, 1941–42.” Translated by Jason Morton. Kritika, vol. 15, no. 4 (2014): 777. ¹⁰ Budnitskii, “The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society,” op. cit., pp. 776–777; Budnitskii, Oleg. “Muzhchiny i zhenshchiny v Krasnoi Armii (1941–1945),” Les Cahiers du Monde Russe, vol. 52, nos. 2–3 (2011): 406. ¹¹ Budnitskii, “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front,” op. cit., p. 67. ¹² “Sexual revolution.” Budnitskii, “Muzhchiny i zhenshchiny v Krasnoi Armii (1941–1945),” op. cit., p. 406. ¹³ Budnitskii, “Muzhchiny i zhenshchiny v Krasnoi Armii (1941–1945),” op. cit., pp. 406, 408, 410. ¹⁴ “Access to the female body became the ‘currency’ of wartime.” Budnitskii, “Muzhchiny i zhenshchiny v Krasnoi Armii (1941–1945),” op. cit., p. 413. ¹⁵ “I am neither morally nor physically able to bear loneliness any longer. I am a person and a woman! But on the front everything is so short-lived that no serious, deep intimacy can exist, as tomorrow the person who is dear today may be gone. I have already experienced this. […] But even so it is unbearable. Will I survive? Will I not live to see my dream and, unable to endure, exchange myself for half-thoughts, half-feelings, half-passion.” Budnitskii, “Muzhchiny i zhenshchiny v Krasnoi Armii (1941–1945),” op. cit., p. 419. ¹⁶ Budnitskii, “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front,” op. cit., p. 58. ¹⁷ Budnitskii, “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front,” op. cit., pp. 72–76. ¹⁸ Budnitskii, “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front,” op. cit., p. 64; Budnitskii, “The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society,” op. cit., p. 778. ¹⁹ Budnitskii, “The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society,” op. cit., pp. 777–778. In his earlier work, Budnitskii upheld the notion that there was a ban against soldiers keeping diaries but he later revised this position. ²⁰ Budnitskii, “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front,” op. cit., p. 61. ²¹ Budnitskii, “Jews at War: Diaries from the Front,” op. cit., p. 61. ²² Budnitskii, “The Intelligentsia meets the Enemy,” op. cit., p. 681. ²³ Budnitskii, “The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society,” op. cit., p. 768. A different, but related critique of the tendency to import liberal assumptions when studying Soviet citizens in: Krylova, Anna. “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika, vol. 1, no. 1 (2000): 119–146. ²⁴ Studies of the mythos of the Great Patriotic War and memory include: Tumarkin, Nina. “The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memory,” European Review, vol. 11, no. 4 (2003): 595–611; Weiner, Amir. “The Making of a Dominant Myth: The Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities within the Soviet Polity,” Russian Review, vol. 55, no. 4 (1996): 638–660; Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. *The Legacy of the |
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© Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire
French
Dossier: Movere — Literature, Corporeality and Movement
Issue: 3
Volume: 98
Pages: 773–852
ISSN: 0035-0818
Language: French
ZDB number: 2601544-4
First full-text edition: Vol. 1 (1922)
Publication date: 2020
Article pages: 691–714
Publication: Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire
Movere.
The polysemy of this Latin verb reveals a typology of movements through which body and world enter into relation. The double aspect of its transitivity — that which sets in motion and that which is itself in motion — places the emphasis on process rather than result, that is, on exchange. During the twentieth century, the experience of this relationship became an experience of acceleration, correlated with a logic of uninterrupted growth in the affecting of bodies and extraction of resources in the name of progress. The increasing speed of mutual transformations between bodies and an exponentially connected world appears as the true engine of modernity. The contributors draw on literature to reflect on movements between the human body and the environment — natural, material, social and transcendental — caught in this continuous flow of acceleration. Together they show how literature is ideally placed to observe and experiment with the convergence of body and world in forms and with effects specific to literature itself, at once witness to and actor in the “Tout-Monde,” to borrow Glissant’s formulation.
Alexis Peri, “Soviet Diaries in the Era of the Great Patriotic War”
Seeking to understand more fully the unprecedented devastation caused by the Second World War, historians of the Soviet Union have shown growing interest in personal diaries as a means of grasping how citizens experienced and perceived the conflict. In this essay I examine recent historiographical approaches to Soviet wartime diaries, considering the pioneering yet different methods of Oleg Budnitskii, Jochen Hellbeck and Jeffrey K. Hass before developing my own research.
Budnitskii used soldiers’ personal diaries to illuminate little-known and sometimes taboo aspects of frontline service, thereby complicating both the celebrated myth of the Great Patriotic War and the idea that Soviet diarists, when writing, remained prisoners of the framework of Soviet ideology.
Analyzing diary practice in the Stalinist period, Hellbeck understood it as a tool of self-improvement used by the diarist to purge bourgeois individualism from the self and align individual consciousness with the collective. From this he inferred the existence of a distinctive Soviet concept of the self, or subjectivity, different from Western liberal subjectivity.
Using a historical-sociological approach, Hass studied personal diaries from the Siege of Leningrad in order to determine the extent to which conditions of famine affected certain norms and behavioral logics within the besieged community.
Inspired by all of these scholars, my own research — likewise focused on wartime Leningrad — examines the cognitive and narrative strategies used by Leningraders to make sense of the state of siege. In doing so, I treat the diary as a text that produces meaning rather than as a laboratory of the self.
The main article that follows, “Soviet Diaries of the Great Patriotic War,” is already in English in the original page and is therefore not duplicated here.
