It is amazing that such a simple thing as a personal diary can simultaneously be a creative laboratory, a caring psychotherapist, a source of memories, a tool for self-development, and most importantly - a reliable shelter behind which you can be absolutely honest with others and with yourself. It is even more surprising that all these qualities are often not realized even by those who once tried to keep regular records in their notebooks, notepads and diaries.

Keeping a diary is not fruitless self-digging. This is not an activity reserved exclusively for young girls and teenagers who need to sort out their feelings and sentimental experiences. And this is not just a prosecutorial businesslike fixation of the events that happened to you over the past day.

It is also wrong to think that journaling is only for outstanding people who "have something to say." It is true that among famous writers, scientists or artists it is difficult to find someone who would not keep records intended only for themselves. But even if you do not claim to be a genius, this is not a reason to abandon this useful practice. In addition, there is always the possibility that you are still a genius, and many years after your death, the heirs will receive substantial royalties for the publication of your diary.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Nausea

To turn the most banal incident into an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient to tell it.<...>Each person is always a storyteller, he lives surrounded by stories, his own and others, and sees everything that happens to him through their prism. So he tries to fit his life to the story about her.

Diaries are written to be written, read and reread. Here are some answers to the reasonable question “what is it for?”:

• to pour out on paper and realize those feelings that cannot be trusted to others;
• to figure out what you want from life;
• to understand how your plans correspond to reality and whether you are moving towards their implementation in the right way;
• to better understand other people and learn to take into account their point of view;
• to train in the expression of their thoughts and learn to reason;
• to recognize and change harmful thought habits and behavioral patterns;
• to develop intuitive thinking and creativity.

What to write about

Who am I?

A piece of paper that "endures everything" is almost the only place in this world where you can be yourself. This may be said too categorically: in the end, each personality is multifaceted and needs different contexts for its realization. But the honesty and openness that can be achieved in a diary is very rarely available to us in other areas of life.

In the diary, you can reflect on your past and make plans for the future. This is a well-known exercise: try to imagine what kind of life you would like to lead in 5/10/15 years? Then relate what you are doing now to your long-term intentions. If the pictures don't match, maybe it's time to change something. In this practice, it is the recording procedure that is useful.

If you think about the future, then the gaps between dream and reality are smoothed out. In the recording, they appear with all obviousness.

If you don't know what you want to do in this world, a diary will help you come closer to understanding your strengths and deep intentions. Record in a diary what brings you joy and causes sincere interest. A person immersed in business may suddenly realize that the soul of a poet has always been hidden under a business mask. The diary will give him the opportunity to develop this particular side of his personality, not forgetting about the others.

If you have been keeping a diary for several years, when you reread it, your personality will be revealed to you in dynamics. How have your priorities and values ​​changed? What was important to you then and what remains now? So keeping a diary helps to see your life as a whole, albeit an incomplete picture. The diary brings unity and length to a series of broken moments, in it "each moment carries the burden of everything previous and the germ of everything that follows" (Lydia Ginzburg).

Lev Tolstoy

Sunday

For two years I did not write a diary and thought that I would never return to this childishness. And this was not childishness, but a conversation with oneself, with that true, divine self that lives in every person. All the time this I was sleeping, and I had no one to talk to.

With the “true me”, perhaps Lev Nikolaevich went too far. The diary does not remove all social masks, because this is impossible. But it helps to understand which one fits you better. Perhaps this understanding will lead to a change of masks, a change of personality. As Susan Sontag wrote in her diary, "by masking my behavior, I do not protect my personality - I overcome it". The surest way to change something is to understand how it works. The diary does not just record what is happening around; it changes its owner. Usually for the better.

If you suffer from low self-esteem, self-doubt, and see only the negative side of everything, diary entries will help you overcome these bad thinking habits and look at the world more realistically. This is how the diary is used, for example, in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. This is not only useful, but also absolutely free (unlike visits to an analyst and antidepressants).

Recently, there has been scientific evidence for the benefits of journaling. Psychologists from Duke University (USA) have found that writing down exciting events and your own experiences not only improves memory and well-being, but also reduces the frequency of visiting doctors.

Timothy Wilson, one of the authors of the studies, writes about it this way: “Such written interventions can really help people start thinking positively and believing in their own abilities”; “Writing lyrics makes people understand everything that bothers them and find new meaning in it.”

People who are prone to self-flagellation usually pass praise on deaf ears, but they react extremely sharply to any critical remarks. If you record in your diary when you were explicitly or implicitly praised, you may be surprised to find that others treat you not at all as badly as you thought. When you are depressed after another failure, re-read the entries about joyful events and situations when you showed your best side.

After that, it will become much easier to believe that the world is not so bad and hopeless, and all difficulties can be overcome.

As one of the Buddhist thinkers said, the “I” given in reflection is not the true “I”, it is constructed by the mind. But it is a mistake to think that this "I" can be found in some other place. To believe that a real person does not reflect, but does things, is at least naive and unfair: you need to do both.

How do I treat other people?

The constant heroes of the diary are not only ourselves, but also our loved ones. Some keep a diary solely to vent their resentment, anger, feelings of loneliness, abandonment and misunderstanding that haunt them in relationships with others. And here you can figure out how these relationships work: why do you repeat the same mistakes? What do you expect from loved ones and how justified are these expectations?

You can take notes in the "unsent letter" format, saying to the end what you cannot say in real communication. You can try to take the position of another person and write a monologue on his behalf: how does he see the current situation? maybe you are missing something and from his point of view everything looks completely different? Such exercises help develop empathy and the ability to see the world as a multidimensional space of choice and evaluation, in which everyone is right in their own way.

The diary will not replace live communication and real relationships. As Theodor Adorno wrote, “we become free people not because we ourselves, as they say terribly, implement each alone, but because we go beyond our own limits, enter into relationships with other people and, in a sense, deny ourselves in them. For self-development, it is not enough to create a safe platform for yourself, where you can “water and grow yourself like flowers” ​​- this requires other people and real actions. But the diary will help you understand what you want from them, what is really important to you.

If you can give yourself an honest answer to these questions, then building relationships with other people will become much easier.

An example of using the diary to solve personal dilemmas can be found in the biography of Charles Darwin. When it comes to marriage, he writes out with the meticulousness of a naturalist the cons (“an endless amount of trouble and expense ... disputes due to lack of society - morning visits - a daily waste of time”) and pluses of this enterprise (“it is impossible to lead a life alone, without participation, without children ... Cheer up, trust in chance - take a close look around - there are many happy slaves"). And in the end he makes a decision: he must definitely get married.

Diary as an intellectual and creative laboratory

The diary can become the place where vague thoughts and experiences are melted into precise formulations and artistic images. You don't have to be a professional writer or artist to think and imagine. Creativity is not a class privilege. They are available to anyone, but not everyone uses the entrance. A personal diary is exactly the place where you can think and fantasize as much as you like and not be afraid that someone will judge you for naivety and graphomania.

Write down thoughts and ideas from the books you read that hooked you in a diary. Make lists of literature. Create verbal portraits of people and thinkers close to you. Make sketches. Compose . Paste photos and magazine clippings. Make collages. Write down your dreams (the list is endless).

Pablo Picasso

Spanish painter, sculptor and designer, founder of cubism

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

The diary assumes complete freedom of expression: here you can do whatever you want. But over time, you will realize that certain forms of utterance are easier for you than others.

The personal diary as a form of writing appears to have first appeared in Japan. The diaries of Japanese court ladies and poets, written in the 10th-11th centuries, have come down to us, where prose easily flows into poetry. Some fragments from these diaries may touch the modern reader:

“If only my thoughts were the same as those of others ... I could find more joy, I would feel not so old and would observe this transient life with peace.<...>When dawn broke, I looked outside and saw ducks swimming serenely in the lake.

Ducks in the lake -
Can I look at them
Indifferent?
Crossing the swirling waters
Sad world and me.

The birds looked so serene, but they, too, must often suffer, I thought ”(Murasaki-shikibu. Diary. XXIII. 13th day of the 10th moon).

As writer Tristina Reiner points out in her book The New Diary, the form of a diary corresponds to all four basic mechanisms of human perception, which include emotions, sensations, intuition and intelligence. Try to develop each of these qualities, avoid monotony. And then, quite possibly, the diary will become for you a fertile ground for the development of ideas that will go beyond its limits and find embodiment in real creative projects.

Five rules for keeping a diary

1. Write honestly.

As honestly as possible. Even in records that no one but you will see, you will be embarrassed or ashamed to write about some things. It is worth taking a closer look at where this awkwardness arises, where you yourself hide the truth from yourself. No one so often and successfully deceives a person as he himself. But it is much easier to recognize the sources and causes of self-deception in a diary than in mental reasoning.

2. Keep your inner censor and critic in check.

We not only hide the truth from ourselves, but also strive to expose our sincere experiences in an unsightly way. This role is played by the internal censor - the embodiment of Freud's "super-I", that is, the assimilated social attitudes and ideas about "how it should be." He is accompanied by an inner critic, for whom fine artistic taste and depth of reasoning are more important than sincerity. To get rid of these annoying creatures, try writing in stream of consciousness mode. Write down everything that comes to your mind: images, experiences, vague sensations and memories.

Reflection is useful, but it's far from the only way to understand what's going on with you and your life.

3. Write for yourself.

We are used to the fact that any message is intended for some addressee. But a personal diary should not be oriented towards the public (this, by the way, is one of the many differences between a diary and a blog). If you are writing for an audience, even the narrowest one, your internal censor and critic will ruthlessly edit any of your messages. Better try to write for yourself. Perhaps a good target would be your "future self" who will be reading the diary in a few years.

4. Pay attention to details.

So that you can then resurrect past events in your memory, try to capture the details and shades of what is happening. If you just write "it was bad", then it will tell you much less than "I'm lying here on the sofa, thrown out of the world with one kick, lying in wait for a dream that does not want to come, and if it comes, it will only touch me, my joints ache from fatigue, my thin body is exhausted by a tremor of unrest, the meaning of which it does not dare to clearly understand, it knocks at the temples ”(quote from the diary of Franz Kafka).

5. Use paper and ink.

This recommendation here is not due to inertia and retrograde. When you take notes by hand, handwriting can say as much about feelings as the words themselves. In addition, a paper notebook can be carried everywhere with you, unlike a laptop (and taking notes on a smartphone is not very convenient). Sometimes it is enough just to feel the rough surface of the paper notebook in which you write in your hands in order to experience a feeling of confidence and security. It is better, by the way, to use notebooks with blank sheets, rather than lined diaries. The main thing is to choose writing supplies so that keeping a diary gives you pleasure.

Some believe that diary entries should be made daily. It seems to me that this is completely unnecessary.

It is better to write when there is a desire or need to figure something out, so that keeping a diary does not turn into another boring “must”. But at first, until the habit has formed, you will have to force yourself to open a notebook and write at least something. But if the first words were found, there will be others.

Do not forget that each diary is a reflection of the personality of its owner (albeit incomplete and distorted). Therefore, these recommendations are somewhat generalized. But even they should not be taken too literally. What works for a conventional Leo Tolstoy may be completely useless for you. The individual style of keeping a diary develops over the years and changes over time. But in order to understand what benefit the diary can bring to you, you first need to start it.

The section is very easy to use. In the proposed field, just enter the desired word, and we will give you a list of its meanings. I would like to note that our site provides data from various sources - encyclopedic, explanatory, derivational dictionaries. Here you can also get acquainted with examples of the use of the word you entered.

The meaning of the word diary

diary in the crossword dictionary

a diary

Dictionary of medical terms

Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. D.N. Ushakov

a diary

diary, m.

Notes of a personal nature, kept from day to day (book). To keep a diary.

Daily records of scientific observations made during expeditions and explorations.

The name of various kinds of periodicals (book literature). Diary of the Society of Physicians. Writer's diary.

A book in which official operations performed during the day are recorded; magazine (stationary).

A student's notebook for recording assigned lessons and for marking progress (pre-revolutionary).

Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova.

a diary

Records of daily affairs, current events are kept from day to day. Lead d.d. expeditions.

A student notebook for recording assigned lessons and for marking progress and behavior.

adj. diary, -th, -th (to 1 value).

New explanatory and derivational dictionary of the Russian language, T. F. Efremova.

a diary

1. Personal records kept from day to day; notebook for such notes.

   Records of observations, events, etc., kept from day to day while working, traveling, etc.

A notebook for recording the lessons given to the student at home and grading.

Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1998

a diary

records of a personal, scientific, public nature, kept day after day. As a literary form, it opens up specific opportunities for depicting the inner world of a character ("Notes of a Madman" by N. V. Gogol) or an author ("Not a Day Without a Line" by Yu. K. Olesha); distributed from con. 18th century (literature of pre-romanticism).

A diary

daily records of one person or team, kept synchronously with the events of their life (cf. Memoirs). An external, but more than others, obligatory sign of D. is the designation of dates. Real D. (first widely used in England in the 17th century) can be considered as a kind of historical, historical-biographical, or historical-cultural documents: for example, the ship D. of the navigator J. Cook, the lyceum D. of the Decembrist V. K. Kyuchelbeker, D. censor A. V. Nikitenko, publicist A. S. Suvorin, numerous writers D. (W. Scott, Stendhal, the Goncourt brothers, T. G. Shevchenko, L. N. Tolstoy, etc.).

D. can also act as a form of artistic narration. In Russian and European literature of the 18th century. sentimentalism, which aroused interest in the inner world of the individual, cultivates D. as a form of "self-observation"; “Sentimental Journey” by L. Stern, “Letters from a Russian Traveler” by N. M. Karamzin are designed as travel letters. writers convey the diary form of narration to a fictional character for the sake of in-depth study of the “history of the human soul” (M. Yu. Lermontov); for example, Pechorin's Journal in A Hero of Our Time. At the same time, the possibilities of stylization, a complex speech game, associated with the increasing separation of the author from the character (N.V. Gogol's Notes of a Madman) arise. Realists of the 19th century resort to genre varieties close to artistic D. - “notes” (“The History of Yesterday” by L. N. Tolstoy), “letters” (“Poor People” by F. M. Dostoevsky), “confessions” (Ippolit’s notebook in the novel Dostoevsky "The Idiot"). Examples of the use of the D. form in Soviet literature: “The Diary of Kostya Ryabtsev” by N. Ognev, “The Village Diary” by E. Dorosh.

The middle place between fiction as a document and fiction as a literary genre is occupied by writer's journals, intended for publication in advance (J. Renard's Diary, V. V. Rozanov's Fallen Leaves, Yu. K. Olesha and others); autobiography is deliberately combined in them with a breadth of observations and reflections. Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer (70s of the 19th century), which is addressed to the modern reader, is an example of the use of the D. form in the sphere of artistic journalism. Sometimes the artistic interest is acquired by D. "private persons", thanks to sincerity and truthfulness ("Anne Frank's Diary", "Nina Kosterina's Diary").

I. B. Voskresenskaya.

Wikipedia

Diary (disambiguation)

A diary :

• Diary - daily records of one person or team, kept synchronously with the events of their lives.
• School diary - a journal in which the grades of a student of a school are recorded.
• Training diary - records of athletes that allow you to track progressions in loads (powerlifting), muscle mass (bodybuilding) or adaptations, analyze and compose more effective training, taking into account your physiology and training.

A diary

A diary- a set of fragmentary records that are made for oneself, are kept regularly and are most often accompanied by an indication of the date. Such records organize individual experience and, like a written genre, accompany the formation of individuality in culture, the formation of the “I” - in parallel with them, the forms of memoirs and autobiography develop.

Diary (newspaper, Skopje)

"A diary" is a daily newspaper in the Republic of Macedonia.

The newspaper was founded by Mile Jovanovski, Branislav Gjeroski and Alexander Damovski. The newspaper is published every day except Sunday. The first issue of the Diary was published on March 20, 1996.

The circulation of the newspaper is 25 thousand copies (2015), the editor-in-chief is Sasho Kokalanov.

On Fridays, the Antena supplement is published for the newspaper, and on Saturdays, the Weekend.

Diary (novel)

"A diary"(2003, eng. Diary ) is a novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The plot revolves around Misty Wilmot, a promising young artist who drinks heavily and works as a waitress in a hotel. Her husband, a contractor, is in a coma after a suicide attempt, and his clients are threatening Misty with legal action through a series of disgusting messages she found on the walls of houses her husband has remodeled. Suddenly, artistic talent returns to Misty. Perplexed by a surge of inspiration, she soon finds herself a pawn in a larger conspiracy that threatens hundreds of lives. The Diary falls short of the genre of modern horror books, preferring psychological stunts with fear and black humor, and almost no use of violence and shock tactics as a means of influencing the reader.

Examples of the use of the word diary in the literature.

Anna Pavlovna sat next to Samokhin and wrote down a message in a thick blue notebook - emergency a diary.

Of course, memories diaries, confessions are autobiographical in genre and in essence, but Grigoriev's ordinary stories also have a deeply personal, autobiographical character.

But I had no idea that not only an autobiography would turn out, but also a diary.

Besides, a diary was an impeccably composed routine of life, and the Autocrat never deviated from it one iota.

AT diary entrepreneur of this troupe, Philip Henslow, beginning in 1591, the production of Marlowe's play is mentioned for the first time on September 30, 1594, i.e.

The name of Jean-Paul Antoine enters into his a diary already injected with morphine.

When Richard had finished, Arnold said, "Are you sure that Sarah a diary did not read?

Published fragments diaries did not violate the already established image of an ascetic eccentric scientist who lived a modest and calm life.

I have a great many duplicates and freaks, - the graduate student continued reading diary.

Discovered in the Atacama Desert, the find was something like diary, which was led by one of the aliens.

From diary It turned out that on the third day of the flight, due to icing of the valve and shell, the balloon became so heavy that the lifting force was insufficient.

Despite the mistreatment of diaries, it was possible to restore several love poems addressed to the popular film singer, whom Babur Shakil had never seen in his eyes, Poorly rhymed lines expressing fiery love for an inaccessible beauty, praising her angelic voice, nearby, not very out of place, there was already a verse white, distinctly pornographic.

Having taken refuge in the Unthinkable Mountains, Babur began to grow a beard, studied the intricate structure of mountain communities-clans, wrote poetry, rested between raids - either to military posts, then to the railway, then to reservoirs - and, since an isolated life dictated its conditions , could reason in his diary on the virtues of mating with sheep and goats.

In early diaries Olga Bergholz mentions him quite often - and how he strictly follows their studies, and how he walks with them - 21.

So Olga Berggolts wrote about her father at the end of the 50s, that is, about 30 years after the real events noted by her in diary those years.

Inga Mayakovskaya

Reading time: 4 minutes

A A

Why keep a diary? Keeping a diary helps you understand yourself, your desires and feelings. When a huge amount of thoughts accumulates, which are in disarray, it is better to “splash out” them on paper. In the process of keeping a diary, remembering and describing this or that situation, you begin to analyze your actions, think about whether you did the right thing under these circumstances, draw conclusions.

If these thoughts are for work, then most women write them down briefly - with abstracts and record them in a diary.

Why do you need a personal diary?

For a woman who finds it difficult to keep all her experiences in herself, you just need to keep a personal diary , where you can describe absolutely everything: your thoughts about your colleagues, how you feel about the recently appeared persistent boyfriend, what does not suit you in your husband, thoughts about children and much more.

Yes, of course, you can tell all this to a close friend, but it’s not a fact that the information she received will remain only between you. A personal diary will endure everything and won't tell anyone anything , unless, of course, it will be inaccessible to others. Therefore, it is better to conduct it electronically. , and, of course, set passwords.

Usually a personal diary is started girls still in puberty when the first relationship with the opposite sex occurs. There they describe experiences about first love, as well as relationships with parents and peers. personal diary you can entrust the most intimate thoughts and desires , because he will never give publicity to the secrets of his author.

What is a diary for anyway? What does he give? At the moment of an emotional outburst, you transfer your emotions into a diary (paper or electronic). Then, over time, after reading the lines from the diary, you remember those emotions and feelings, and see the situation from a completely different angle .

The diary takes us back to the past, makes us think about the present and avoids mistakes in the future. .

For example, a pregnant woman keeps a diary and writes down her experiences, feelings and feelings, and then, when her daughter is pregnant, she will share her notes with her.

To see the changes in your thoughts day by day, a diary needs a chronology . Therefore, it is better to put the day, month, year and time with each entry.

What are the benefits of keeping a personal diary?

• The benefits of keeping a diary are obvious. Describing events, remembering the details, you develop your memory. By writing down daily events and then analyzing them, you develop the habit of remembering the details of episodes that you did not pay any attention to before;
• There is an ability to structure your thoughts. And also to choose the right words for certain emotions and feelings that arise when reproducing the described situation;
• In the diary you can write your desires, goals, as well as identify ways to achieve them;
• Reading the events described in the diary will help you understand yourself. in their internal conflicts. It is a kind of psychotherapy;
• By writing in your diary your victories from any sphere of life (business, personal), you you can draw energy in the future rereading the lines. You will remember what you are capable of and the thought will flash through your head: “Yes, I - wow! I can't do that either."
• In the future, it will revive the emotions and memories of long-forgotten events.. Imagine how in 10 - 20 years you will open your diary, and how nice it will be to plunge into the past and remember the pleasant moments of life.

Briefly to the question - why keep a diary? - you can answer like this: to become better, wiser and make fewer mistakes in the future.

1

The diary, along with an autobiography, memoirs and notes, is part of memoir literature. This article discusses which features of the diary are genre-forming, necessary, which are auxiliary, which genres that historically preceded the diary are associated with it, and how this genre has been transformed in modern literature. The paper also analyzes the development of the diary genre over the past five centuries. The first diaries that have come down to us date back to the 15th century, but these entries cannot be considered a diary in the modern sense of the word, since they are either court records reproducing the events of various diplomatic missions, or travel notes. In the future, the genre becomes more and more intimate, personal, but in modern literature it also undergoes significant changes. Today, the diary is one of the few living literary genres, the interest of writers, researchers and readers in which does not fade away.

diaries

memoir literature

literary criticism

1. Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Moscow, Soviet Encyclopedia, volume 27;

2. Bulletin of history, literature, art, M.: Collection, 2009;

3. Literary encyclopedia: Dictionary of literary terms: In 2 volumes / Ed. N. Brodsky, A. Lavretsky, E. Lunin, V. Lvov-Rogachevsky, M. Rozanov, V. Cheshikhin-Vetrinsky. - M.; L.: Publishing house L. D. Frenkel, 1925;

4. Literary encyclopedia of terms and concepts (chief editor A.N. Nikolyukin), M., 2002;

5. Literary encyclopedic dictionary, M., TSB, 1987;

6. New Literary Review, No. 61 (2003), No. 106 (2010);

7. A Critical Edition of John Beadle's A Journal, Or Diary of a Thankful Christian, Taylor & Francis, 1996;

8. British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written Between 1442 and 1942, William Matthews, University of California Press, California, 1950;

9. Dutton E.P., Medieval Russia's epics, chronicles and tales, New York, 1974;

10. Jurgensen M., Das Fiktional Ich (Untersuchungen zum Tagebuch) Franckle Verlag Bern und Munchen 1979;

11. Kendall P. M., The art of biography, W W Norton and Company INC, New York, 1965;

12. Latham R., Matthews W., The diary of Samuel Pepys (11 vols.), eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970-1983;

13. Mckay E. The Diary Network in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, URL: http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/publications/eras/edition-2/mckay.php (accessed 04.11.2014)

14. Spengemann W. C., “The forms of autobiography, Episodes in the History of a Literature Genre”, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1980;

15. Wuthenow R. R., Europäische Tagebücher, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1950;

In view of the large number of different interpretations of the term "diary" in the literary tradition of various countries, as well as the fact that this genre is becoming increasingly popular in the modern world, it is important to consider what a diary is, what features of a diary are genre-forming, necessary, that is, the most significant , which are auxiliary, secondary, what genres that historically preceded the diary are associated with it, and how it was transformed in the literature of the late XX - XXI century.

aim research is to consistently identify the features of the diary in a number of other literary genres, as well as an analysis of its development over the past five centuries of existence.

Research material: diaries of authors from various countries (mainly England, Germany, Russia, France) and eras (XV-XXI centuries).

Research methods: cultural-historical, comparative-historical.

The diary as a genre, along with autobiography, memoirs and notes, is part of memoir literature. Despite the fact that the appearance of the diary belongs to a relatively late period, it should be considered in the context of all memoir literature, since the genres have been transformed over time, acquiring new features, while the former formative features have faded into the background. The greatest dawn, distribution of the diary reaches at the end of the 17th century, when a special interest in the personality of the author, his inner world, thoughts, feelings is formed. The diary as a kind of literary genre appears a little later, at the beginning of the 18th century (“Diary for Stella” by J. Swift, “Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy” by L. Stern). It should be noted, however, that the genres preceding the diary, the genres without which the appearance of the diary would have been impossible, by this time exist for a rather long period.

It is important to consider what a diary is, what features of the diary are genre-forming, necessary, that is, the most significant, which are auxiliary, secondary, what genres that historically preceded the diary are associated with it, and how it was transformed in the literature of the late XX - XXI century.

There are many definitions of the diary, in many ways similar, but each of them marks one or another feature characteristic of the genre. We can deduce the following features inherent in the diary, the manifestation of which in one or another extraneous genre will bring the latter closer to the diary. A diary is a text written for oneself, and not for prying eyes, describing what has just happened, an event of both personal and global significance, indicating the dates of creation and with periodic replenishment. That is why, as Anna Zaliznyak notes, diary entries are characterized by "fragmentation, non-linearity, violation of cause-and-effect relationships, intertextuality, autoreflection, a mixture of documentary and artistic, fact and style, fundamental incompleteness and lack of a single plan" .

Thus, different formative features give us the opportunity to compare the diary with several other genres. "Sincerity" in creation, a limited number of readers / listeners allows us to compare the diary with a confession. Dating and connection with a specific time of creation, a kind of "hyper-relevance" - with the chronicles and related genres (travels, walks, travel diaries). The limited number of readers also makes it possible to compare diaries and letters; one can often observe how the thoughts that appear in a diary are also developed in letters to various addressees (for example, L.N. Tolstoy or F. Kafka). The peculiarity of creating diaries makes them fragmentary, a property that is also characteristic of the genre of notes (that is why, for example, Lydia Ginzburg's Notebooks are often called diaries). Anna Zaliznyak also speaks about the coincidence of the genres of the diary and notebooks in the work of writers-diaries: “everything that the writer writes is part of his professional activity, any entry in the diary is a potential “pre-text”, material from which later "text" is made. Therefore, the writer's diary is actually not much different from "notebooks" (notebooks, in one of the meanings of this term, are a specifically "writer's" genre). And precisely because the writer's diary is always to some extent oriented towards the subsequent "artistic" text, it is not a "real" diary, but a text of a different type. Finally, diaries are a personal experience, which brings the genre closer to autobiography and partly its more ancient variety, hagiographic literature.

In Literature, confession goes a very long way; the genre is named after one of the seven sacraments (along with baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, marriage, unction and ordination), after the appearance of the book of the same name by St. Augustine, is becoming quite common in literature. Confession is considered "a literary and artistic work or part of it, where the narration is in the first person and the narrator lets the reader into the innermost depths of his inner world" .

Early diaries (end of the 16th - beginning of the 17th centuries) are considered by scientists to be closer to the genre of confession. Thus, the historian William Haller notes that "for the Puritans, the diary becomes a substitute for confession." At the same time, a confession, unlike a diary, is a genre a priori aimed at subsequent reading. In addition, the diary describes any events and actions that impressed the author, so these are far from always actions that are hidden from society or condemned by it, while confession is a genre that involves repentance for the deed.

Confession is also usually correlated with an autobiography. However, if autobiography is characterized primarily by describing external events, then confession, despite the changes that the genre undergoes over time, describes, first of all, the experiences of the inner world.

An autobiography, along with a diary, is part of memoir literature. However, the "historicity" of what is described, common in diaries and autobiographies, is also their main difference. The genre of the diary implies the duration of the creative process, the creation of the text day by day, the correlation of the event that took place and the record made, which means freshness, “clearness” of perception. The creator of an autobiography, by the very fact of creating such a work, sums up a kind of result of his life, therefore the events described often occur many years before writing.

Another significant difference between a diary and an autobiography is how much their texts are aimed at the reader, that is, they suggest further reading. If in the case of an autobiography the answer to this question is obvious, diaries in this respect cause controversy among researchers.

At the same time, the researchers note that “an autobiography is a review of life, in which the author perceives an autobiography as a kind of training in evaluating his own life. It is as retrospective as possible, while the diary is created as certain events occur.

One of the most important distinguishing features of the diary is the peculiarity of the organization of the test, the indispensable dating, the description of events that have not yet become the past. This way of structuring the narrative makes it possible to correlate the genre of the diary with the chronicles. However, the system-forming factor in the chronicles is time, while in the diaries it is the life and experiences of the author. It is also significant that chronicles, like diaries, receive an artistic analogue in the Renaissance, starting with Shakespeare's chronicle plays, and up to the works of Dos Passos, in which many researchers capture the features of the chronicles. However, the chronicles do not receive such a wide literary and artistic distribution, since in the early periods of their development they remain a genre “for the elite”, while the development of the diary genre is due to the gradual “democratization” of the genre, as a result of which an increasing number of people became the authors of diaries.

Finally, another genre that is often compared with a diary is letters. They are brought together primarily by a limited number of addressees. In addition, on the pages of diaries and letters, everyday and world problems are given equal attention. At the same time, the total layer of letters of one or another author is a wider and more diverse material for research, since until the middle of the 20th century letters were the only way of correspondence communication, which means that all literate people wrote them in one format or another. By letters to different addressees of the same author, one can trace both stylistic shades and features of the relationship with one or another addressee.

However, diaries can also be seen as letters to oneself. If the diary belongs to the writer, the reader has the opportunity to trace the "pure" author's style, which sometimes coincides with the style of the works, and sometimes differs.

One of the varieties of the diary genre is travel diaries, daily recording of the incidents of a particular trip. Travel diaries are a fusion of diary genres, since the travel diary is also often very much personal, subjective rather than objective perception of events, and the travel genre. Travel, which, as already noted above, is not an artistic genre, turned out to be very productive for the development of fiction. In addition to the already mentioned travel diary, the travel novel, which had developed by the 18th century, was also widely used, combining the features of philosophical, adventurous and psychological novels. In such works, the journey is the “driving force” of the plot (for example, Robinson Crusoe by D. Defoe, 1719).

So, diaries are formed as a genre of memoir literature relatively late. However, this formation takes some time. Today, more than 300 diaries are available to us, collected by researchers in the book "English Diaries". There are also 20 diaries from the 16th century. The reason for such a sharp increase in the number of diaries, firstly, is that there are more literate people (according to the site http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/literacy-rates from 20% of men and 5% of women in the 16th century to 30% men and 10% women in the 17th century). Secondly - growing individualism, interest in one's own self, determined by the era. Thus, the English scientist Roy Porter connects the growth in the number of people keeping diaries with the growing individualism in the European Communities. Other scholars, such as William Heller, also note the significance of diaries for Puritans in the early 17th century, when the diary "becomes for them an ersatz of confession"

If we turn to the history of the appearance of diaries, then in world literature diaries date back to Japan, where the first diaries date back to the 11th century. In India, such works of an autobiographical nature date back to the 16th century, and in China to the 12th. At the same time, there is no reason to believe that these works were known and therefore had any influence on the Western world. Therefore, the source of autobiographical and diary entries for Europeans lies in ancient Greece and Rome. However, the modern researcher of the diary has the following difficulty. The diary is a genre until recently handwritten, intimate, and therefore not replicated, existing only in one copy. The diary is subject to destruction from any cataclysm, fire, flood, which means that the preservation of records is a task that is possible only if the significance of this document for a historian, literary critic, etc. is realized.

Interest in diary entries appeared in many countries in different periods. This work began earlier than anything else in England, where already at the beginning of the 19th century William Matthews compiled a bibliography of diary entries created in England, Scotland and Ireland from the 15th to the end of the 17th century. We can also trace the history of the creation of various German-language diary entries from the 16th century. The main layer of diary entries created in Russian belongs to a rather late period, starting from the second half of the 18th century. However, even here the researcher is often disappointed. Many documents were destroyed, many are stored in archives, not always accessible to the general reader.

Thus, the history of the creation of diaries has 5 centuries, from the 16th century to the present. It is interesting to trace the structural and semantic change in the form and content of the diary over this period. As mentioned earlier, speaking of diaries, we are based on rather scarce material. At our disposal today there are several (no more than ten) diaries of the 15th century, about 30 diaries of the 16th century, and, starting from the 17th century, the genre has become increasingly popular, English-language sources already have more than 300 texts, a similar trend can be traced in others. countries. Speaking of texts preceding the 17th century, one should not forget that the modern word "diary" in this period is denoted by various terms. So, along with the usual "Diary" in English sources, the German "Tagebuch" is also less common, and more often the French "Journal" and the Latin "Diurnal". All four words refer to a diary, each referring to the fact that the text is being written on a daily basis. However, these designations can appear in the same text as synonyms. These words are synonymous, however, perhaps they indicate the characteristic features of certain records. Here it is also necessary to mention that the authors themselves attribute to their texts the belonging to the Diary genre, and this definition can often be erroneous.

The diaries of the 15th - 16th centuries that have come down to us cannot be called diaries in the modern sense of the word, since they are based on either court records reproducing the events of various diplomatic missions, or travel notes from travels (Albrecht Dürer's diary “Family Chronicles. Diary from a trip to the Netherlands 1520 - 1521").

By the 17th century, the trend changed somewhat. Diary entries acquire a more “intimate”, personal character, turning from a document of the era into an “imprint” of a person. In addition, the diary, like all literature, is gradually ceasing to be a genre of only the highest social circles. In addition to the fact that the level of literacy in Europe in the 17th century is increasing significantly, paper is gradually becoming more accessible to the “middle class”, which causes an increased interest in the genre among more and more people. A typical example here would be the famous diary of Samuel Pipes.

One of the few monuments of diary creativity in Russian also belongs to the 17th century - these are the diaries of Marina Mnishek, as well as a monument of Armenian history, the diary of Zakaria Akulissky, describing trade trips to the east (Iran, Turkey) and European (Italy, France, Holland) countries, their customs, nature, natural disasters experienced by the author in these countries. This diary was kept in the period from 1647 to 1687. However, in these examples the personality of the creator of the text is not affected, even his attitude to the events. Therefore, the book is more likely to belong to the genre of chronicles or travel notes.

The next few centuries are the heyday of the diary genre. During this period, the whole variety of diaries appears. Texts are created both to be read by the reader as soon as they are created (The Diaries of the Goncourt brothers, The Diary of a Writer by Dostoevsky), and, on the contrary, in order to be destroyed (The Diaries of Kafka, The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard in the period from 1840 - 1850), personal diaries are kept by most writers (L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky, Lewis Carol, Walter Scott, etc.), politicians (Theodore Roosevelt, Queen Victoria, Nicholas II), actors, musicians, artists (then there are representatives of art who are not directly related to the creation of texts (P.I. Tchaikovsky, Vaclav Nijinsky, Frida Kahlo).It is noteworthy that in the 20th century it seems impossible that a famous political figure did not keep a diary, so fake diaries appear, such like the Diary of Adolf Hitler.This is the period when the above-mentioned gap between the surviving diaries in different countries is significantly reduced (we are talking about European material), the amount of material for the researcher is sufficient oh great. During this period, the trend that began in the 17th century continues, when writing diaries gradually ceases to be the prerogative of high society.

However, the increased amount of material displaces the diaries of ordinary people from the field of scientific interest of researchers. If the diaries of the 15th-17th centuries are a material for studying not only and not so much a literary critic, but one of the few sources of information for a historian, sociologist, linguist, then there is a number of other evidence about the later period, so more and more attention of researchers (and therefore readers ) concentrates on the diaries of people who have become famous in a particular field. At the same time, in the 20th century, during the Second World War, the reverse process can be observed, when Anne Frank, Etti Hilsam, Otto Wolf, Nina Lugovskaya become known to the general reader only thanks to their diaries describing their experiences during the war.

The diaries of the 18th - 20th centuries are distinguished from the previous periods by another feature. At the end of the 17th - beginning of the 18th century, a new genre appeared in literature; diary entries are so popular that they become an object for imitation of writers, the first art diaries appear. From now on, the creators of private diaries have another resource to follow, artistic diaries.

Since diaries, as mentioned earlier, are an intimate genre, it is still too early to talk about private diaries written in recent years, little has already been published. However, in recent decades, a new type of diary entries has appeared, web diaries, blogs. Everyone can create their own diary-blog, add entries there, determine for themselves who they allow to be their readers. A significant difference between this genre and the diary genre is that it is no longer an intimate genre, since a large number of blog readers is an indicator of its success. In recent years, even a new profession "blogger" has appeared. The new diaries continue the trend of previous centuries towards the maximum democratization of the genre, now any owner of Internet access can blog. Thus, the diary is currently one of the few living literary genres; over time, it undergoes certain changes, but the interest of researchers and readers in the genre does not fade away.

conclusions

A diary is a text written for oneself, and not for prying eyes, describing what has just happened, an event of both personal and global significance, indicating the dates of creation and with periodic replenishment. Various formative features make it possible to consider the diary as an evolution of a number of other genres that are part of memoir literature.

Reviewers:

Kling OA, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, Head of the Department of Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology, Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov, Moscow;

Lipgart A.A., Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor of the Department of English Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov, Moscow.

Bibliographic link

Romashkina M.V. DIARY: EVOLUTION OF THE GENRE // Modern problems of science and education. - 2014. - No. 6.;
URL: http://science-education.ru/ru/article/view?id=15447 (date of access: 01.02.2020). We bring to your attention the journals published by the publishing house "Academy of Natural History"

DIARY meaning

T.F. Efremova New Dictionary of the Russian Language. Explanatory- derivational

a diary

Meaning:

daily and to

m.

a) Personal records kept from day to day; notebook for such notes.

b) Records of observations, events, etc., kept from day to day while working, traveling, etc.

2) A notebook for recording the lessons given to the student at home and grading.

Modern explanatory dictionary ed. "Great Soviet Encyclopedia"

A DIARY

Meaning:

records of a personal, scientific, public nature, kept day after day. As a literary form, it opens up specific opportunities for depicting the inner world of a character (“Notes of a Madman” by N. V. Gogol) or an author (“Not a Day Without a Line” by Yu. K. Olesha); distributed from con. 18th century (literature of pre-romanticism).

Small academic dictionary of the Russian language

a diary

Meaning:

BUT, m.

Day-to-day recordings of some facts, events, observations, etc. during a trip, expedition or any occupations, activities.

Travel diary. Ship's diary.

A good educator must necessarily keep a diary of his work, in which he writes down individual observations on pupils. Makarenko, Methods of organizing the educational process.

Records of a personal nature, kept from day to day.

To keep a diary.

This is my diary: facts, pictures, thoughts and impressions that I, tired and sometimes deeply shocked by everything that I had seen and felt during the day, entered in the evening --- into this tattered expensive little book. Korolenko, In a hungry year.

A book, a journal in which observations, events, etc. are recorded.

A notebook for recording the lessons given to the student and for grading.

Alyosha was left in the care of his older brother, a plant engineer. And my brother didn’t even sign the diary, he didn’t come to school. Izyumsky, Vocation.