What Can Be Done with Diaries?

Author(s): Irina Paperno

Source: The Russian Review , Oct., 2004, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 561-573
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian
Review

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 DIARIES AND INTIMATE ARCHIVES

What Can Be Done with Diaries?

IRINA PAPERNO

To William Mills Todd III for his sixtieth birth

Reading other people's intimate papers-mostly, diaries and letters--ha

privilege of students of history and literature. In many ways, diaries and
similar: both are archived intimate writings of potential historical as well
value. Scholars have defined private, or familiar, letters as literary writings
of sociability.' Diaries seem to present more of a difficulty. Many scholars hav
on the uncertain situation of the diary. To use a recent statement, "the diary, as
genre uneasily balanced between literary and historical writing, between the
of reportage and reflectiveness of the crafted text, between selfhood and ev
subjectivity and objectivity, between the private and the public, constantly distu
to summarize its characteristics within formalized boundaries."2 (The list of
can be revised and extended.) On this basis, the diary has been both co
exclusion from analysis as a specific genre and privileged for its ability to
tension between the opposites and to highlight marginality.
Yet, over the years, scholars have read, and used, diaries as a historical t
literary form, or an autobiographical document. The success of the diaries
Pepys, Marie Bashkirtseff, Anais Nin, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Mikha
Witold Gombrowicz, Anne Frank, and Victor Klemperer demonstrate the n
fascination diaries hold for readers. In these and other capacities the diary b
overlapping domains of history and literature.
What is the diary as a mode of writing, or as a genre? (I use the word "g
broad, Bakhtinian, sense, not limited to the belles lettres: as a complex form
the representation of experience into a whole.) There is no consensus about t

'On private letters as a literary genre and form of sociability in Russia see W. M. Todd III, The
as a Literary Genre in The Age ofPushkin (Princeton, 1967). A student of William Mills Todd, I
benefited from his insights into the interrelations of the literary and the social; his pioneering
literature as a social institution has had tangible influence on Slavic studies. For West European
letters as acts of intimacy, Bruce Redford, The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eig
Familiar Letter (Chicago, 1986); and on uses of the letter in its situation between the public and
France), Roger Chartier et al., eds., Christopher Woodall, trans., Correspondence: Models ofLett
the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1997).
2Rachael Langford and Russell West, "Introduction: Diaries and Margins," in Marginal Voices, M
Diaries in European Literature and History, ed. Rachael Langford and Russell West (Amsterd

The Russian Review 63 (October 2004): 561-73

Copyright 2004 The Russian Review

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562 Irina Paperno

Many focus on the "elastic" nature of this genre, its "hybridity and diversity": the diar
takes a variety of shapes, often incorporating other genres; the diary has a capacity t
include diverse materials; the diary is put to different uses (serial autobiography, chroni
of current events, and so on).3 As one self-conscious diarist put it, the diary is a "capacio
hold-all."4 A scholar commented: "It is very difficult to say anything about diaries whi
is true for all of them."' Yet there is a distinct narrative form that writers and readers
alike associate with the word "diary." To take a cue from its name, English "diary," or
"journal," German "Tagebuch," French "journal" (or "journal intime"), and Russian
"dnevnik" are all derived from the root meaning "day." Notwithstanding the diversity
and variability of its form, the diary is committed to the calendar, day after day.6 (It has
been pointed out that the diary is a genre described in terms of the purported circumstances
of writing.7) The diary is also firmly committed to the first-person narrative; but not to an
addressee. What follows is the diary's special relationship to privacy, intimacy, and secrecy."
For a minimal definition, scholars usually go by form (or circumstances of writing),
function, and addressee (or communicative situation): the diary is a text written in the
first-person, in separate installments, ideally on a daily basis, and ostensibly for the purposes
of giving an account of the writer's personal experience in a given day, which is not
necessarily addressed to someone other than the diarist.9
Conceptualizing the diary requires a variety of extensions and qualifications of the
formal definition--comments on the genesis and history of the genre, the psychology of
keeping a diary and its philosophical significance, the diary's status as a cultural
phenomenon and its communicative situation. In terms of their genesis, diaries have
been connected to chronicles and annals as well as personal and household account books.'1
Some scholars view the diary as a functional and symbolic equivalent, not necessarily an

30On "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. For
definition of the diary on the basis of usage see Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English
Diaries (London, 1974), 3.
4Virginia Woolf's phrase, cited by Cottam, "Diaries and Journals," 267.
5The 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.
6This principle was formulated by Jean Rousset, who followed Blanchot. See Jean Rousset, "Le journal intime,
texte sans destinataire?" Podtique 56 (1983): 435; and Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come [Le Livre a venir]
(Stanford, 2003), 183.
7Kuhn-Osius, "Making Loose Ends Meet," 166.
8For 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.

9Cf. 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. W
call that form a diary when a writer uses it to fulfill certain functions. We might describe those functions collective
as the discontinuous recording of the aspects of the writer's own life; more technically we must posit a number
identities: between the author and the narrator; between the narrator and the principal character; and between
depicted and the real, this latter including the identity between date of entry and date of composition." Rosenwald'
definition is meant to exclude the neighboring genres, such as memoir and autobiography, letter and correspondenc
and fictitious diary (or diary-novel). See Lawrence Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary (New Yo
1988), 5-6. 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.
'1For connection between the diary and the account book see William Matthews, British Diaries: An Annotat
Bibliography of British Diaries Written between 1492 and 1942 (Berkeley, 1950), 1:cvi--cviii; Stuart Sherm
Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 (Chicago, 1996), 58-67; Jacques Reve

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 What Can Be Done with Diaries? 563

outgrowth, of the account book. From this perspective, the modem diary has bee
in terms of its significance in the individual psychological and general ph
sense: used to account for one's time, the diary stems from the fear of watchin
shorter with each passing day." Moreover, as it turns life into text, the diary re
lasting trace of one's being-an effective defense against annihilation. In t
diarists use the "account book" and, broader, the "book of (my) life" as the go
metaphors of diary-writing.
Several scholars have sought a clue to the diary's meaning at the intersection
and historical context. Thus, Beatrice Didier described the early modem
convergence of capitalism, individualism, and Christianity. Derived from book
and the practice of daily religious self-examination, the diary can be seen as an
one's personal economy-financial, emotional, and spiritual.12 Alain Corbin
of diaries in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, related the growing a
to property, scientific observation, and the quest for individuality, or self.13 It is
opinion that the diary flourished in the ages and cultures concerned with the i
For scholars working with diaries this means dealing not only with individualit
with specific individuals. Diaries have been favored by students of the Re
Pietism and Puritanism, Sentimentalism and Romanticism, Modernism and
Soviet era. What individuality means, and how the diarist works on himself o
varies depending on the historical context as well as on the concrete person. Th
late seventeenth and eighteenth century, Puritans and Pietists used diaries to m
sinful self and (as far as the Pietists are concerned) to bring about an internal c
that led to salvation. In the age of the Enlightenment and Sentimentalism, diar
used psychological introspection for the purposes of moral self-perfection and
of feeling. Romantic diarists in the first half of the nineteenth century were a
by a new historicist sense. (As Delacroix wrote in 1824, his diary was "the his
what I feel."14) In the second part of the nineteenth century, positivism encou
use of the diary for scientific self-observation, tracing the connections between th
and the psychological, external circumstances and sensation.15 In the twentieth
the diary-without losing its earlier meanings-absorbed the modernist im
deliberate self-creation, whether in an aesthetic or in a political key. Or so hist
us.16 In recent decades, a new branch of historiography claimed diaries, along w

al., "Forms of Privatization," in A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, tr
Goldhammer, vol. 3 Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 3
Corbin, "Backstage," in A History ofPrivate Life, vol. 4 From the Fires ofRevolution to the Great W
Perrot (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 498-99. For connection between historical chronicles and personal di
example, Ralph Houlbrooke, English Family Life 1567-1716: An Anthology from Diaries (Oxfor
"Corbin, "Backstage," 498. Corbin wrote of nineteenth-century diaries.
'2B6atrice Didier, "Pour une sociologie du journal intime," in Lejournal intime et sesformes littgr
du Colloque de septembre 1975, comp. V. Del Litto (Geneva, 1978), 245-48. For details see Ransel's
issue.

'3Corbin, "Backstage," 499.

14Cited in ibid.

"5See Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavi
1988), 41-53.
'6A brief comprehensive sketch of the history of the genre, from the fifteenth century to the twent
found in Peter Boerner's classic survey, Tagebuch (Stuttgart, 1969), 37-59. See also Ransel's essay in

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564 Irina Paperno

and other forms of personal writings, as elements of the "private life," constituted b
forms of intimate (as opposed to public) existence.17
Literary scholars claim that diaries over the course of time have been invested (b
the diarists themselves, or their publishers and readers) with an aesthetic value and function
becoming works of literature.'8 The diaries are seen as having a high potential for sel
reflexivity and for thematizing the very act of writing.19 Many note that the diary is both
a text, or a document, and a practice, or an activity. Scholars have written about the
history and sociology of diary-keeping.20 The psychology of keeping a diary has also
received some attention.21
Literary scholars engage in ingenious discussions of the peculiar communicati
situation of the diary, in relation to both the implicit addressee and the actual reader.22
is a shared opinion that "a founding principle of the diary is a belief in its own privacy."
Writing the diary is an act of intimate communication the diarist is having with him
herself. Of course, this principle does not reflect actual practice; in practice, the diar
allows for a number of implied, and actual, addressees, from an intimate friend (or a
intimate circle) to an unknown reader, who might read the diary in the future, in an
archive or in print.24 (It has proven difficult to make distinctions between the diarie
addressed to oneself and the diaries addressed to others, even in the presence of invocatio
to a reader or statements to the effect that complete privacy is expected). But addressin
implied readers and actually reading other people's diaries does not necessarily change
the presumption of privacy inherent in the genre. One scholar has even suggested th
reading other people's diaries, even published diaries, involves "vestigial guilt" that stem
from the violation (albeit licensed) of "the secrecy clause"-a "residue left over from t

'7See Rogier Chartier's introduction to the "Forms of Privatization" section in A History ofPrivate Life 3:16
8Loosely after Philippe Lejeune, "The Practice of the Private Journal: Chronicle of an Investigation (19
1998)," in Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms, 202. Lejeune presents the aesthetization of the diary as a nineteent
century phenomenon, which is debatable.
'19See, for example, Hassam, Writing and Reality, 15.
20See Lejeune, "The Practice of the Private Journal"; and Malik Allam, Journaux intimes: Une sociologie de
l'dcriture personnelle, pref. Philippe Lejeune (Paris, 1996).
21For the psychological aspects of diary-keeping see Wendy J.Wiener and George C. Rosenwald, "A Momen
Monument: The Psychology of Keeping a Diary," in The Narrative Study ofLives, ed. Ruthellen Josselson
Amia Lieblich (Newbury, 1993), 1:30-58. Drawing their material from interviews with diarists, Wiener a
Rosenwald reviewed the psychological possibilities the diary offers a diarist: versality and coordination of self a
others as well as the management of emotions and of the experience of time. As the diary permits the evocation
fantasies about the self and the sedimentation of these fantasies on the written (and thus readable) page, the dia
functions for the objectivation as well as transformation of the self. The keeping of a diary is an activity that bind
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
instrument of self-continuity. The diary is both a "space" and an "object" (in the psychoanalytic sense); there is
"diary-diarist" relationship. In conclusion, Wiener and Rosewald suggest that the chief psychological utility o
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
literary scholars and psychologists overlap, with each side taking clues from the other.
22For the views presented below I rely mostly on Andrew Hassam, "Reading Other People's Diaries," Univers
of Toronto Quarterly 56:3 (1987): 435-42; and Rousset, "Le journal intime," 435-43. See also Roger Cardina
"Unlocking the Diary," Comparative Criticism 12 (1990): 71-87; and Kuhn-Osius, "Making Loose Ends Meet
23Hassam, "Reading Other People's Diaries," 436. See also Rousset, "Le journal intime," 436-37.
24See 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."

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 What Can Be Done with Diaries? 565

unpublished work."25 A related phenomenon is the illusion of "authentic

"immediacy" associated with the diary, an effect predicated on the presumed pre
self and presumed primacy of the living moment.26 To this day, the diary has a
status of an "as if"' text: we write and read the diary as if it is a private text c
communicating an "authentic" self and an "immediate" experience.27
As we see from this brief survey, defining or describing the diary as a gen
cultural phenomenon involves a variety of moves, none of which pinpoints a stabl
than mutable, structure. In the conclusion of this essay, I will attempt another des
But first, a few samples from recent investigations of diaries. There is a relative
but distinctive, body of research. Those who work with diaries often complain th
years, scholars have described and catalogued diaries, compiling introductory su
and annotated bibliographies.28 It is a common opinion that scholars do not kno
to do with diaries.29
Most scholars today, literary critics and historians alike, know what is not
done: diaries are not to be treated as if they provide an unmediated access t
experience or facts. Psychologists know this as well.30 Of course, historians hav
diaries, as well as other intimate writings, for information on any number of issues
by the diarists. Literary scholars have kept insisting that diaries are documents w
own structure and purpose, which are lost when a diary is "raided as a database
their part, historians complain that literary scholars have not provided sufficient
In his essay for this volume, the historian David Ransel describes his attempt, and
to locate a body of scholarly knowledge about diaries as a type of intimate writ
literary form. The diary, he concludes, is almost an empty vessel, or an adaptable
the disposal of its users for the purposes at hand.
So what has been done with diaries? To speak of recent research trends, diari
been used within the context of the history of private life-not so much as repos
the "quotidian" or "intimate," but as practices of daily life that create the priv
sphere of individual self-consciousness or intimacy.32 Some go so far as to treat
itself as a mere byproduct, or residue, of diary-writing. Thus, the distinguished s

25Hassam, "Reading Other People Diaries," 438-39 and passim.

26On the diary and "authenticity" see Hassam, Writing and Reality, 25.
27Hassam's ingenious idea ("Reading Other People's Diaries," 442).
28For such surveys see Michele Leleu, Les Journaux intimes (Paris, 1952); Alain Girard, Les Journau
(Paris, 1963); Gustav Rene Hocke, Das Europdische Tagebuch (Wiesbaden, 1963); Peter Boerner
(Stuttgart, 1969); Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London 197
Didier, Le Journal intime (Paris, 1976); Thomas Mallon, A Book of One 's Own: People and Their D
York, 1984); and Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow, Europdische Tagebiicher: Eigenart-Formen-Entwicklung (Da
1990). There is no comparable survey of Russian diaries. A brief survey-style treatment of diaries can b
A. G. Tartakovskii, Russkaia memuaristika XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow, 1991). The
comprehensive annotated bibliographies of the English diaries, some of which attempt classification. Cen
them (though incomplete) is William Matthews, British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of Bri
Written between 1492 and 1942 (Berkeley, 1950). See also Cheryl Cline, Women's Diaries, Journals, an
An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1989). For a bibliography of the Russian diaries--combin
memoirs-see Petr Zaionchkovskii, Istoriia dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii v dnevnikakh i vospomi
Annotirovannyi ukazatel', 5 vols. (Moscow, 1976-89).
29For a discussion of existing research and its problems see Sherman, Telling Time, 13-16nn. 19-24
30See Wiener and Rosenwald, "A Moment's Monument," 31.
31After Sherman, Telling Time, 31.
32See Aries and Duby, eds., A History of Private Life 3:165, 255, 330-36, 380-92, and 4:498-502.

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566 Irina Paperno

autobiography Philippe Lejeune has undertaken a massive investigation of "the reasons

why, and the ways in which so many 'ordinary people,' who are not writers, write a
diary." His efforts range from archival research to the distribution of questionnaires t
today's diarists, and the establishment of "autobiographical archives" for them.33 Associa
with the feminine pastime, the diary also has been used in women's and gender studies.
In recent years, few authors have treated the diary primarily as literature, or art; whe
literary scholars write about diaries, they do so as experts on writing and form (not literar
form).
Apart from dominating trends, I will discuss concrete examples of recent research.
The most comprehensive discussion of what has been, and what should be, done with
diaries can be found in the work of the literary scholar Stuart Sherman. Following the
lead of Lawrence Rosenwald (also a literary specialist), Sherman finds a solution in setting
the diarist's modus operandi within the larger context of his culture, including patterns of
privacy and self-control, modes of production and distribution of writing, and literary
practices."3 While Rosenwald produced a comprehensive analysis of the journals of Ralph
Waldo Emerson as one of the great masterpieces of American writing, Sherman views
diaries side by side with other "diurnal forms" (such as daily newspapers and travel
journals), tracing the development of a broad range of means for the reckoning of the self
in time. Focusing on late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, the period and
locale crucial for the development of the modern conception of time, Sherman shows how
writing and reading diurnal forms helped people experience time differently (unfolding
continuously in measurable and commensurable units) and so "to inhabit the temporality
by which the whole culture was learning to live and work."36 His main text is the diary of
Samuel Pepys, which has figured in research as a paradigmatic example of the genre in
the early modern period. For Sherman, the paradigmatic quality of Pepys's famous diary
lies in his success in creating a narrative template for tracking time and, with it, the self.
In the simple choice to write up every day in turn, plotting the day on a calendar grid,
Pepys succeeded in keeping a "rigorously continuous, steadily serial narrative as no one
in English has written before"-a narrative that "fosters the textual illusion of temporal
continuity.""37 In this context, Sherman views even the habitual diary records of expenditure
and acquisitions not as a means in itself, but as another way to construct narrative continuity
within even measures of time.38 In the end, the time told continuously, in private, allows
the diarist to attain knowledge (and hence possession and control) of the self: the narrative
template of such a diary allows a continuous self-construction, a "running report on
identities both shifting and fixed.""39 Viewed from this perspective, such diaries are not
"mere witnesses to their culture," but "active embodiments" of one of its organizing
principles: its temporality.40

33This 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.
34Noted by Langford and West in their "Introduction: Diaries and Margins," 8. 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).
35See Rosenwald, Emerson and the Art of the Diary, 3-28; and Sherman, Telling Time, 238n.19.
36Sherman, Telling Time, xi.
37Ibid., 33-34.
38Ibid., 68.
39Ibid., 8, 107.
40Ibid., 27.

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 What Can Be Done with Diaries? 567

The historian Jochen Hellbeck, who works with Russian materials, used diar
(in his terms) comprehend the individual subjectivity as a constitutive element
(Stalinist) culture.41 Focusing on the 1930s, when the Bolshevik regime actively p
the creation of a new subject, called by many "the New Man," Hellbeck treats d
"laboratories of the Soviet self," that is, as means of self-construction and self-fa
within a common ideological mold. In reading such diaries, Hellbeck emphas
what people wrote about themselves but how they used writing about themselves t
their selves"-to construct an identity in the very act of diary-writing. In a ser
published and unpublished studies, Hellbeck provided convincing readings of a n
of diaries from the 1930s (be it the diary of the ordinary young man Stepan Pod
the diary of the prominent writer Aleksandr Afinogenov) as both an expression
function of the question the diarist faced: how to become a new man in the new h
circumstances. Of course, the use of the diary as an instrument of self-transform
the service of shared beliefs is not specifically Soviet. As Hellbeck points out, t
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritans and Pietists introduced such techn
a wide scale in order to cultivate self-scrutiny and self-regeneration in pursuit of i
and collective salvation in a community of believers. It has been argued that this
secularized in the climate of the Enlightenment, informed the modern diary as a
Hellbeck shows how in Stalinist Russia the centuries-old pattern of self-transfo
diary was infused with culture-specific meaning and purpose: the diary was use
logbook of the evolving Soviet self, steering it toward the trajectory of the Revolu
the revolutionary society, with which the self was eventually to merge. While
interest is not the diary form but Soviet subjectivity, Hellbeck has told us a gr
about the genre-its capacity to serve as an instrument of self-construction,
between the self and community, and adapt to the needs of a specific culture.43
Both Sherman's and Hellbeck's studies (written independently of each other
predicated on a double move: highlighting the unique potential of the diary for
involvement with temporality and subjectivity) and highlighting the specific his
cultural context in which the structural potentials play out. And both Sherman and
have been prompted by what diary-writing meant to the diarists themselves.

41See Jochen Hellbeck, "Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries from the Stalin Era" (Ph.D. diss.
University, 1998), which contains extensive discussions of the diary form. For brief comments see al
"Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931-1939)," in Stalinism: New Dire
Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York, 2000), 77-116; and idem, "Writing the Self in the Time of Terror: T
Aleksandr Afinogenov," in Selfand Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sand
2000), 69-93. Hellbeck's book-length study on the subject will be published by Harvard University Pre
42Hellbeck situated the Soviet diary in relation to the Puritan and Pietist diary in "Laboratories of
Self," 90, 9-98, 157. See also his discussion of the culture of diary-writing in prerevolutionary Russia
diaries of Orthodox priests (pp. 99-102), and of attitudes toward diary-writing in the Soviet state in th
1930s (pp. 103-31).
43In July 2001 the Russian Review devoted a cluster to the topic of "Soviet subjectivity": Eric Naim
Soviet Subjects and Scholars Who Make Them," Igal Halfin's "Looking Into the Oppositionists' Soul:
Communist Style," and Jochen Hellbeck's "Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographic
(Russian Review 60 [July 2001]: 307-15, 316-39, and 340-59, respectively). In their contributions to th
the two historians, Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, argued that speech, writing, and autobiographical
(such as the diary), fostered a sense of self as a historical subject, ultimately participating in the creation o
selves for the new regime. In his comment, Eric Naiman, a literary scholar, formulated a critical res
cluster reformulates the methodological problem. The focus is not on historical forms of subjectivity,
genre itself (the diary), used by historians and literary scholars.

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568 Irina Paperno

I have used a similar approach in a study of a nineteenth-century Russian diary: Le

Tolstoy's. The starting point was the question about the diary form itself: for most of h
life (1847-1910), the great Russian writer kept diaries-what does his project mean?44
On the basis of his method of diary-keeping, Tolstoy's diaries can be viewed as a life-lon
experiment testing the possibilities and constraints of man's ability to know, improv
and represent himself. From the age of eighteen to the age of eighty-two Tolstoy ke
asking in his diary: Who am I? How do I live? What is death? For him, the diary-writin
was a project with far-reaching psychological, moral, and philosophical significance. In
his early diaries, the young Tolstoy tried to develop a narrative template that would crea
an ordered account of his time, and thus a moral order. In the evening of each day, h
made an account of today measured against the plan for tomorrow made yesterday, and
made a plan for the next day, anticipating a tomorrow that would embody his moral ide
He discovered that the plan ("tomorrow") and its fulfillment ("today") did not match. H
also discovered the difficulties of capturing presentness in the account of today. In h
diary, the old Tolstoy, whose ultimate goal was to transcend death by transcending tim
and self, repeatedly attempted to transgress the confines of temporal order imposed by t
narrative form and even to abandon the speaking "I." In Tolstoy's case, the context th
informs his diary is not confined to the topical agenda of the day. In the end, informed
a set of philosophical and literary sources that dealt with time, self, and narrative (Kan
Fichte, and Schopenhauer; Sterne, Rousseau, and Tolstoy-the-writer), Tolstoy's diary-
writing drew meaning from the structural possibilities and limitations inherent in th
diary form itself.

The authors of the essays gathered in this issue of the Russian Review put diaries to
similar and different uses. And as they do things with diaries, each tells us importan
things about diaries as well as intimate writings in general.
John Randolph addresses the problem that precedes and transcends the analysis o
diaries as a form: the status of intimate writings, or private documents, as activity on t
part of private individuals and as material used by professional historians. Randolph i
historian who relies on various personal documents (letters, diaries, and other intimat
writings) for a large-scale study of family, nobility, and social thought in Russia in t
1780s-1840s, for which the Bakunin family and their friends serve as the materi
Working with a specific historical moment and milieu-the circle of the "Idealists of t
1830s" which was shaped by the Hegelian understanding of historical consciousne
Randolph explores various ways of writing and archivizing private documents. Th
Bakunin family turned letter- and diary-writing into the main vehicle of family intima
and, simultaneously, into an instrument of entering the social domain by making histor
Indeed, long before this family attracted the interest of historians, historical impulse ha
guided the family itself. From the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, memb
of the family produced thousands of pages of paper-letters, diaries, and other home-
produced literature. Seen from this perspective, letters begin to function as a diary o

"See Irina Paperno, "Tolstoy's Diaries: The Inaccessible Self," in Self and Story in Russian History, 242-6
For this and other studies of diaries see also the thematic cluster "Dnevniki: Mezhdu tekstom i zhiznetvorchestvom,"
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 61 (2003).

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 What Can Be Done with Diaries? 569

intimate life, and diaries become a means of communication in the family as w

part of the family's historical chronicle.45
Randolph's study reminds us that the diary is not merely a genre, but a c
artifact existing within a social context, on which its uses and significance for h
research depend. Elsewhere, Randolph has shown in detail how these document
produced.46 In the article published in this issue, he traces how they were archi
family and how transfers of the family papers to professional historians and
were negotiated. The "intimate life of a private family" (as one of the Bakunin
members put it), conceived as a sphere of historical activity, was claimed for pu
and for historical research. This was neither a trivial nor an intimate matter:
argues that the historiography of Russian thought (from Pavel Annenkov and A
Pypin to Pavel Miliukov and Aleksandr Komilov) was constructed out of the m
family archives. In more ways than one the history of Russian thought is a st
confrontation, conflict, and interpenetration between intimacy and publicity.
with intimate writings preserved in family archives and claimed by historians,
shows how the domesticity of the nobility helped form the spheres of publici
professional history in modem Russian culture and what role women played in th
And if the family was historicized even before the historians did so, the use of t
archive by professional historians (in Randolph's terms) opened and partitioned th
sphere without collapsing it altogether, in effect highlighting the public sector
within the intimate one. Randolph's investigation illuminates an inherent conn
all intimate writings to the axis privacy-publicity. Its relevance to the study o
proper lies in broadening the perspective beyond the confines of form and genre, r
us that the questions "What is the diary?" and "What is to be done with diarie
have preoccupied mainly, but not exclusively, students of literature) may be li
Indeed, emphasis on form and genre obscures the workings of diaries as intimat
and intimate records-an archive that situates self in history.
The historian David Ransel, in his research, went beyond the minuscul
Russian aristocrats and intellectuals whose extensive and sophisticated personal
gave rise to the historiography of Russian social thought. For the twentieth cen
history is a method for creating an archive of the intimate lives of "ordinary pe
what about the distant past? Access to the life in a nongentry, or plebeian, m
provincial Russia in early modem times is limited. Ransel has one, unique, sour
disposal: the diary of the merchant Ivan Tolchenov. What can be done wit
historicist self-consciousness that permeates the intimate writings of the Baku
their circle is absent from the diary of the eighteenth-century Russian merchant
one reason why the historiographical tradition has bypassed such documents. I
a historian to make sense of such a text. Like most historians, Ransel is more
in learning things from his source than learning things about his source. In a

45Cf. the observation Jilrgen Habermas made, speaking of the intimate sphere of the family in eightee
England: "The diary became a letter addressed to the sender, and the first-person narrative became a
with one's self addressed to another person. These were experiments with the subjectivity discovered
relationships of the conjugal family" (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Tho
et al. [Cambridge, MA, 1991], 49).
46See John Wyatt Randolph, "The Bakunins: Family, Nobility, and Social Thought in Imperial Rus
1840" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997).

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570 Irina Paperno

work, he put Tolchenov's diary to a good historical use.47 In the essay written for th
issue, he takes his reader, step by step, through accumulated experience of working wit
diaries written before modem times and outside of the milieu of intellectuals. Following
the lead of such students of Western history as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ransel uses th
merchant's diary to recreate his life as a part of a community and social class.48 It is fro
this perspective that the "dull dailiness"-the mundane tasks of everyday life devoid o
sense of historical or metaphysical self-significance-becomes a source of persona
meaning and historical value. Focusing on what this diarist relates about his daily life
commercial operations; visits paid and received; births, illnesses, and deaths in the family
the historian follows patterns of social advancement, social interaction, and emotional
reactions as they change over time. In the end, Ransel has used the diary not for "facts
but for the reconstruction of the social meaning of recorded daily routines, and, throu
them, for a glimpse into the social and emotional world inhabited by the diarist, as revea
within available generic and narrative possibilities.
David Ransel's and John Randolph's studies show the historian's approach adjusted
to the material of different historical epochs, social circles, and personalities. T
juxtaposition of these two studies with the article by Boris Wolfson shows what the dia
may mean to a literary scholar.49
Around 1930, Yury Olesha, a prominent and promising Soviet writer, started a diary
which he kept for some thirty years. In 1965, five years after his death, a book entitled
Day Without a Line: From Notebooks (Ni dnia bez strochki: Iz zapisnykh knizhek) was
published, under the editorship of the prominent literary theorist (and former Formalis
Viktor Shklovsky, who (working with others) selected, excised, and arranged fragmen
of Olesha's intimate writings. This book has become a part of Olesha's oeuvre. In 1999,
another edition came under the redaction of Violetta Gudkova. This book presented a
different text-not only because Gudkova included additional portions omitted in 1965
in view of Soviet censorship, but also because she arranged the material in a less structur
way. (This publication still does not include all of Olesha's voluminous and formle
diaries.) A twentieth-century text written by a professional writer, Olesha's diary, whi
intensely personal, is highly self-conscious and consciously literary: it constantly reflec
on what it means to write a diary, as a personal document and as a literary text. What c
be done with such a diary-caught between personal confession and literar
experimentation?
Wolfson (who chose to focus on the fragments written in the 1930s, not on the comple
published text) reads Olesha's diary as an attempt to renegotiate the writer's identity as
writer and an intelligent within a new (Soviet) context. He interprets the meaning of
Olesha's project by performing a minute analysis of specific rhetorical operations. Wolfs

47See David Ransel, "An Eighteenth-Century Russian Merchant Family in Prosperity and Decline," in Imper
Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David Ransel (Bloomington, 1998), 256-80;
Ransel, "Enlightenment and Tradition: The Aestheticized Life of an Eighteenth-Century Provincial Merchant,"
Self and Story in Russian History, 305-29.
48Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-18
(New York, 1990).
49Another literary scholar, Boris Maslov, performed a (yet unpublished) investigation of Olesha's diary as
autobiographical text ("Subjecthood and Politics of Literature in Yuri Olesha's Diaries of the 1930s"). I am indeb
to Maslov for informative and insightful discussions of Olesha's diary.

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 What Can Be Done with Diaries? 571

shows that Olesha made deliberate attempts to transgress the confines of the liter
itself. Unlike Hellbeck, who is studying Soviet diaries from the 1930s from a h
perspective (the construction of a new social identity), Wolfson is interested in th
dimensions of the experiment on the self that is conducted in the diary. H
Olesha's task in terms of the larger Soviet project of cleansing society from alien
and, ultimately, cleansing, or "purging" (the word of the day), the self into a
purity worthy of the "New Man." But, as a professional writer, Olesha also set h
task to purge literature, that is, belles lettres, from his own writing by expung
literary categories as characters, plot, and figurative language. This move, Wolfs
was turned from the writing onto the writer's self: on the pages of his diary,
expressed an urge to purge the literary and the beautiful (belletristicheskoe) el
from his own self. He even attempted to replace the purged self of the writer and, b
of the intelligent with several imaginary Soviet selves. The diarist's self-discipline
argues, appears as a constant "surveillance" of the self involved in the process of
as an unrelenting self-censorship. (Olesha watched himself write, marking ever
his deplorable slips into belles lettres.) "Surveillance" turns into the organizing m
as well as the main structural principle of diary-writing.
Wolfson thus shows how the traditional concerns of the diary as a genre (su
passing of time, self-improvement, and the question "Who am I?") are invested w
meanings by using tropes and rhetorical strategies derived from official Soviet
and the Soviet experience (the "New Man," "purging," and "surveillance"). W
study underscores the uncertainty of the identity constructed in the diary-the p
self of a Russian intelligent and a professional writer who is living and writing in
Russia and who is attempting to adapt himself to it. Wolfson's reading present
facets of Olesha's doomed project-the one of making himself into the Soviet "N
and the one of overcoming literature by means of diary-writing. Ultimately, he
us with a testimony on the man and his age, as well as a demonstration of the p
and limitations of the diary.

So, is a diary "a capacious hold-all"? An empty vessel invested with meanin
diarist, the context, and the scholar)? On the basis of investigations performed
issue and elsewhere, I would attempt a synthetic definition, or conceptualizatio
word, it is a mold waiting to be filled-a generic matrix that gives distinctive sha
experience it records. As a genre, the diary is built around basic epistemological
applied to human experience: subjectivity, temporality, and private-public. Rel
the speaking "I" (and the presumed identity between the speaker and actor) rev
diary's involvement with subjectivity. The daily mode of production-that is, th
separate installments that correspond to the time of composition-foregrounds its
link to temporality.50 The diary offers a unique narrative form, or template, for the
of self in time. Commitment to the calendar entails two narrative conse
fragmentation and continuity. As a serial text written continuously on a chron
grid, the diary mediates between the past, the present, and the future. Concur
experience with the act of writing calls for presentness. But every entry is th
relation to the ones that would follow. The diary invites the diarist to deal with

5"On advertising a link to subjectivity and temporality see Langford and West, "Introduction: Diaries an
7. On visibly separate installments see Kuhn-Osius, "Making Loose Ends Meet," 166.

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 572 Irina Paperno

while interacting with the present. (Each entry is meant to be read by its author at a lat
date; and there is hardly a diary that does not engage in recording the memories of t
past within the present day's entry).51 The diary also prepares a space for the unknow
future. (It is hardly an accident that many diarists discuss plans for the future in today
entry.) Thus the diary form transcends the present moment by delving into the past a
future alike. A narrative template that represents the flow of life while anticipating an
absorbing the future, the diary can be used to construct continuity as well as to deal wit
personal and social rupture.52 The unfolding of the personal story in time, its accumulati
and preservation, allows the writer to use the diary for self-regulation (in different historic
forms, such as moral self-perfection, introspective self-apprehension, or deliberate self
construction). There is another dimension: a date relates an entry in the private diary t
history, inviting comparison between the writer's life and the social world outside. Th
diary allows the linking of the self to historical time.53
But this is not all. The diary should be also described in terms of its addressee an
communicative situation. Especially noteworthy is "the absence of a readily identifiab
illocutionary act."54 Yet the diary works as a form of communication-by mediati
between the private and the public. To begin with (as one scholar put it), while "t
experience itself in its privacy is speechless," the very act of writing "drags it into t
public realm."55 From the initial apprehension of experience by the diarist in the very a
of writing (and in subsequent reading) to the potential publication for reading by other
the diary externalizes and objectifies the inner, socializes and historicizes the intimate
essentially working as the archive of the intimate. But as some scholars remind u
reading one's own and other people's diaries does not change the presumption of privacy
or secrecy, inherent in the genre. In fact, the value of the published diary largely stem
from presumed privacy. The communicative situation of the diary rests on a paradox: t
coexistence of the presumption of privacy (the diary as a text not addressed to anyone b
the diarist) and the violation of privacy.
To conclude, as it negotiates the relationship between the categories of temporalit
and subjectivity, as well as the private-public, the diary creates a generic matrix for
recounting personal experience in historical and social context. In this way, the diary ca
be said to create a space for "the intimate theater of history."56 The diary matrix highlight
a number of tensions that ultimately reflect on the disjunction between living and writin
the rift between a single and changing, or incremental, self; the paradox of privacy and
writing; the concurrence of the impulse to leave a record and realization of the inadequac

"5For a different opinion see Hassam, who insists that the diary is nonretrospective (Writing andReality, 21, 24).
52As Felicity Nussbaum put it, "the diary creates and tolerates crisis in perpetuity" ("Toward Conceptualizi
Diary," 134).
53On 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.
54Kuhn-Osius, "Making Loose Ends Meet," 167. Kuhn-Osius comments that diaries share this feature wi
fiction.

55After 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).
56John Randolph's apt phrase.

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 What Can Be Done with Diaries? 573

of a written rendition of experience." It is essential to emphasize that while t

narrative template (the continuous first-person account written in daily insta
stable, the specific understanding of temporality (a way of conceiving time), su
(a way of conceptualizing self), and the relationship between the private and t
depends on the context-historical, cultural, and personal. The specific configu
of the diary form and of the self that is constructed in diary-writing have pr
highly permeable-open to the cultural context. The variables shift continuous
categories are redefined by each new, historically specific author. Held togeth
basic narrative form, the diary serves many an individual as a vehicle of histor
and historical activity.58
What can a scholar do with diaries? It seems that, at least in recent years
have been mostly used to learn about the categories that structure it: time, self,
intimacy), and about the processes of writing, archivizing, and publishing, whi
limited to diaries, but include other forms of intimate writings.
And what about those, mostly historians, who would not be content with
more things about diaries than from diaries? For them, the question is: How
diary be read? Diaries are written as records of their authors' experience, and n
them as such would be to deny people their capacity for speech. Scholars would
not hesitate to use diaries to comment on what people did, witnessed, and tho
evidenced by the fact that they wrote about it. Yet the message is tied to the
genre, which, of course, is true of any writing. The diary is best read not as a
a beginning and end, but as a process. We should ask not what can be learned
text of the diary, but what can be learned from the individual diarist's work of
his/her life, in private, on a continuous basis within a calendar grid.
I believe that, at this point, showing how to read a diary, and what to do wi
and other intimate writings, cannot be done in yet another survey, or in an
nonexistent theoretical work. This is best done in practice, by publishing the
self-conscious and reflective readings of specific diaries, both together with
from other private documents.
Almost every study of diaries published in the last decade laments that the
often has been seen as a marginal phenomenon, while commenting on the uns
fluid nature of the genre and speaking of the limitations of diary studies. My
is the opposite: as a form of writing, the diary can be considered as central t
practice, from the eighteenth century to Modernism; and to the epistemology
and literature, from formalism to postmodernism. Scholars (literary spec
historians) can be judged based on their ability to deal with diaries, which
attention to the form (or genre), context, and individual subject simultaneous
with diaries and, more broadly, with intimate writings also calls for common s
all, postmodernist skepticism notwithstanding, common sense tells us that w
texts even in accordance with their intended purposes.

"I used reflections on incremental self in the diary from Boris Maslov's unpublished essay on Ol
("the incremental diary is meant to yield a cumulative autobiography") and the formulation by Bor
("being read by someone even as it is being written constitutes an integral part of the diary").
58I thank Boris Wolfson for helping me to formulate this princip!e.

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