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What Can Be Done with Diaries?

2004; Wiley; Volume: 63; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-9434.2004.00332.x

1467-9434

Irina Paperno,

Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies

The Russian ReviewVolume 63, Issue 4 p. 561-573 What Can Be Done with Diaries? IRINA PAPERNO, IRINA PAPERNO Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotifcs of Behavior (1988), Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia (1997), and, in recent years, "Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,"Kritika (Fall 2002).Search for more papers by this author IRINA PAPERNO, IRINA PAPERNO Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotifcs of Behavior (1988), Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia (1997), and, in recent years, "Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,"Kritika (Fall 2002).Search for more papers by this author First published: 27 August 2004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9434.2004.00332.xCitations: 17AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL References 1 On private letters as a literary genre and form of sociability in Russia see W. M. Todd III, The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in The Age of Pushkin ( Princeton , 1967). A student of William Mills Todd, I have enormously benefited from his insights into the interrelations of the literary and the social; 1a his pioneering work on Russian literature as a social institution has had tangible influence on Slavic studies. For West European context see, on letters as acts of intimacy, Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter ( Chicago , 1986); 1b and on uses of the letter in its situation between the public and the private (in France), Roger Chartier et al., eds., Christopher Woodall, trans., Correspondence: Models of Letter Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century ( Princeton , 1997). 2 Rachael Langford and Russell West, " Introduction: Diaries and Margins,"in Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History, ed. Rachael Langford and Russell West ( Amsterdam , 1999), 8. 3 On "hybridity and diversity" see Rachel Cottam, " Diaries and Journals: General Survey,"in Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, ed. Margaretta Jolly ( London , 2001), 1: 267– 68. 3a For definition of the diary on the basis of usage see Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries ( London , 1974), 3. 4 Virginia Woolf's phrase, cited by Cottam, " Diaries and Journals," 267. 5 The opening sentence of K. Eckhard Kuhn-Osius's far-reaching essay, "Making Loose Ends Meet: Private Journals in the Public Realm,"The German Quarterly 54 (1981): 166. 6 This principle was formulated by Jean Rousset, who followed Blanchot. See Jean Rousset, "Le journal intime, texte sans destinataire Poétique 56 (1983): 435; 6a and Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come [ Le Livre à venir ] ( Stanford , 2003), 183. 7 Kuhn-Osius, " Making Loose Ends Meet," 166. 8 For a discussion of the diary's relation to self, and the division between public and private self, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, " Toward Conceptualizing Diary,"in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney ( New York , 1988), 128– 40. 9 Cf. the definition by Lawrence Rosenwald (who goes by the Russian Formalist categories of form and function): "In form, a diary is a chronologically ordered sequence of dated entries addressed to an unspecified audience. We call that form a diary when a writer uses it to fulfill certain functions. We might describe those functions collectively as the discontinuous recording of the aspects of the writer's own life; more technically we must posit a number of identities: between the author and the narrator; between the narrator and the principal character; and between the depicted and the real, this latter including the identity between date of entry and date of composition." Rosenwald's definition is meant to exclude the neighboring genres, such as memoir and autobiography, letter and correspondence, and fictitious diary (or diary-novel). See Lawrence Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary ( New York , 1988), 5– 6. 9a For an extensive discussion of definitions of the diary see Andrew Hassam, Writing and Reality: A Study of Modern British Diary Fiction ( Westport , CT , 1993), 11– 23. 10 For connection between the diary and the account book see William Matthews, British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written between 1492 and 1942 ( Berkeley , 1950), 1: cvi– cviii; 10a Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 ( Chicago , 1996), 58– 67; 10b Jacques Revel et al., " Forms of Privatization,"in A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 3 Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier ( Cambridge , MA , 1989), 330; 10c and Alain Corbin, " Backstage,"in A History of Private Life, vol. 4 From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War , ed. Michel Perrot ( Cambridge , MA , 1990), 498– 99. 10d For connection between historical chronicles and personal diaries see, for example, Ralph Houlbrooke, English Family Life 1567–1716: An Anthology from Diaries ( Oxford , 1988), 1– 2. 11 Corbin, " Backstage," 498. Corbin wrote of nineteenth-century diaries. 12 Béatrice Didier, " Pour une sociologie du journal intime,"in Le journal intime et ses formes littéraires: Actes du Colloque de septembre 1975, comp. V. Litto ( Geneva , 1978), 245– 48. For details see Ransel's essay in this issue. 13 Corbin, " Backstage," 499. 14 Cited in ibid. 15 See Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior ( Stanford , 1988), 41– 53. 16 A brief comprehensive sketch of the history of the genre, from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, can be found in Peter Boerner's classic survey, Tagebuch ( Stuttgart , 1969), 37– 59. See also Ransel's essay in this issue. 17 See Rogier Chartier's introduction to the"Forms of Privatization"section in A History of Private Life 3: 165. 18 Loosely after Philippe Lejeune, " The Practice of the Private Journal: Chronicle of an Investigation (1986–1998),"in Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms, 202. Lejeune presents the aesthetization of the diary as a nineteenthcentury phenomenon, which is debatable. 19 See, for example, Hassam, Writing and Reality, 15. 20 See Lejeune, " The Practice of the Private Journal"; and Malik Allam, Journaux intimes: Une sociologie de l'écriture personnelle, pref. Philippe Lejeune ( Paris , 1996). 21 For the psychological aspects of diary-keeping see Wendy J. Wiener and George C. Rosenwald, " A Moment's Monument: The Psychology of Keeping a Diary,"in The Narrative Study of Lives, ed. Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich ( Newbury , 1993), 1: 30– 58. Drawing their material from interviews with diarists, Wiener and Rosenwald reviewed the psychological possibilities the diary offers a diarist: versality and coordination of self and others as well as the management of emotions and of the experience of time. As the diary permits the evocation of fantasies about the self and the sedimentation of these fantasies on the written (and thus readable) page, the diary functions for the objectivation as well as transformation of the self. The keeping of a diary is an activity that binds self in time, not only across the span of a long-term diary, but also within each entry. Each entry is made with an intention to read it later and to add further entries, to return as reader and writer. The diary-writing thus serves as an instrument of self-continuity. The diary is both a "space" and an "object" (in the psychoanalytic sense); there is the "diary-diarist" relationship. In conclusion, Wiener and Rosewald suggest that the chief psychological utility of diaries emanates from the reflexive uses to which diarists put them. It is worth noting that this description of the psychology of diary-keeping mirrors the discussions of the diary as a genre by literary scholars. The concerns of literary scholars and psychologists overlap, with each side taking clues from the other. 22 For the views presented below I rely mostly on Andrew Hassam, "Reading Other People's Diaries,"University of Toronto Quarterly 56: 3 (1987): 435– 42; 22a and Rousset, " Le journal intime," 435– 43. 22b See also Roger Cardinal, "Unlocking the Diary,"Comparative Criticism 12 (1990): 71– 87; 22c and Kuhn-Osius, " Making Loose Ends Meet." 23 Hassam, " Reading Other People's Diaries," 436. 23a See also Rousset, " Le journal intime," 436– 37. 24 See a typology of diary-writing according to the position of the addressee in Rousset, " Le journal intime."Hassam discussed this typology in his "Reading Other People's Diaries." 25 Hassam, " Reading Other People Diaries," 438– 39 and passim. 26 On the diary and "authenticity" see Hassam, Writing and Reality, 25. 27 Hassam's ingenious idea ("Reading Other People's Diaries," 442). 28 For such surveys see Michele Leleu, Les Journaux intimes ( Paris , 1952); 28a Alain Girard, Les Journaux intimes ( Paris , 1963); 28b Gustav Rene Hocke, Das Europäische Tagebuch ( Wiesbaden , 1963); 28c Peter Boerner, Tagebuch ( Stuttgart , 1969); 28d Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries ( London 1974); 28e Béatrice Didier, Le Journal intime ( Paris , 1976); 28f Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries ( New York , 1984); 28g and Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow, Europäische Tagebücher: Eigenart-Formen-Entwicklung ( Darmstadt , 1990). 28h There is no comparable survey of Russian diaries. A brief survey-style treatment of diaries can be found in A. G. Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika XVIII–pervoi poloviny XIX v. ( Moscow , 1991). 28i There are also comprehensive annotated bibliographies of the English diaries, some of which attempt classification. Central among them (though incomplete) is William Matthews, British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written between 1492 and 1942 ( Berkeley , 1950). 28j See also Cheryl Cline, Women's Diaries, Journals, and Letters: An Annotated Bibliography ( New York , 1989). 28k For a bibliography of the Russian diaries—combined with memoirs—see Petr Zaionchkovskii, Istoriia dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii v dnevnikakh i vospominaniiakh: Annotirovannyi ukazatel', 5 vols. ( Moscow , 197689). 29 For a discussion of existing research and its problems see Sherman, Telling Time, 13–16nn.19–24. 30 See Wiener and Rosenwald, "A Moment's Monument," 31. 31 After Sherman, Telling Time, 31. 32 See Ariès and Duby, eds., A History of Private Life 3: 165, 255, 330– 36, 380–92, and 4: 498–502. 33 This research has been summarized in Lejeune, "The Practice of the Private Journal," which contains a bibliography of francophone studies of the diary between 1938 and 1998. 34 Noted by Langford and West in their" Introduction: Diaries and Margins," 8. 34a For a recent example of such research see Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, eds., Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries ( Amherst , 1996). 35 See Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary, 3– 28; 35a and Sherman, Telling Time, 238n.19. 36 Sherman, Telling Time, xi. 37 Ibid., 33–34. 38 Ibid., 68. 39 Ibid., 8, 107. 40 Ibid., 27. 41 See Jochen Hellbeck, " Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries from the Stalin Era" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998), which contains extensive discussions of the diary form. 42 For brief comments see also idem, " Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931–1939),"in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick ( New York , 2000), 77– 116; 42a and idem, " Writing the Self in the Time of Terror: The Diary of Aleksandr Afinogenov,"in Self and Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler ( Ithaca , 2000), 69– 93. Hellbeck's book-length study on the subject will be published by Harvard University Press. 42b Hellbeck situated the Soviet diary in relation to the Puritan and Pietist diary in" Laboratories of the Soviet Self," 90, 9– 98, 157. 42c See also his discussion of the culture of diary-writing in prerevolutionary Russia, especially diaries of Orthodox priests (pp. 99–102), and of attitudes toward diary-writing in the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s (pp. 103–31). 43 In July 2001 the Russian Review devoted a cluster to the topic of "Soviet subjectivity": Eric Naiman's "On Soviet Subjects and Scholars Who Make Them," Igal Halfin's "Looking Into the Oppositionists' Soul: Inquisition Communist Style," and Jochen Hellbeck's "Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts" (Russian Review 60 [July 2001]: 307–15, 316–39, and 340–59, respectively). In their contributions to the forum, the two historians, Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, argued that speech, writing, and autobiographical narratives (such as the diary), fostered a sense of self as a historical subject, ultimately participating in the creation of the new selves for the new regime. In his comment, Eric Naiman, a literary scholar, formulated a critical response. This cluster reformulates the methodological problem. The focus is not on historical forms of subjectivity, but on the genre itself (the diary), used by historians and literary scholars. 44 See Irina Paperno, " Tolstoy's Diaries: The Inaccessible Self,"in Self and Story in Russian History, 242– 65. 44a For this and other studies of diaries see also the thematic cluster"Dnevniki: Mezhdu tekstom i zhiznetvorchestvom,"Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 61 (2003). 45 Cf. the observation Jürgen Habermas made, speaking of the intimate sphere of the family in eighteenth-century England: " The diary became a letter addressed to the sender, and the first-person narrative became a conversation with one's self addressed to another person. These were experiments with the subjectivity discovered in the close relationships of the conjugal family" ( The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger et al. [ Cambridge , MA , 1991], 49). 46 See John Wyatt Randolph, " The Bakunins: Family, Nobility, and Social Thought in Imperial Russia, 1780–1840" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley , 1997). 47 See David Ransel, " An Eighteenth-Century Russian Merchant Family in Prosperity and Decline,"in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David Ransel ( Bloomington , 1998), 256– 80; 47a and Ransel, " Enlightenment and Tradition: The Aestheticized Life of an Eighteenth-Century Provincial Merchant,"in Self and Story in Russian History, 305–29. 48 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 ( New York , 1990). 49 Another literary scholar, Boris Maslov, performed a (yet unpublished) investigation of Olesha's diary as an autobiographical text ("Subjecthood and Politics of Literature in Yuri Olesha's Diaries of the 1930s"). I am indebted to Maslov for informative and insightful discussions of Olesha's diary. 50 On advertising a link to subjectivity and temporality see Langford and West, "Introduction: Diaries and Margins," 7. On visibly separate installments see Kuhn-Osius, " Making Loose Ends Meet," 166. 51 For a different opinion see Hassam, who insists that the diary is nonretrospective (Writing and Reality, 21, 24). 52 As Felicity Nussbaum put it, "the diary creates and tolerates crisis in perpetuity" ("Toward Conceptualizing Diary," 134). 53 On date and history see Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary, 7. On linking self to historical time see Wolfson's essay in this issue. 54 Kuhn-Osius, " Making Loose Ends Meet," 167. Kuhn-Osius comments that diaries share this feature with fiction. 55 After Kuhn-Osius, " Making Loose Ends Meet," 169– 70. Cf. Hannah Arendt's large-scale proposition: "Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before." According to Arendt, "the most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experiences" ( The Human Condition, 2d ed. [ Chicago , 1998], 50). 56 John Randolph's apt phrase. 57 I used reflections on incremental self in the diary from Boris Maslov's unpublished essay on Olesha's diary ("the incremental diary is meant to yield a cumulative autobiography") and the formulation by Boris Wolfson ("being read by someone even as it is being written constitutes an integral part of the diary"). 58 I thank Boris Wolfson for helping me to formulate this principle. Citing Literature Volume63, Issue4October 2004Pages 561-573 ReferencesRelatedInformation