Akaki Tsereteli State University
Associate Professor
Philology
Doctor of Philological Sciences
Kutaisi, Georgia
zeikik@yahoo.com
Abstract
The Literary Representation of Caucasian Conflicts in the Diary Genre In the post-Soviet period, the Caucasus region became the site of numerous military conflicts. The wars in Abkhazia and Chechnya, along with ethnic and political confrontations, significantly shaped the social and cultural memory of the region. These experiences found particularly intense expression in texts created in the form of personal narratives, where historical events are represented through individual perception and the perspective of eyewitnesses. In this regard, the diary emerges as a specific literary form for representing wartime experiences, combining documentary authenticity, emotional immediacy, and self-reflective narration. Diaries written during wartime often function not only as a means of expressing personal emotions, but also as a form of processing traumatic reality. In this context, personal writing assumes a dual function: on the one hand, it serves as a space for individual self-expression, and on the other, as a documentary source of historical experience. Using comparative and narratological methods, the present paper analyzes documentary-epic and literary texts, including the Chechen war diaries of Polina Zherebtsova, Milana Terloeva’s autobiographical work Dancing on the Ruins, the diary of an unknown Abkhazian girl, and Tamta Melashvili’s novella Counting Out. All the analyzed texts are united by the homodiegetic specificity of narration, in which the narrator is simultaneously a participant in and eyewitness to the events of war. The tragedy of the Chechen war is vividly reflected in Polina Zherebtsova’s diaries. Her writings depict everyday life amid bombings, hunger, and constant danger in a multiethnic city where people of different nationalities share the same tragedy. A similar experience appears from a different perspective in Milana Terloeva’s autobiographical narrative. Her text is more reflective in nature, as the author revisits the traumatic experiences of her youth through memory. Both texts represent two distinct temporal modes of recording war experience — the diary and the memoir. The diary of the unknown Abkhazian girl was also written directly during the conflict, and its author ultimately became a victim of the war. These personal notes construct an image of war that often remains beyond the scope of official historical documents. The text particularly highlights the reaction of a young woman to the tragedy of war and demonstrates how the existential perception of an adolescent consciousness is formed under conditions of conflict. Tamta Melashvili’s text conveys, in the form of literary narrative, the same reality that is directly documented in diaries through personal experience. Despite the generic differences, the work clearly demonstrates the impact of war on the psychological condition and worldview of young characters. The thematic and narrative similarities among the analyzed texts are revealed in the fragmentation of traumatic memory, the normalization of violence as part of everyday life, the experience of displacement, female vulnerability, and the crisis of identity under wartime conditions. Despite differing national and cultural-political contexts, the texts reveal similar narrative models that present the horrors of war not merely as statistics, but through a universal human prism. The trauma of war, the disruption of daily life, and the uncertainty of the future ultimately form a shared and painful cultural experience within the Caucasian space.
Keywords: Caucasian conflicts; diary genre; homodiegetic narration.