'We-Narrative': Ukrainian War Diary and the Fashioning of the National Subject

• In Event: Diary, Document, Testimony: From Shalamov’s Stories to Ukrainian War Diaries

Abstract

War diary, the most prominent genre of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, reconfigures the conventions of the genre. While it retains the dedication to contemporaneity and to a chronological linearity of the narrative that is posed as artless, private, and authentic, war diary modifies the relationship between the public and the private spheres, and subordinates the traditional assumptions of “privacy, intimacy, and secrecy” (Abbott, Paperno) to the documentary and testimonial value of a witness account. At times of crisis (Lejeune) online public diary sheds such conventions of the genre as privacy, effectively substituting the ‘I-narrative’ of traditional life writing (Eakin) with the ‘we-narrative’ of “a diary for everyone” (Serhii Zhadan, Sky Above Kharkiv). The war diary reconfigures the very act of self-fashioning inherent in life writing from the individual to the national: the diarists explicitly pose their records of individual experiences as expressing and fashioning the national self.

Author

• Lyudmila Parts, McGill U (Canada)