Rozhdestvenskaya E. Russian Letters from the Front: Egodocuments and Witnesses of Time. Avtobiografija. Journal on Life Writing and the Representation of the Self in Russian Culture, 2020, No. 9, pp. 435-462.

Текст статьи на сайте журнала URL: https://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/231(дата обращения 07.01.2021)

Abstract

In the center of the article is the phenomenon of the front epistle, considered on a selection of attributed letters by Russians from various fronts of the twentieth century. The letter from the front is a personal document; with appropriate historical processing, it can be a socio-historical document telling about the attitude of a participant in events to what is happening, to the context of the front and its circumstances. Frontal writing as a personal ego document is at the same time a reflection of the discursive regime of the era, which determines and shapes the dominant modes of written communication. For the purposes of this article, we restrict ourselves to the subject of the professional attitude to war, which has certainly changed throughout the twentieth century. Where do the ideas about military professionalism during the Anglo-Boer War in the Transvaal converge and how do they differ from those of the Russo-Japanese War, the First and Second World Wars, or the relatively recent Afghan war and the Chechen campaigns? A socially oriented narrative analysis of individual front-line letters of the Russian military from various wars of the twentieth century allows us to outline the leading leitmotifs of the plot of work in war, the evolution of military professionalism, military ethos and public discourse about it.

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