Presentation of the book “We lived in the days of struggle”

On July 1, 2020, the presentation of the book “We lived in the days of struggle” was held in the form of video conference. The book is composed of the war diaries of writers Mikola Loban, Anton Aleshko, Pyotr Volkodayev and Vissarion Gorbuk and was prepared for publication by the Belarusian State Archives-Museum of Literature and Art (BGAMLI).

Anna Zapartyko, the compiler of the book, author of the preface, introductory articles and comments, told about the fate of each of the writers and the place of war in his biography, as well as about the phenomenon of the war diary: as it is known, making personal notes in the war conditions was very problematic, so each of these diaries in itself is an extremely unique document. Then, with congratulatory words and discussions about the place of war diaries in historical and archival research spoke the director of the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Belarus Victor Kourash, the director of the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus Andrei Demyanyuk, candidates of historical sciences Svyatoslav Kulinok and Mikhail Shumeyko.

In particular, S. Kulinok noted that P. Volkodayev’s diary records contain information that is not available in the well-known works on the history of the Partisan movement; the diaries being valuable both for historians and philologists as they can be studied, for example, in the context of the war prose of these writers.

The colleagues from the State Museum of the History of Belarusian Literature, whose collections also contain many papers and personal items of front-line writers, congratulated BGAMLI employees on the release of the book.