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’.