Diary

The diary is a documentary-artistic genre, a form of keeping dated first-person records of events, thoughts, and experiences made directly in the course of life, without temporal distance. Unlike the memoir, the diary records impressions 'here and now', and is therefore distinguished by a special sincerity, fragmentariness, and psychological authenticity. A diary may be a purely private document or a consciously artistic work. World examples are The Diary of Anne Frank and the diaries of Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. In Ukrainian literature an outstanding phenomenon is Oleksandr Dovzhenko's Diary — a deeply personal and at the same time sharp chronicle of the era, full of pain for the fate of Ukraine under totalitarian pressure. The diary form was also used by Taras Shevchenko (his Journal from the period of exile) and Volodymyr Vynnychenko.