“A Nice Day, With No Events Whatsoever,” or On a Chronicle Nature of a Partisan Diary

Abstract

A question that emerged while working with the personal diaries of participants in the Lithuanian Guerrilla War (1944–1953) (the headquarter’s diaries are not included in this research) prompted this study. The question, why does a fairly large proportion of their authors, despite unfavorable circumstances, strove to write their diaries daily, as if being aware that this form of diary was a necessity or an obligation, brought the author of the article back to the issue of the experience of time and its recording in a diary. Taking into consideration a method of measuring and perceiving time offered by the modern diary as a specific genre form, and how partisans wrote about their daily life, it became clear that the recording of time in the form of a diary and its thematic reflection at the level of content opened up as a space of tension and negotiation between the diary as a historically created form of fixing a person in time and the specific experience recorded within it. Based on the research of diary history and the analysis of diaries by Jonas Junokas, Balys Vaičėnas, Bronius Vasiliauskas, Andrius Žemaitis, Antanas Žiogas, and other partisans, the study conceptualizes the chronicle nature of a partisan diary, paying attention to the relationship between the day, its calendar sequence and the structure of the entry’s content, as well as the problem of the event that serves as the basis of a narrative.