Psychological dimension of modern Ukrainian military diaries

Abstract

Introduction. Invaluable from the point of view of personal military experience, comprehension of the phenomenon of war by the participants themselves is documentary literature, such as the texts of G. Kharchenko «Diary of an Artilleryman», R. Zinenko «Illovaysk Diary», V. Chernienko «Diary of a Military Doctor», etc., the last one was the most emotionally expressive.
Relevance and purpose of the study. Undoubtedly, war literature, documentary, journalism are now being actively studied in scientific circles from the standpoint of chronicles of events, interest in the author’s personality, his reactions to events, in general, understanding the phenomenon of war between the «fraternal peoples». Our attention is drawn to the axiological and psychological aspects of the study of the documentary text about the war, hence the purpose: to identify the emotional component in such diaries, to classify emotions, emotional states of the author, characters and reader, to determine their correlation with the subjective psychotype of the author, as well as to describe the ways of representing emotionality in the text.
Research methods. The study of emotions and emotional states, their allocation in the diaries was carried out on the basis of the content analysis of the text, the allocation of emotions and emotional states named by the author, the use of general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison, as well as the structural method to highlight the emergence of psychological states and emotions, their stages of formation, influence on the features of the narration in the diary etc.

Conclusions. The genre of the diary allows illustrating self-reflection and specifically reflect personal emotions, the author to be as frank as possible with himself (in the studied test also through confession and sleep), and at the same time show an emotional slice of the social experience of war related to professional and civic duties. The analyzed diary shows that in the course of acquiring their own experience of war, the participant/witness experiences the entire emotional paradigm of both primary (anger, disgust, despair, fear, distress, guilt, interest, joy, love, surprise) and secondary emotions, and secondary emotions (emotions in the course of human socialization), named and unnamed, dominant explicated binary emotions (interest-excitement, disgust-aversion-rejection, alertness-expectation-interest), etc.Existential states reflected in the diary, firstly, reflect the emotional image of the author as fully as possible, demonstrate the highest degree of emotionality of the author’s «I»; and secondly, help reflect also the processes of auto-communication and overcoming the distance in communication with the reader, have a powerful influential potential through frankness, openness. The text highlights flashbacks and triggers, which are often a trigger or a certain stage in the experience of emotions and emotional states. In order to avoid psychological trauma, addiction to the psychological state of shock, the author sublimates in the diary, in particular, in the experiences of positive emotions of childhood, love for his father, beauty, admiration for a little girl and dreams of his own children, and therefore – hope for salvation, survival. The emotions and emotional states highlighted in the diary clearly demonstrate the motivation of the activities of servicemen and ordinary Ukrainians in the occupied territories in extreme conditions, as well as have an informational and psychological impact on mass communication in Ukrainian society.