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Abstract

This text serves as a short introduction to the journal section “Personal Diaries and the Varieties of the Soviet Self”. The introduction briefy discusses how the study of diaries developed in European humanities of the 20th century, and how, at various times, this type of study placed emphasis on historical, literary and anthropological methods. We show that the diaries analyzed by this section's authors are a new type of sources that was not taken into account during the previous stage of discussions regarding the “Soviet self”.