The head of the Center for the Study of Ego-Documents "Prozhito" Mikhail Melnichenko has received the award "TOP 50. The most famous people of St. Petersburg" — 2022 in the category "Science and Life".
Sobaka.ru spoke with Mikhail about the preservation of historical documents, the digitization of diaries, diaries from the Blockade of Leningrad, and the laboratory at the center.
Here is the text of the interview:
— Reading other people's diaries — isn't that an invasion of privacy?
It's an invasion of privacy — and you can establish certain restrictions. Yes, we work with very sensitive data, and sensitivity is required. The first thing we explain to relatives is that they retain complete control over the text. If they feel that something is inappropriate for publication, we are ready to make exceptions with a note so that the reader understands that the diary is not published in its entirety, and that there are storylines here that the heirs decided not to share.
There is another delicate point when we work with relatives. Often, when children or grandchildren work with diaries, they have an established image of the author. We need to explain to them that a diary is a therapeutic tool where a person can pour out their frustrations. The irritated tone that a loved one uses when they write about you could be a consequence of a momentary state. A diary is a place where a person can get things off their chest so they can move on calmly.
— Are there people who offer their own diaries for publication?
Yes. Without such people, we would not have, for example, the 1990s at all.
— What drives them? Soul-searching exhibitionism?
Well, I don't think it's exhibitionism. It’s that you've been writing a book about yourself all your life, and you need a reader. You fit yourself into the landscape; you are a participant in events; you have an opinion; you loved someone; you were loved. It’s natural to want to live on in people's memories after death and leave behind a text.
— «"Prozhito" — what is it, besides an archive and an attempt to systematize diaries?
"Prozhito" is a scientific center at the European University in St. Petersburg. We have several areas of work. On the one hand, we are compiling a digital collection of documents from family archives (diaries, memories, correspondence, photographs), which otherwise would not have much chance of being seen by researchers and readers. And on the other hand, we want to understand how it was that these documents were created and what their authors meant when they documented their own lives.
— What are the main objectives of "Prozhito"?
We work for a professional audience and position ourselves as a scientific project, but through a fortunate coincidence, our non-professional audience is much wider. People see us us as a memorial project and even entertainment project. We are introducing them to uncensored historical testimonies.
We talk to society through the voices of our authors; we give a platform to people who never knew that they would have an audience of this size. We publish documents without dividing them into good or bad.
— Do you study the diaries of the Blockade of Leningrad?
Yes, this is our main project. We are searching for texts of the blockade and trying to understand how a text of the blockade differs from a peacetime diary — and what we can say from it about strategies for survival in a besieged city. My colleagues Anastasia and Alexey Pavlovsky are now working on the second volume of our book series dedicated to the blockade – the first volume was published in 2021 with the title "I know you aren’t supposed to write like this: The phenomenon of the blockade diary."
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— At what point does the diary turn into the personal story of its researcher?
I'll tell you about my experience. I worked with the manuscript of a diary of an ethnographer, ethnographer and folklorist Nikolai Mendelssohn, who kept it in the 1920s and 1930s. After a few months of work, I started to have an internal dialogue with the author; he became a real person for me, sort of a member of the family, whom you observe for a long time, so you roughly understand how he would react to this or that. And by the end of a year of work, as I approached the end of the manuscript – my hero had grown old and was beginning to die. His handwriting had changed, because his hands were already working poorly; he began to have health problems. I had a very real feeling that a loved one was dying. I thought, "A good man, but he’s tired of life." And for a while, I lived with this and watched as this man’s life flickered and faded—a man who had, in a way, become a friend.
— Do you keep a diary?
Yes, I do. And I’ve reflected on the topic. I publish diaries; do I have the right to keep a diary myself? Now I understand that for me it sets the rhythm of life. I think the most important thing I write down are my colleagues’ jokes. I work in a team in which everyone has a brilliant and unique sense of humor.
— Is the diary popular as a genre today?
you were to look at a timeline of how many diaries are kept and when, you would clearly see peaks in the popularity of diaries. There were peaks in the First World War and during the revolution. Then there's a plateau. And then the incredible peak of World War II. I am sure that COVID and all the subsequent events will be clearly visible on the modern part of the graph. I think now a huge number of people are trying to bolster themselves through journaling.
— What is your team like?
We have a huge team by the standards of the humanities – almost ten people. The fundamental work that we do with texts is done by volunteers: any person who has a couple of free hours a week and a computer can help decipher manuscripts with us. In recent years, we’ve had somewhat of a decline in volunteer activity, but since February, assistants have come to us every day. Many people are soothed by working with the texts, doing mechanical work, and reading other people's diaries, and seeing what happened in other people's lives.
— How many diaries have been processed so far?
We have about 2600 diaries uploaded to our website. Diaries consist of daily entries, and over the course of three centuries significantly more than 600 thousand have accumulated. In our archive database there are a several terabytes of scanned manuscripts, and now several people are engaged in the archival description of these documents. About three thousand units have been described, which is about a quarter of what is scanned. We’re moving slowly, but surely.
— You conduct workshop labs on working with diaries for non-professionals. Why?
The “Prozhito” workshop labs were at first attempts to involve people who might be interested. It has now become clear that labs as a format for deciphering handwritten texts is over, and we need to move to a new stage; we must organize analytical labs to teach our audience to read diary texts and understand what is interesting in them, how much they can be believed and what researchers of different profiles can learn from them.
Previously, an array of blockade diaries had to be deciphered and uniformly formalized, and now we want to understand what these diaries can say about survival strategies in besieged Leningrad. We want to gather a community of volunteers, in person, in St. Petersburg. Each volunteer will receive a text of a blockade diary for a month of work and, at the end, fill out a lengthy form: what was the social status of the author, their age, the number of family members, their home address, their work address and so on. After we collect three hundred such questionnaires, we will be able to draw research conclusions. I hope that we will launch the lab of this kind in the autumn.
The full version of the material is available on the website «Собака.ru».