The Diary of Galicia-Dweller Stepan F. Lagno as an Object of Historical and Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

Ego-documents (such as diaries, private correspondence, postcards, and photos) created by ordinary people attract a high amount of researchers’ attention. Egodocuments, especially those that have arisen in linguistic and cultural borderlands, provide information for studying the dialect and contactological features of idiomatic, ethnographic and, more broadly, anthropological phenomena, as well as valuable data on the history of the region. This paper presents the diary of Stepan F. Lagno, a dweller of the Ternopil region of Ukraine, which was written in 1985–1986 in the Ukrainian language, so the text is published with a translation into Russian along with comments. The paper contains a description of the historical source, a brief biographical note about the author, and a linguistic description of the diary's dialect features (dialects in the territory of Galicia). The published diary is a unique example of naïve literature in Slavic studies. The document contains daily records concerning the economic and household activities of a western Ukrainian peasant that will be interesting for ethnologists, anthropologists, and historians.