Oral stories
- ID:
- 55174
- Description:
-
In the first weeks of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, I had a clear understanding that I had to record everything that was happening, thinking and living, so as not to lose any memories for myself in the future. The saturated information space was changing hourly, and so was my emotional state: from bright hope and its companion euphoria to heavy dark fear and hopelessness. The ritual of writing down diary notes turned the process of anxiously comprehending the new reality into a kind of "slow thinking," which allowed not only to record some facts and news, but also to structure one's own feelings at the same time. A couple of months after the start of the full-scale invasion, I learned to slow down my thoughts and anxieties on my own, without the mediation of writing, and suddenly ended up keeping a war diary. However, what started as a kind of psychological practice of "grounding" helped me to remember the most difficult and intense days of my life in a clear and detailed way. Rereading these notes in 2024, I feel somewhat grateful to myself that I have recorded memories somewhere that would otherwise have simply dissolved in my memory. And at the same time, I do not find the strength to read them all together, because every time I go back in time completely and find myself in the middle of the unknown, fear for my loved ones; I find myself in a foreign country without any certainty about the next morning. My war diary is an endless mirror of what was happening, what could have happened, what I wanted and feared; two years later, it is the clearest memory of my life, without which there would be no me today.
Lis Bobrova, April 2024 - Collection:
- Two Months of War: Diaries and Ego-documents
