The Diary between Literature and History: A Historian's Critical Response

There emerge two types of responses to the question framing this forum on diaries, their significance and scholarly uses. One is contained in the individual essays themselves. Each of them proposes a distinct strategy of working with a particular diary, or a set of diaries, and arrives at conclusions based on this specific case. The plurality of approaches, emphases, and responses to be observed in these contributions stems in part from the fact that they discuss diaries from a variety of social milieus and historical contexts, ranging from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries; but it is also a matter of a given scholar's methodological and stylistic preferences. Such preferences are to a certain extent effects of the different forms of disciplinary training characterizing the professions of the historian and the literary specialist, respectively, but they are also a matter of personal sensibility and taste; conceivably these latter traits assume particular weight in an analysis of personal sources as rich in expression of subjective viewpoints as the diary. In light of such creative plurality, any attempt to formulate a "synthetic definition" of the diary may appear daunting. Yet this is what Irina Paperno does, as she seeks to apply to the study of diaries the combined insights of historical and literary analysis. In terms of its genre features and as a historical source, the diary has bedeviled literary and historical scholars alike. Its "uncertain" nature between literary and historical writing, between fictional and documentary, spontaneous and reflected narrative, has frustrated many a literary specialist in search for canonical clarity. At least equally frustrating has it proved for historians to work with the diary's personal testimony, which promises sincere, private testimony, yet which at closer sight reveals manifold connections to conventions governing the public world. The relationship between the diarist's subjective voice and objective reality, and the question of any given diary's representativeness as a record of individual experience, are further complicating issues. These questions are formulated in such ways that they cannot be conclusively answered, as they produce residues of uncertainty, openness, and indeterminacy. However, if we shift the question toward an interrogation of the very categories grounding our understanding of diaries and motivating our questions on them, we gain firmer ground. A cultural historical approach to the subject could demonstrate how categories such as history, self, and privacy, often accepted as an unquestioned syntax of the diary across time and space, are constructions of an age, highly malleable in meaning and identifiable only through careful contextualized analysis. John Randolph's contribution unlocks some of these questions in masterful ways. Though Randolph deals not so much with the literary form of the diary per se, his discussion of various forms of personal testimony is very pertinent for an understanding of our interest in diaries. As he shows so well, the autobiographical accounts of Belinskii, Stankevich,