The Rural Non-Literary Diary

The article is devoted to the study of "naive" non-literary diaries reflecting the everyday life of rural inhabitants at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The research material consists of two diaries belonging to residents of the Yurlinsky District in the Perm Region. The study examines significant genre characteristics of the diary texts as well as the aspects of rural private life reflected in them. Each diary exhibits pronounced formal features: in one case, it is the presence of visual elements, in the other – collective (dual) authorship. This largely determined the subject of our analysis: the article deals with such aspects of diary poetics as the figure of the addressee, the authors’ writing style, the structure and functions of the entries, and their visual design. In both cases, the rural personal diaries include the genre traits of household notebooks and weather diaries. In the dual-authored diary, the figure of the addressee becomes more complex since, in addition to auto communication, the entries serve as a means of mediated communication between the co-authoring spouses. The main focus of the article is on an analysis of the everyday life reflected in the diaries, which enables the reconstruction of an "internal" perspective on rural life during a transitional era. The diary authors concentrate on their "immediate world": the entries document everyday chores, the social contacts, which are limited to kinship ties and interactions within the rural community. Gender and age-related attitudes, the notions of social norms and deviations are manifested in succinct descriptions of daily routines, celebrations, conflicts, and mutual assistance. The diary records reflect the ongoing transformation of rural life, marking a transition to modern practices not only in public and professional spheres but also in private, personal domains

Everyday life · Kinship · Poetics · Social relationship · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Identity, Memory, and Therapy