A Man with a Gun: The Hunting Sketches of a Soviet Youth (According to the Diary of a Provincial Schoolboy 1947–1952)

The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the lifeworld of a Soviet schoolboy between 1947 and 1952 based on the diary of Nikolai Kozakov, a provincial young man. The author considers the diary as a special historical source belonging to the group of ego-documents. Referring to the daily diary entries of the rural teenager, the article attempts to discover significant components of everyday life in the Soviet village and to reveal the connection between the “spirit of the epoch” and social expectations, imagination and value orientations in their individual refraction. The concept of social time, first introduced into scientific discourse by Pitirim Sorokin and Robert Merton, serves as the theoretical and methodological basis of the study. In order to adapt it to the analysis of historical sources, the author uses the approaches of Umberto Eco related to the understanding of the absent structures as elements of social orders in society. This methodology makes it possible to combine the analysis of diary narrative with the ideas about social and normative order, which the diary writer did not verbalize but shared with his contemporaries. The additional meanings that are also found in ego-texts make them an important source for understanding both social time and collective perceptions of the epoch. N. Kozakov’s personal diary presents the Soviet village as social space functionally oriented to preparing the young generation of Soviet teenagers for future independent adult life. A shotgun is presented as a symbol of independence, responsibility, and adulthood of the rural young man. In the diary, the practices of obtaining, using, and caring for the gun form a special type of narrative about socialization in the Soviet village. Preservation and reproduction in the family environment of orientations towards the values and models of behavior of an urban resident, inherited from the pre-evacuation period in the family, awakened a special style of social imagination in N. Kozakov. The intersection of socio-cultural coordinates of the two worlds (rural and urban ones) presented in the texts of the diary in an individual dimension, allows us to reveal the multidimensionality, heterogeneity, and aggregate state of the lifeworld of a Soviet teenager.

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