Peasant diary as a text of folklore?

Résumé

The article attempts to answer the question of the genological status of peasant diaries. These texts were certainly being written from the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it is not impossible that peasants recorded their reflections earlier as well. The genre flourished in the post-war years, when organisers of numerous competitions encouraged the villagers to write their autobiographies, and lasted essentially until the late 1970s. The source material makes it possible to study the transformations that the texts themselves underwent over the period of a century, as well as the way their authors perceived reality and their own place in it.

Researchers of autobiographical records point to the formation of the beginnings of an individualistic attitude as a prerequisite for a person taking the trouble to record the events of their own life. Peasant diaries make it possible to trace the dynamics of changes in peasant consciousness: from a traditional society based on oral transmission to a (proto-)modern one, rooted in the culture of writing (print). The author poses the hypothesis that the origins of peasant diarism should be sought in oral folklore, as indicated by the formal similarity of the first records of this type to traditional folklore genres. Over time, however, diarism breaks away from its roots, turning into an expression of the authors’ individual traits and thus coming closer to literature.