(log, journal), daily notes by an individual or group, written concurrently with the life events being described. An external but more or less essential feature of a diary is dating. Practical diaries (which first came into wide use in 17th-century England) can be viewed as a kind of historical, historical-biographical, or historical-cultural document: for example, the ship’s log of the navigator J. Cook, the lycée diary of Decembrist V. K. Kiukhel’beker (Kiichelbecker), and the diaries and journals of the censor A. V. Nikitenko, the publicist A. S. Suvorin, and many writers, including W. Scott, Stendhal, the Goncourt brothers, T. G. Shevchenko, and L. N. Tolstoy.
A diary is also used as a form of fictional narrative. In sentimentalism, an 18th-century Russian and European literary movement that aroused interest in the inner world of the individual, the diary was cultivated as a form of “self-observation.” L. Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and N. M. Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler were written as travel diaries. In the 19th century writers gave a diary form of narrative to a fictional hero for the sake of an intensified inquiry into “the history of the human soul,” as, for instance, “Pechorin’s Journal” inM. Iu. Lermontov’s/4 Hero of Our Times. In the process, opportunities arose for stylization and a complex narrative game, involving the increasing separation of the author from the character (Diary of a Madman by N. V. Gogol). Realists of the 19th century resorted to genre varieties close to fictional diaries—“sketches” (Tolstoy’s History of Yesterday), “letters” (F. M. Dostoevsky’s Poor People), and “confessions” (Ippolit’s notebook in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot). Examples of the use of the diary form in Soviet literature are The Diary of Kostia Riabtsev by N. Ognev and Village Diary by E. Dorosh.
A middle ground between diaries as a document and diaries as a literary genre is occupied by writers’ diaries intended in advance for publication (such as Journal by J. Renard, Fallen Leaves by V. V. Rozanov, and Not a Day Without a Line by Iu. K. Olesha); they are characterized by a carefully planned combination of autobiography and a breadth of observations and reflections. Dostoevsky’s D/ary of a Writer (1870’s), addressed to the contemporary reader, is a model of the use of the diary form in the sphere of socially oriented writing. Sometimes diaries of private individuals take on artistic interest because of their sincerity and truthfulness (The Diary of Anne Frank, The Diary of Nina Kosterina).
I. B. VOSKRESENSKAIA