1st International Egodocumental Network Conference
Vilnius University, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, the University of Lodz, and the Egodocumental Research Group (https://egodocuments.umk.pl) organise an international conference focusing on research, development, and changing perceptions of egodocuments in the twenty-first century. The conference aims to bring together scholars from different disciplines to share their insights and to encourage interdisciplinary studies of egodocuments.
The conference will also be the first meeting of the International Egodocumental Network established in December 2023 by the Egodocumental Research Group (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the University of Lodz) to unite scholars from different disciplines working on egodocuments. It provides a platform for discussion, collaboration, and exchange of information between the participants, as well as online research seminars organized twice a year. In this dimension, our conference continues two editions of the Scientific Symposium "Egodocuments, Life-Writing and Autobiographical Texts..." organized at NCU in Toruń in 2022 and 2024.
Keynote speakers
Dr. Nataliia Voloshkova
Kazimierz Wielki University and Oxford Brookes University
Prof. Leona Toker
Hebrew University and Shalem Academic College
Prof. François-Joseph Ruggiu
Sorbonne Université, CNRS and Oxford University
Olga Simonova
University of Turku
Diaries of Russian Nurses in the First World War: A Space for the Search for Identity
For a long time, the First World War was a ‘forgotten’ war in Russia. Only in the post-Soviet decades did it ultimately receive much attention in the Russian humanities for the first time. The study of the Sisters of Mercy attracted historians. The phenomenon of nurses as writers, which has been discussed in the English-speaking academy, has not yet been addressed in the Russian material. The few authentic diaries of nurses (Anna Zhdanova, Yulia Butorova, Elizaveta Militsyna) that have been found and (partly) published by researchers are of particular value. How did nurses form their identities, and how did these identities change over time? How did nurses’ self-representations coincide or diverge from their popular images constructed by the propaganda of the First World War press, which have been much more extensively studied by scholars?
The diaries reveal that lively and non-idealised representations of nurses were already being created in the early years of the First World War. It was not until the end of the war that fiction created similar natural personages, usually by discrediting the image of the nurse. The diary’s narrative can be presented as a space of freedom and detachment from the rhetoric of propaganda and the ‘male gaze’.
