How a Young Sylvia Plath Found Her Literary Voice Through Diary Keeping

From lithub.com

Carl Rollyson on the Teenage Years of One of America's Most Famous Female Poets

For two weeks in July 1944, Sylvia Plath attended Camp Helen Storrow at Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, averaging a letter a day to her mother, reporting on her swimming and hiking and her enjoyment of arts and crafts and of shows, masquerading with charcoal on her face as a “pickaninnny.” The world was white, although for purposes of play you could be Black. Nowhere in Plath’s comments on people she called Negroes is there evidence of any significant engagement with racial issues, or even much empathy for Black victims of discrimination. She grew up in the era of civil rights protests (for example, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1956) but showed no interest in the marches for equal treatment under the law. She read newspapers but did not comment on the plight of minorities (except for Jews). She lived in a white World.

Near the ocean, the all-white camp revived her memories of an early childhood by the sea. She made a ninety-page book listing her favourite actresses (Shirley Temple, Margaret O’Brien, and Elizabeth Taylor), her schedule at camp, the enormous quantities of food she consumed, the length of her walks, and other camp activities.

At an early age, Plath realized you could incorporate yourself in a medium.

Sylvia’s diaries, meticulously kept for almost every day from 1944 to 1949, reflect her early realization that you could broadcast your own life, as Jack Benny did on his radio show (another of her favourites). The show dispensed a running commentary on his funny failings, his desire to get ahead, and his preening, and had a cast—including Rochester, the faithful, if not uncritical African American factotum—that became Benny’s retinue, commenting on his every mercenary move.

Later, in London, in the last years of her life, Plath would speak of a desire to create a salon of writers, a following that would situate her at the centre of literary life. At an early age, Plath realized you could incorporate yourself in a medium. You could reach out to the public and command a hearing. She would later exploit this medium in her appearances on BBC radio. Her best poetry, she would come to realize, should be spoken aloud, perfected in a voice that she worked on, transforming a regional New England accent into a broader Anglo-American style of speaking that reflected her transcontinental ambitions.

These early diaries show a sensibility already well formed and with a presentiment of destiny, which she defined in her diaries by setting down certain markers:

January 20, 1944: Today is the biggest day of my life. I had a dreamless sleep and woke as fresh as dew on spring buttercups. All day I was in another world, far better than this. I took the bus to Boston with mother and Warrie to see Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” at the Colonial Theatre. It was too perfect for words. I am keeping the program as a souvenir. We took the train to Wellesley and there were no separate seats. I sat next to a young sensitive boy from the navy. He had blond wavy hair and blue eyes. In all my life I will never love anyone as I did him. Our talk was of travels, life, Shakespeare.

Later, her marriage to Ted Hughes would seem impulsive and hasty, but in fact she had been looking for just such a man almost as soon as she could write. She had a sense of the transcendent, of how art can supersede all else, before she turned twelve.

Wayne Sterling remembered that sometime in 1944, when Sylvia was twelve, she initiated a conversation about what it was like to be Jewish. She had no contact with Jews in Winthrop or Wellesley, so Wayne couldn’t say what prompted her interest. Her diary entry for January 15 mentioned “trying to make a crazy statue of Hitler in the snow with no success.” Perhaps that swastika on the flagpole in Winthrop had caught her attention. Her diary entry for November 25, 1945, recounted a “very interesting” Sunday School talk by a Jewish girl about Jewish customs and beliefs. “She promised to take us to a Jewish Synagogue in the future. I had a beautiful time listening to her.” On January 25, 1946, a neighbor, Mr. Norton, took her to the Temple of Israel in Boston. The light in the shape of the Star of David entranced her, as did the impressive white marble pulpit and the Torah in the ark. She listened to a rabbi explaining Judaism. She was impressed. “I had a beautiful time,” she confided to her diary. She drew a kiddish cup, challah, and a Star of David.

School assignments like a “problem paper” on “Roman People’s Places, and Things” and the work for her Scout “World Knowledge Badge” meant that as she entered adolescence Sylvia Plath was already attuned to the history and geography that propelled her later work. By the age of twelve, Plath’s school curriculum included a social studies class that covered, for example, units on the Albany Plan of Union (an early effort to unite the American colonies in a common defense) and General Braddock’s North America campaign against the French during the Seven Years War. She drew several maps of the United States and mapped out important historical events like the Louisiana Purchase and the issuance of the Monroe Doctrine.

At twelve, Sylvia measured five feet three and one-half inches, weighed about ninety-five pounds, and was athletic, participating in volleyball, baseball, field hockey, and basketball, where she played the position of guard. She collected stamps from all over the world and exulted in a trip to  to purchase a stamp album at the Harris Stamp Company. She tended her own garden and marvelled how in the spring it looked “lovely as it is full of sprouting green leaves and sweet smelling, fresh overturned earth.” She watched birds. “I saw the most beautiful bird today,” she wrote in her diary. “It was a little smaller than a robin and had the most beautiful blue plumage and red breast. I found out later that it was a bluebird and the first I have seen this spring.”

On March 27, 1945, her class visited the Christian Science Monitor building where she saw the printing room and watched how the newspaper was cut and printed, an excursion she meticulously documented in her diary entry about a “magic afternoon.” Some of her first articles would be published in the Monitor. Her own diaries, profusely illustrated—sometimes in color—suggest the importance of book making to her. In the eighth grade, on the staff of her school publication, The Phillipian, she was determined to put out a “super magazine.”

*

The war was an ever-present part of young Sylvia’s life. She played a game called “Russia” about the German invasion of the Soviet Union. On April 11, 1945, she mentioned she was put in charge of Defense Stamps at school. The next day she recorded her shock: “ROOSEVELT DIES!,” adding: “He died, like Lincoln, soon—very soon before the peace treaty and end of a long, cruel war!” On August 8, 1945, Sylvia wrote in her diary: “Atom bomb!” She read that 60 percent of Hiroshima had been destroyed, but made no comment other than to report President Truman’s statement that nuclear energy could be used for both destructive and constructive purposes.

On August 14, at 7:00 p.m., Sylvia heard on the radio the “official word…that Pres. Truman has received the note from Japan saying ‘We surrender unconditionally.’ The end of World War II!!!!!! How the people shouted! How the whistles blew. At night we set off firecrackers and rockets. We all thank God for answering our prayers.” The war penetrated her consciousness in other ways too. DPs, as displaced persons were then called, appear in a diary entry describing how she joined a group of girls dressed in “old rags” who “went to one house to pretend we were refugees, but, fortunately, (for us, probably), no one was home.” Does it make too much of this early effort to say she was already impersonating the persecuted, even if others would be offended and would call a poem like “Daddy” a despicable act of appropriation?

Sylvia read widely in teen and young adult novels that exposed her to many different cultures and to European and world history. On September 23, 1945, she mentions finishing A Sea between Us, reviewed in Commentary. This novel, by Lavinia R. Davis, struck close to home: “The heroine encounters the dragon of anti-Semitic prejudice early in the story during a visit to her fiancé’s family in a locality resembling Cape Cod.” The reviewer concluded: “For the problem of anti-Semitic prejudice, long underground in American life, to have forced its way through the pasteboard walls of a story for girls probably indicates that its pros and cons are more largely discussed today than many of us realize. It is comforting to learn even from a young ladies’ handbook that our society’s mores still denounce discrimination against Jews as unfair and undemocratic.”

*

Wayne Sterling remembered a bike ride in which he discussed with Sylvia the suicide of a Wellesley student who had hung himself from a tree. Sylvia seemed mainly concerned with what it would be like to be “almost dead”—a curious phrase that calls to mind her later interest in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Man Who Died,” about a resurrected Christ-like figure, and also, of course, her own “Lady Lazarus,” which suggests the speaker has a gift for coming back from the dead. Was Plath, with the early death of her father, already drawn to near-death experiences and beginning to think of life as a series of resurrections? This is the premise of Connie Palmen’s biographical novel about Plath and Hughes, Your Story, My Story.

Plath’s early diaries (1944–1947), studded with exclamation marks in many entries, and her letters and postcards from camp to her mother and Warren express an exuberant personality, eager to share her adventures and pleasures with her family. Warren and Aurelia reciprocated and Sylvia rejoiced in their “fat” and “meaty” letters that other campers envied. She made going to camp seem like a family enterprise, and that dynastic delight carries through right to her final days in England, when she wrote home wishing that newly married Warren or his wife could join her.

Her desire to assemble a salon, a group of likeminded souls, is reminiscent of her days at camp when she celebrated in letters and diaries the new friends that formed a circle around her. She began diary entries “Dear Diary,” as if addressing an alter ego and putting her life in order. “Dear Diary—you’re one of the ‘musts’ for peace of mind,” she wrote on October 11, 1945. Sometimes she wrote as if addressing a future self: On April 29, 1946, she announced: “Today the most wonderful thing happened!” She had sent in a “picturesque speech” to The Reader’s Digest: “A milkweed parachute hitchhikes on a passing breeze.” To her diary, she confessed “It may sound amateurish to you later, but to me it sounded pretty good.”

Entering her teens, diary entries no longer are studded with quite as many exclamation marks. She was developing a remarkable vocabulary, composing a poem, “A Winter Sunset,” that describes a sky of “copen shades.” Ice on the trees shimmers like diamonds. Teachers noticed her talent. Mrs. Warren told her she had a “flair” for English. “She firmly believes I have a talent for oral talks,” Sylvia recorded in her diary for February 12, 1946. A month later, Mrs. Warren took her aside and told her any professor would regard her work highly and she could apply to college as a scholarship student. But like most students, she tired of the school regimen: “Ugh! I am getting very eager for vacation,” she confided to her diary on March 25.

Was Plath, with the early death of her father, already drawn to near-death experiences and beginning to think of life as a series of resurrections?

Some days were just ecstatic. Coasting with Warren on the playground: “We had a super time. The hill rose shining, white and vacant. We flew down and the stinging wind brought tears to our eyes. It was glorious!” She drew a picture and wrote: “I’ll never forget the feeling of those silver runners slashing through the crusty snow!” These early revelries in snow would in just a few years dissolve into the symbolism of a numbing snow/cold that would haunt her later letters and depressions. In “Tulips at Dawn,” a poem written on the cusp of 1947/48, she speaks of plunging into the “depths of austere whiteness,” and of “white flashes of cold” lancing her wings, a “captive / Of white worlds.”

Sylvia liked to write about cooking in Food class—quite a variety of desserts, sandwiches, and main dishes—not to mention making her favorite molasses cookies at home (“yum yum”). She also took up knitting. On January 28, 1946, she recorded a visit to an Observatory: “I will never forget my first view of Saturn through the telescope! I expected a little point of light and gasped as I saw the three rings of moonlets whirling about the silvery planet.” Like other bright young girls of her generation such as Susan Sontag, Plath enthused over Richard Halliburton’s travel books: The Royal Road to Romance, The Flying Carpet, The Glorious Adventure, and New Worlds to Conquer. “They’re full of lovely expressions and descriptions,” she wrote to a friend. When a schoolmate lent her Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels with a picture of him on the back, she confessed: “I am in love with him. I feel as though I understand him. (Being on his fourth book.)”

But another kind of adventure also appealed to her. On April 8, 1946, she had her first dream about the “lives and works” of American artists. Her imagination took another turn with mystery-horror stories like “The Mummy’s Tomb,” which began: “[A] gloomy atmosphere of foreboding pervaded the chill air.” She added a sentence to her friend Margot’s horror story: “The delicious smell of frying flesh reached my nostrils.” She hoped that after camp was over, she could spend part of the summer with Margot: “Can’t you just see us lying on soft pine needles,” she wrote to a friend who also wrote stories, “and writing best-sellers in the quiet serenity of the woods?”

But it wasn’t ever just a make-believe world for her: In a Memorial Day school assembly (May 29, 1946), a soldier spoke about “incidents of war and victory overseas, not forgetting to mention the long rows of white crosses filling the many green clearings holding the American and allied dead. It was really quite sad. Oh! but I do hope that there will be no more wars”—a sentiment she expressed many times in her diaries, and a few years later in an antiwar poem, “Seek No More the Young,” inspired by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, depicting the “iron men” who fall limp on “spattered stone” with “eyes glazed blind.” She felt “very strongly about the subject of world peace,” she asserted in an April 2, 1947, diary entry: “I felt as if I had suddenly come into contact with the turbulent political world outside when Carrie showed us the paper, among those distributed by the Socialist party…I was gripped by a cold, tense excitement that made me and my ideas an important part of the chaos in the world today.”

With only the chirping of purple grackles, and the sight of her Grampy’s “cheery pile” of “treasured compost,” she wondered how “murder and ugly quarrels” could go on in such a “beautiful world.” But then a fire engine came “screeching around the corner.” She would remain the same, more than a decade later, cultivating her own garden in her Court Green country home retreat, thrusting her hands in the soil while worrying about the strontium 90 radioactive fallout in mother’s milk.

Excerpted from The Making of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson, Copyright © 2024 by Carl Rollyson. Published by University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved.

https://lithub.com/how-a-young-sylvia-plath-found-her-literary-voice-through-diary-keeping/ 

Elizabeth II’s final diary entry revealed

From telegraph.co.uk/royal-family

Late Queen’s last words in journal, two days before her death, were typically ‘factual and practical’

Queen Elizabeth II kept a diary throughout her reign but said she had time only to record events Credit: Jane Barlow/PA

Elizabeth II was still keeping a private diary until two days before her death, with a “factual and practical” final entry, a biographer has found.

The late Queen, who died on Sept 8 2022 at the age of 96, recorded that “Edward came to see me”, in reference to Sir Edward Young, her private secretary, and made notes about the swearing-in of new Privy Council members.

She made the entry at Balmoral, where she held a final audience with Liz Truss, who was then prime minister, before she “slipped away” in her sleep two days later, said Robert Hardman, the royal biographer.

Hardman, who discovered the diary while researching updated chapters for his book about the King, said that the monarch was now following in his mother’s footsteps by keeping a factual diary.

The late Queen’s journal was famously a record of her activities, rather than laying out her thoughts and feelings. It was intended to jog her memory and keep a note of her working life for the archives.

Prince Charles, pictured at Highgrove in 1986, kept a more reflective diary before becoming King Credit: Tim Graham/Getty

She once told Kenneth Rose, the society diarist: “I have no time to record conversations, only events.”

“It transpires that she was still writing it at Balmoral two days before her death,” Hardman wrote in his new book. “Her last entry was as factual and practical as ever.

“It could have been describing another normal working day starting in the usual way – ‘Edward came to see me’ – as she noted the arrangements which her private secretary, Sir Edward Young, had made for the swearing-in of the new ministers of the Truss administration.”

Since becoming monarch, the book states, the King has followed his mother’s policy of not giving interviews and of keeping a practical diary.

“He doesn’t write great narrative diaries like he used to,” a senior courtier discloses, but “scribbles down his recollections and reflections” on the events of the day.

The new style, Hardman said, is “not quite as self-analytical, humorous and readable as the journal he kept as a prince”.

Some of those entries have already been read by the public, with an extract of his frank thoughts on the handover of Hong Kong leaked to a newspaper in 2006.

King’s cancer diagnosis

The new edition of the book also relays how Buckingham Palace reacted to the King’s cancer diagnosis earlier this year, suggesting aides were not so alarmed by the prognosis that they moved to update funeral plans.

“Eyes are firmly on the present,” Hardman writes. “Though all royal funeral arrangements have always been routinely reviewed (by military and government planners) as a matter of course, it is both significant and reassuring to learn that there was no call to the master of such ceremonies, the Earl Marshal, at any stage during the dark days of early 2024.

“The King’s own valedictory arrangements have now, officially, been upgraded to Operation London Bridge, mirroring those of Elizabeth II.”

The new Prince of Wales has taken on the code name “Menai Bridge” from his father, replacing his previous Operation Clare Bridge, after the crossing over the River Cam, during his time as Duke of Cambridge.

On the future of the King’s beloved home of Highgrove, where he spent much of his time recuperating from cancer, one “close ally” of the King suggested it would make an ideal “Museum of King Charles III” in years to come.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2024/11/07/queen-elizabeth-iis-final-diary-entry-revealed/ 

On Being a Writer in Wales: John Osmond

From nation.cymru

John Osmond

If I were to offer one piece of advice to an aspiring young writer it would be simply this: Keep a diary!

I’m about midway through the second volume of a documentary novel about the period between the 1970s and 1990s, trying to explain how the overwhelming defeat in the 1979 referendum turned into the Yes vote that established the National Assembly in 1997, less than twenty years later.

If I had kept a diary during that period my task would be a lot easier.

As it is I’m having to rely a good deal on memory which is notoriously unreliable. For instance, if you were around do you remember what you were doing during March 1984? That’s an especially important moment for my purposes since it was the month that the Miners’ Strike began.

Defeat

In searching for reasons that explain what happened between the two referendums I’m convinced that the Miners’ Strike played a critical part. It was, of course, another defeat.

But in Wales the defeat was experienced very differently to the way it occurred in England and Scotland. But more than that, I believe it shifted attitudes fundamentally.

To begin with there was strong opposition at most of the Welsh pitheads in a show of hands, and with good reason. Striking in the Spring with summer ahead and coal stocks piled high was, to say the least, an inopportune moment.

More fundamentally, a year earlier when all 31 pits across south Wales had struck to defend threatened Lewis Merthyr in the Rhondda, there had been no solidarity from the richer English coalfields which voted against support.

Militant

Yet when the strike was fully underway, the Welsh coalfield proved the most militant, sending pickets in military-style operations across Britain. Moreover, miners in Wales remained solid when elsewhere across Britain they drifted back to work.

And then, in early 1985, when the strike became untenable, it was the Welsh miners who put the survival of their union first, and led an orderly return to work.

In all of this the Welsh miners acted in unison, but at the end found themselves abandoned as mass closures ensued.

It was a bitter lesson. When it comes to the crunch we only have ourselves to rely on.

For me the sentiment was summed up by a miner at Cwm Colliery, near Llantrisant some four miles south of Pontypridd. At the time I was working with HTV’s Wales This Week current affairs programme which followed the fortunes of Cwm during the strike. When it was over one of the miners we featured told us he had started learning Welsh. Asked why he said, ‘The language is all we have left.’

Resonant

His response stayed with me as resonant of the strike’s impact, not only on the mining communities directly engaged, but on Wales as a whole. If I had kept a diary I would surely have recorded this, and my feelings about it. I recall sensing in a somewhat inchoate way that the strike was a momentous episode. But, of course, living in the moment you have no idea of what is to come and how a train of events links the past and present to the future.

Delving into memoirs and archives forty years later, one is left grasping at fragments to support the conviction that the strike was indeed a turning point, the hinge on which history turned in favour of devolution.

Hywel Francis, who chaired the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities in 1984-85, certainly thought so and makes the point in his account of the strike, History on our Side. But again his perspective is one of hindsight. Hywel died in 2021 so it is too late to explore his understanding in greater depth. If only I had kept that diary.

I did keep one much later for two short periods. The first was during 2006 in the period leading to the 2007 Assembly election. A small group of us in Plaid Cymru came together to propagate the argument that we should accept the need for cross-party collaboration if Labour’s seemingly perpetual dominance of Welsh politics was to end. If Welsh democracy was to be meaningful the electorate had to be presented with a realistic prospect of an alternative government.

It was, of course, controversial since it meant Plaid being willing to enter a coalition with the Welsh Conservatives, albeit that in those days they were a much more Welsh-aligned breed. And, for a fleeting moment in the wake of the 2007 Assembly election, it did seem that the so-called Rainbow Alliance between Plaid, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats might be possible.

In fact, a first edition of the London Times announced that Plaid’s Ieuan Wyn Jones was to be the new First Minister of Wales. In the event he turned out to be Deputy First Minister to Rhodri Morgan in a coalition with Labour.

                                                                                                                                                            John Osmond

Strategic

The second period when I began keeping a diary was in October 2018. I had just completed the first volume of my novel, Ten Million Stars are Burning, which took my story to 1979 when, totally unexpectedly, Adam Price asked me to become his Special Adviser following his election as leader of Plaid Cymru. I became immersed in a project Adam had to hand.

He convinced me that, given a fair wind and some strategic vision there was a chance that Plaid could lead a government following the 2021 Senedd election. This seemed important to inject a new energy into Welsh democracy, and was enough to entice me away from my novel.

The diary covers the six-month period of what Adam Price called our first hundred days. As they reached their end, it looked for a dizzying moment as if we were indeed on course to achieve our objective of leading a minority government. Adam’s leadership was established, and the party was doing well in the opinion polls, well enough it seemed to reach our goal.

Then the diary stops. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that subconsciously I realised that if it continued, I would be recording something completely different to the project we had started upon so optimistically six months earlier. Most immediately was the fall-out from Brexit, a maelstrom and calamity that sucked the lifeblood from forward planning.

Scarcely had that been settled, at least for the time being by the December 2019 ‘Get Brexit Done’ election, when we were overtaken by the Covid 19 pandemic. This was a further calamitous event, overwhelming in its impact. The combined effect was to throw the idea of a Plaid-led minority government completely off course. Somehow, we had to find an alternative, more realisable objective. Following the year-long production of our manifesto for the May 2021 Senedd election, this became the Co-operation Agreement.

This diary is a core component of my new book The Politics of Co-Opposition: The Inside Story of the 2021-24 Co-Operation Agreement Between Plaid Cymru and Welsh Labour.

Beguiling

In its own way the Agreement turned out be as a beguiling project as a Plaid-led Government might have been. Certainly, it introduced a completely new form of political engagement in the British Isles, in which opposing politicians co-operate on mutually agreed policies while maintaining their positions as government and opposition. Termed by academics ‘Contract Parliamentarianism’, it drew on precedents in Sweden, New Zealand and Malaysia.

It resulted in significant measures being introduced across 46 policy areas. These included free school meals for all primary school pupils, expanding free childcare to all two-year-olds, action on the second homes crisis blighting rural Wales, and reforming the Senedd.

The latter involved an increase in its Members from 60 to 96 and a fully proportional electoral system which will be used in the 2026 Senedd election. I’m not sure how much of this might have been achieved by a Plaid minority government, with an angry Labour Opposition resisting every move. Certainly, Senedd reform – which required a two-thirds majority – would have been off limits.

Looking back the episode fully justifies that brief period following October 2018 when I kept a diary, which gives an insight into the circumstances which persuaded Plaid’s leadership that they needed a new trajectory to take Wales forward. It’s also confirmation, to me at least, that I should have kept a diary for much longer, in fact for the whole of my working life.

The Politics of Opposition is published by the Welsh Academic Press.

It is being launched at a Wales Governance Centre event at the Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University, Cathays Park, Cardiff, at 6pm for 6.30pm on Wednesday 6 November 2024, in which John Osmond will be in conversation with Professor Richard Wyn Jones, Director of the Wales Governance Centre. Free tickets to attend the event are available here.

https://nation.cymru/culture/on-being-a-writer-in-wales-john-osmond/ 

Dear diary … my heart hurts at how time passes

From varsity.co.uk

Bex Goodchild rereads her teenage diary and laments on time lost, and memories saved 

Sometimes, at the most inconvenient of times, I rediscover my old diary and spend hours flicking through the pages. If I told you that I started it in year 9 and finished it after my A-Levels, you’d probably be pretty impressed with my level of commitment. What I’d most definitely leave out of that conversation is how wildly inconsistent those diary entries were. With the majority of pages beginning with some variation on “So, It’s been a while”, my life between the ages of fourteen and eighteen fits into one singular notebook. Give me some credit, though – I tried! Did you even keep a diary? Yeah, thought so. Let’s keep this a judgment-free zone.

From crushes to friendships to a lovely to-scale drawing of my retainer, it’s not the most thrilling of reads. I find myself fighting the urge to curl up into a ball and grit my teeth as I read a particularly cringe-worthy extract. If you think I’m being dramatic, try reading this genuine defence of one of my Year 9 crushes: “he doesn’t make racist or offensive jokes and is quite decent I think”. The bar was so low. So why, if I have such an extreme reaction to my diary’s content, do I read it more often than my lecture notes?

Typically a diary is a ‘for my eyes only’ situation, but I distinctly remember writing my diary for others to eventually read. Perhaps I didn’t trust the notebook’s flimsy lock, or maybe it was a plea for attention or possibly I had a premonition that I would one day be sharing it with Varsity … regardless, there is a distinctive lack of deep dark secrets (not that I had any), a multitude of compliments to various friends and family and a sprinkling of self-depreciation.

                                              I guess I’m a bit obsessed with my past. Does that make me a narcissist?                                                                                 Laura Forwood for Varsity

Would I have been embarrassed if my dairy had been shared around the school? Most definitely. Would I have secretly hoped such an event would place me right in the centre of a real-life teen rom-com? Duh! At the time, subconsciously writing for an audience meant making a cooler, more interesting version of my life. Reading it in 2024, all attempts at ‘cooler’ and ‘more interesting’ are exactly what makes my toes curl. While I can’t escape how absolutely mortifying it is, my daily musings are undeniably hilarious to look back on.

Take my irrational, and completely absurd, fear of height-involved games and icebreakers: “We had to line up in height order (worst thing ever) so it was really awkward. I was not with my friends as they are all average height”. Though I’m proud to say both my height and confidence have grown, I still take myself by surprise: “So I had school again. This morning I actually got up on time!”. I will always be a sleepy girl.

What I’ve left out of these quotes is how horrendous my spelling was at the ripe age of fourteen. Some of my favourites include my “chrush” who “smieles” at me and my “orphodontist opiontment” where I “reilised” I needed braces. I like to think my spelling has somewhat improved, though autocorrect has lent a hand.

I think the main reason I find myself reaching for the diary is nostalgia. There is something so fascinating about reconnecting with a different version of myself. I guess I’m a bit obsessed with my past. Does that make me a narcissist? Potentially, though I’d prefer to brand myself as a memory hoarder. I’m not particularly precious about objects but I have an enormous collection of pictures, videos and diary-esque writings – you should see my Snapchat memories. Change, while constant and necessary, will always be bittersweet. Once a moment is over, we no longer own it. It’s the classic ‘sad that it’s over, happy that it happened’ spiel. I’m sure everyone has experienced those moments of introspection: standing with a group of friends, singing your heart out at a concert, sitting alone watching the stars. It’s your own movie moment where you remember this is happening right now and soon it won’t be. It’s not sad, really – I find it quite peaceful. One of my last diary entries (written in the middle of the night after finishing the series 2125 – if you know, you know) sums this up:

“I am truly beginning to feel what bittersweet is. That moment where something ends. You are glad it has happened but sad you are leaving it behind. The moments where you reflect on the past while looking to the future and being within the present. Bittersweet is beautiful and I crave it and hate it. It is heartbreaking but comforting. It hurts and you smile. It is very human and I like it. My heart hurts to think about how time is passing. The moments that feel like they will last forever will move on. It is running away from us and becomes only a memory before we even realise. Some we hold on to and treasure and some are lost but I think they must all stay within us somewhere.”

Clearly, a midnight poet in the making. The early morning hours always reveal the pretentious parts of my personality. You just know I spelt ‘smile’ and ‘realise’ wrong too …

https://www.varsity.co.uk/lifestyle/28154

Diaries and Loneliness

 By Tim Holman (Originally published in March 2020)

Can loneliness be the real reason why someone keeps a diary?

Usually - no, or not very likely. But for someone who has difficulties with personal relationships, or a sadness that they don't wish to share, then putting their feelings into writing can ease the pain whilst telling their true story.

The more detailed the diary, the greater the sense of hurt behind it. Perhaps.

This thought occurred to me recently when watching a documentary about the late comedian Kenneth Williams, who died in 1988. He kept a diary for over 40 years; after his death this was superbly edited by Russell Davies and published. Its tone was often bitter and immensely self-critical, in stark contrast to Williams's public persona when he was alive.

The diary's true story is Williams's inability to come to terms with his homosexuality. Throughout his life he shunned intimacy and any form of close relationships, and the diary became his confidant. Davies expressed the view that "..Diaries are fundamentally about loneliness... It's having some sort of echo in your head of a voice which otherwise would have been someone else's voice..."

In other words, without a companion to say, "How was your day? How are you?" and so on, Williams had those conversations in writing, in private, in his diary.

This argument can be carried only so far. It implies that if a person is happy, there is no need to keep a diary at all. There have been, and still are, plenty of cheerful souls in the world who keep writing. Perhaps most famously, Samuel Pepys's epic work revels in food, drink, money and illicit sexual encounters. Not only that, but his word count probably exceeds that of Williams.

For myself, I don't recall ever being massively lonely, but during my late teens and early 20s I certainly wrote a very full diary. I have always tended to be a bit of a 'lone wolf' and live slightly adrift from the mainstream. Perhaps this explains the compulsion to write during my younger days (and again now, perhaps surprisingly).

Kenneth Williams's situation was rare, possibly unique, so with loneliness and diary-writing one doesn't necessarily follow the other. Still, it's food for thought.

PAPER QUIPS: Benefits of keeping a journal

From 100milefreepress.net/opinion

100 Mile Free Press editor Patrick Davies reflects on the value of journaling 

For the last year or so now I've been thinking about starting to keep a regular journal. 

As a writer and a journalist, I spend the vast majority of my time writing in some form or another. Whether or not I'm writing up a story on a local artist or editing one of my reporter Misha's stories, I'm always working with words. It's both my passion and profession.

That's why I think playing video games and painting models have become my hobbies in recent years. Much as I do love what I do, variety is the spice of life. Spending my workday writing and then doing creative writing in the evening can be draining, which is why up until now I've never really kept any form of journal. 

However, that's not always been the case. 

When I went on vacation to Southeast Asia in 2015 and Cuba in 2016, I kept journals. At the time I was just starting to think about becoming a reporter and I felt a desire to document this time so I would remember it for years to come.

With a simple pen and notebook, I took notes about what we did, how I felt and my thoughts on the trip. Just this past week, for the first time in years, I decided to read them again. 

I was struck by a few things. First off, my rather loose grasp of grammar and proper spelling. Now while I don't claim to be perfect now, I cringed a little bit at my improper use of there, their and they're, missing words and in general and my seeming love for run-on sentences. It showed how much I've grown as a writer and matured as an individual. 

A journal kept my 100 Mile Free Press editor Patrick Davies in 2015 while visiting South East Asia. (Patrick Davies photo - 100 Mile Free Press)Patrick Davies

Once I got past that, however, I was amazed by how much I did document. I recall making it a personal challenge where I would write every day, usually late in the evening or the morning, about our experiences. I would regale my readers (myself mostly, as it turned out) with what I ate, what I did, observations about the culture and the people we met. Reading those words transports me right back to the chaotic streets of Bangkok, the night-time breeze of Havana and a dozen other memories I haven't thought back on in years. 

These journals and the memories they contain are deeply precious to me and it made me think of what I am forgetting now by not keeping a journal. While it's true that every day isn't going to consist of riding elephants, flying across the world or other exciting events, it still matters. Our day-to-day lives can often blend together and looking back on these last few years I know there are moments and fun memories I have forgotten or can no longer tie to an exact date. 

At the end of the day, who we are is made up of and defined by our experiences, our memories and our relationships. When I look back at my journals I not only remember who I was, but why I became the man I am today and that's just from five weeks out of the more than 1,000 I have lived. 

So keeping a journal throughout the year would do the same thing. It will allow me to look back on the follies of my mid-twenties and smile, just as I did when I read my journals from my teenage years. Besides, if I won't chronicle my own life, who else will? 

I'll finish, I think, with the final thoughts I penned almost a decade ago after coming home from Southeast Asia. 

"This trip just confirmed what I already knew. It's not about the destination, it's about the road you take in between. The friends you meet, the experiences you share. My advice would be to enjoy the ride, but make sure it is the ride you want. None of us are here forever, but it's what we do with the time we have, the way we interact with others, that defines us. That's a pretty deep and Lekker thought, if I do say so myself." Patrick Davies, July 26, 2015. 

https://www.100milefreepress.net/opinion/paper-quips-benefits-of-keeping-a-journal-7591843

Alexei Navalny’s Prison Diaries

From newyorker.com

The Russian opposition leader’s account of his last years and his admonition to his country and the world

On August 20, 2020, during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, the Russian opposition leader and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny thought he was dying––he was disoriented, and felt his body shutting down. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was hospitalized. Two days later, thanks to the persistence of his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and international pressure, the Russian authorities allowed a German plane to take him to Berlin for treatment.

Navalny emerged from a coma on September 7th. A week later, he announced his intention to return soon to Russia, despite the obvious danger. Doctors concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok. While recovering in the German countryside, he began writing his memoir, “Patriot,” and investigating the attempt on his life. He had no doubt that it had been the decision of Vladimir Putin and the work of the F.S.B., the Russian security services, but he was determined to uncover the details. During an unforgettable telephone call, which was filmed for a documentary about his life, Navalny duped an F.S.B. agent into describing how agents had broken into his hotel room in Tomsk and dosed his clothing with the poison.

On January 17, 2021, Alexei and Yulia flew back to Moscow. Navalny was arrested at the airport. Despite international protests on his behalf, Navalny immediately entered a netherworld of trumped-up criminal charges (embezzlement, fraud, “extremism,” etc.), prison cells, and solitary confinement. By the end of 2023, he landed in the “special regime” colony known as Polar Wolf, north of the Arctic Circle. In captivity, he managed to keep a diary and even had his team post some entries on social media. In one Facebook post, he explained why he refused to live out his life in the safety of exile: “I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.”

“We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth,” Navalny wrote. “This is the most powerful weapon.”Photograph by Martin Schoeller / AUGUST

2022     January 17th 

Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.

I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.

The hero of one of my favourite books, “Resurrection,” by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”

It sounds fine, but it was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now.

There are a lot of honest people in Russia—tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.

The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid but overcome their fear.

There are a lot of them, too. We meet them all the time, in all sorts of places, from rallies to the media, people who remain independent. Indeed, even here, on Instagram. I recently read that the Ministry of the Interior was firing staff who had “liked” my posts. So in Russia, in 2022, even a “like” can take courage.

In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest people than the mean little tsar’s security guards. Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?

The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.

I have no idea when my journey into space will end, if ever, but on Friday I was informed that another criminal case is being brought against me and going to court. And there is yet another coming up, in which I am supposedly an extremist and a terrorist. So I’m one of those cosmonauts who don’t count the days until the end of their term. What is there to count? People have been kept in prison for as long as twenty-seven years.

But I find myself in this company of cosmonauts precisely because I tried my utmost to tug my end of the rope. I pulled over to this side those among the honest people who would not be or could no longer bear to be afraid.

That is what I did. I don’t for a second regret it. And I will continue to do it.

Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck: Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.

The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.

Huge thanks to all of you for your support. I can feel it.

I’d just like to add: This year has gone by incredibly quickly. It seems only yesterday I was boarding the plane to Moscow, and now I’ve already completed a year in prison. It’s true what they say in science books: time on earth and in space passes at different speeds.

I love you all. Hugs to everyone.

March 22nd

Nine years of strict regime. Today, on March 22nd, a new sentence was announced. Before that, I ran a sweepstakes with my lawyers. The losers would have to buy whoever won a drink. Olga reckoned eleven to fifteen years. Vadim surprised everyone with his prediction of precisely twelve years and six months. I guessed seven to eight years and was the winner.

I decided to record my feelings right away, because all year I had been training for situations like today, developing what I call my “prison Zen.”

Whatever way you look at it, nine years, especially in “strict” conditions, is an extremely long sentence. In Russia, the average punishment for murder is seven years.

A prisoner sentenced to an extra term of nine years is going to be upset, to say the least. When I got back to the prison, everyone—who of course already knew about the sentence—furtively gave me a particular kind of look. How was I taking it? What was the expression on my face? It is, after all, intriguing to see someone’s reaction when they have just been told they will be serving the longest sentence of anyone in the entire prison complex. And that they are going to be sent somewhere especially grim and usually reserved for murderers. Nobody is going to come over and ask how I feel, but everyone is curious to see how this plays out. It’s an occasion when a person might hang themselves or slash their wrists.

But I am completely fine. Even “my” jailer said in the course of a really annoying full strip search, “You don’t look to me to be all that upset.” I am really O.K. I am writing this not because I am willing myself to keep up a pretence of being carefree and blasé but because my prison Zen has kicked in.

I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life—either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime.

Regimes like this one are resilient, and the most foolish thing I could do is pay attention to people who say, “Lyosha, sure, the regime is going to last at least another year, but the year after that, two at most, it will fall apart and you will be a free man.” And everything along those lines. People write that to me frequently.

The U.S.S.R. lasted seventy years. The repressive regimes in North Korea and Cuba survive to this day. China, with a whole bunch of political prisoners, has lasted so long that those prisoners grow old and die in prison. The Chinese regime does not relent. It releases no one, despite all the international pressure. The truth of the matter is that we underestimate just how resilient autocracies are in the modern world. With very, very rare exceptions, they are protected from external invasion by the U.N., by international law, by the rights of sovereignty. Russia, which right now is waging a classic war of aggression against Ukraine (which has increased tenfold the predictions of the regime’s imminent collapse), is additionally protected by its membership in the U.N. Security Council and its nuclear weapons.

Economic collapse and impoverishment await us most likely. But it is far from obvious that the regime will come crashing down in such a way that its falling debris breaks open the doors of its prisons.

My approach to the situation is certainly not one of contemplative passivity. I am trying to do everything I can from here to put an end to authoritarianism (or, more modestly, to contribute to ending it). Every single day, I ponder how to act more effectively, what constructive advice to give my colleagues who are still at liberty, where the regime’s greatest vulnerabilities lie. As I said, giving in to wishful thinking (about when the regime will collapse and I will be released) would be the worst thing I could do. What if I’m not free in a year? Or three years? Would I lapse into depression? Blame everyone else for not trying hard enough to get me released? Curse world leaders and public opinion for having forgotten me?

Relying on being released anytime soon, waiting for it to happen, is only a way of tormenting myself.

I decided from the beginning that if I was going to be released as a result of pressure or a political scenario it would happen within six months of my arrest, “while the iron was hot.” And, if it didn’t, I was up the creek for the foreseeable future. I needed to adjust my thinking so that when they did extend my sentence I would feel even more sure I was doing the right thing when I boarded that plane back to Moscow.

Here are the techniques I worked out. Perhaps others may find them helpful in the future (but let’s hope they are not needed).

The first is frequently to be found in self-help books: Imagine the worst thing that can happen, and accept it. This works, even if it’s a masochistic exercise. I can imagine that it’s not suitable for people suffering from clinical depression. They might do it so successfully that they end up hanging themselves.

It’s a fairly easy exercise, because it involves a skill everyone developed in childhood. You may remember crying your eyes out in your bed and exultantly imagining you are going to die right then and there just to spite everyone. Imagine the look on the faces of your parents! How they will cry when it finally dawns on them who they have lost! Choked with tears, they’ll beg you, as you lie quiet and still in your little coffin, to get up and come and watch TV, not just until ten o’clock but until eleven, if only you would be alive. But it is too late, you are dead, which means you are unrelenting and deaf to their pleas.

Well, mine is much the same idea.

Get into your prison bunk and wait to hear “Lights out.” The lights are switched off. You invite yourself to imagine, as realistically as possible, the worst thing that could happen. And then, as I said, accept it (skipping the stages of denial, anger, and bargaining).

I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here. There will not be anybody to say goodbye to. Or, while I am still in prison, people I know outside will die and I won’t be able to say goodbye to them. I will miss graduations from school and college. Tasselled mortarboards will be tossed in the air in my absence. All anniversaries will be celebrated without me. I’ll never see my grandchildren. I won’t be the subject of any family stories. I’ll be missing from all the photos.

You need to think about this seriously, and your cruel imagination will whisk you through your fears so swiftly that you will arrive at your “eyes filled with tears” destination in next to no time. The important thing is not to torment yourself with anger, hatred, fantasies of revenge, but to move instantly to acceptance. That can be hard.

I remember having to stop one of my first sessions at the idea that I will die here, forgotten by everybody, and be buried in an unmarked grave. My family will be informed that “in accordance with the law the burial site cannot be disclosed.” I had difficulty resisting an urge to start furiously smashing everything around me, overturning bunks and bedside tables and yelling, You bastards! You have no right to bury me in an unmarked grave. It’s against the law! It isn’t fair! I actually wanted to shout that out.

Instead of yelling, you need to think about the situation calmly. So what if that comes to pass? Worse things happen.

I’m forty-five. I have a family and children. I’ve had a life to live, worked on some interesting things, done some things that were useful. But there’s a war on right now. Suppose a nineteen-year-old is riding in an armoured vehicle, he gets a piece of shrapnel in his head, and that’s it. He has had no family, no children, no life. Right now, dead civilians are lying in the streets in Mariupol, their bodies gnawed at by dogs, and many of them will be lucky if they end up in even a mass grave—through no fault of their own. I made my choices, but these people were just living their lives. They had jobs. They were family breadwinners. Then, one fine evening, a vengeful runt on television, the President of a neighbouring country, announces that you are all “Nazis” and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin. The next day, a shell comes flying in your window and you no longer have a wife, a husband, or children—and maybe you yourself are also no longer alive.

And how many guiltless prisoners there are here! While you are sitting with your bagful of letters, other prisoners have never had a letter or package from anyone. Some of them will get sick and die in the prison hospital. Alone.

The Soviet dissidents? Anatoly Marchenko died from a hunger strike in 1986, and a couple of years later the satanic Soviet Union fell to pieces. So even the worst possible scenario is not actually all that bad. I resigned myself and accept it.

Yulia has been such a help in this. I didn’t want her to be tormented by all that “perhaps they’ll let him out after a month” stuff. Most important, I wanted her to know I was not suffering here. On her first extended visit, we walked down a corridor and spoke at a spot as far removed as possible from the cameras wired for sound that are tucked in all over the place. I whispered in her ear, “Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. Even if everything starts falling apart, they will bump me off at the first sign the regime is collapsing. They will poison me.”

“I know,” she said with a nod, in a voice that was calm and firm. “I was thinking that myself.”

At that moment I wanted to seize her in my arms and hug her joyfully, as hard as I could. That was so great! No tears! It was one of those moments when you realize you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you.

“Let’s just decide for ourselves that this is most likely what’s going to happen. Let’s accept it as the base scenario and arrange our lives on that basis. If things turn out better, that will be marvellous, but we won’t count on it or have ill-founded hopes.”

“Yep. Let’s do it.”

As usual, her voice sounded as if it belonged to a character in a cartoon, but she was dead serious. She looked up at me and batted her eyes with those big eyelashes, at which point I swept her up in my arms, hugging her in delight. Where else could I ever have found someone who could discuss the most difficult matters with me without a lot of drama and hand-wringing? She entirely got it and, like me, would hope for the best, but expect and prepare for the worst.

Yulia laughed and broke free. I kissed her on the nose and felt much better.

There is, of course, a hint of trickery and self-deception in all this. You have accepted the worst-case scenario, but there is an inner voice you can’t stifle: Come off it, the worst is never going to happen. Even as you tell yourself your direst fate is unavoidable, you’re hoping against hope that someone will change your mind for you.

The process going on in your head is by no means straightforward, but if you find yourself in a bad situation, you should try this. It works, as long as you think everything through seriously.

The second technique is so old you may roll your eyes heavenward when you hear it. It is religion. It is doable only for believers but does not demand zealous, fervent prayer by the prison barracks window three times a day (a very common phenomenon in prisons).

I have always thought, and said openly, that being a believer makes it easier to live your life and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics. Faith makes life simpler.

The initial position for this exercise is the same as for the previous one. You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.

My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.

March 26th

The ghastliest days in prison are the birthdays of close family, especially children.

What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?

“For my birthday my dad took me on a hike.”

“Well, on my birthday, my dad taught me how to drive a car.”

“For my birthday my dad sent me a letter from prison on a piece of notepaper. He promised that when he gets out he’ll teach me how to boil water in a plastic bag.”

Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.

But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware of why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.

Zakhar, happy birthday!

I really miss you and love you very much!

April 3rd

It’s a real Russian spring day. That is, the snowdrifts are up to my waist, and it’s been snowing all weekend. Snow is something prisoners hate, because what do they do when it snows and after it snows? That’s right, they clear the snow away. Arguing that it is, after all, April, and in at most ten days it will all just melt anyway, not only doesn’t work but draws heartfelt indignation from the prison administration. If anything is lying anywhere in violation of the regulations and the normal routine of doing things, it must be shovelled up, scraped off, and removed. That said, clearing snow actually is one of the most meaningful activities in prison life, because most of the others are an inane response to the need to generate work at all costs. The prisoners have a saying: “It doesn’t matter where what gets chucked, as long as the con feels completely fucked.”

This describes my feeling every weekend, because, although you can find at least an inkling of sense in shovelling snow in April, the work is genuinely exhausting. Because I am classified as a nontrusted prisoner, they don’t allow me to shovel the snow like everyone else and to break the ice on the “main line,” the camp’s principal street, along which the commandant walks. In my local area and with my own squad, though, I have to shovel.

We all have that classic labour-camp look that belongs in a movie about the Gulag. The heavy jackets, fur hats, and mittens, the enormous wooden shovels, each of which is so heavy you would think it was made of cast iron, especially after it gets saturated with water, which freezes. They are the self-same shovels used by the soldiers who cleared the streets of my military home town when I was a child. You might have thought that in the thirty years that have passed since then shovel technology would have progressed toward production of lighter shovels, but in Russia, as with so many other things, we didn’t hack it. We were brought a couple of lightweight shovels that immediately broke. The response was the usual “Oh, well, what the hell, let them use the wooden shovels. We’ve used them for shovelling snow all our lives. They are reliable.” As if to say, Our grandfathers invented these shovels and far be it from us to doubt their wisdom by trying to improve something that is already ideal.

So there I was, scowling, wearing a heavy winter jacket, and wielding a wooden shovel with snow frozen to it. The only thing that amused me, and at least partly enabled me to accept this reality, is that on these occasions I feel like the hero of my all-time favourite joke. It is a Soviet joke, but has a certain relevance today.

A boy goes out for a stroll in the courtyard of his apartment block. Boys playing soccer there invite him to join in. The boy is a bit of a stay-at-home, but he’s interested and runs over to play with them. He eventually manages to kick the ball, very hard, but unfortunately it crashes through the window of the basement room where the janitor lives. Unsurprisingly, the janitor emerges. He is unshaven, wearing a fur hat and quilted jacket, and clearly the worse for a hangover. Infuriated, the janitor stares at the boy before rushing at him.

The boy runs away as fast as he can and thinks, What do I need this for? After all, I’m a quiet, stay-at-home sort of boy. I like reading. Why play soccer with the other boys? Why am I running away right now from this scary janitor when I could be lying at home on the couch reading a book by my favourite American writer, Hemingway?

Meanwhile, Hemingway is reclining on a chaise longue in Cuba, with a glass of rum in his hand, and thinking, God, I’m so tired of this rum and Cuba. All this dancing, and shouting, and the sea. Damn it, I’m a clever guy. Why am I here instead of being in Paris discussing existentialism with my colleague Jean-Paul Sartre over a glass of Calvados?

Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre, sipping Calvados, is looking at the scene in front of him and thinking, How I hate Paris. I can’t stand the sight of these boulevards. I’m sick and tired of all these rapturous students and their revolutions. Why do I have to be here, when I long to be in Moscow, engaging in fascinating dialogue with my friend Andrei Platonov, the great Russian writer?

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Platonov is running across a snow-covered courtyard and thinking, If I catch that little bastard, I’ll fucking kill him.

Although, of course, I am no Andrei Platonov, I have the quilted jacket and the fur hat, and I, too, am writing a book. Next, I’ll finish the chapter about how I met Yulia.

July 1st

I live like Putin and Medvedev.

At least I think so when I look at the fence around my barracks. Everyone has the usual fence, and inside there are rods to dry the laundry on. But I have a six-metre-high fence, the kind I have only seen in our investigations of Putin’s and Medvedev’s palaces.

Putin both lives and works in such a place—in Novo-Ogaryovo or Sochi. And I live in a similar place. Putin lets ministers sit in the waiting room for six hours, and my lawyers have to wait five or six hours to see me. I have a loudspeaker in my barracks that plays songs like “Glory to the F.S.B.,” and I think Putin has one, too.

That’s where the similarities end, though.

Putin, as you know, sleeps until 10 a.m., then swims in the pool and eats cottage cheese with honey.

But, for me, 10 a.m. is lunchtime, because work starts at 6:40 a.m. 6:00—Wake up. Ten minutes to make my bed, wash, shave, and so on.

6:10—Exercise.

6:20—Escorted to breakfast.

6:40—Searched and escorted to work.

At work, you sit for seven hours at the sewing machine on a stool below knee height.

10:20—Fifteen-minute lunch break.

After work, you continue to sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called “disciplinary activity.”

On Saturday, you work for five hours and sit on the bench under the portrait again.

Sunday, in theory, is a day off. But in the Putin administration, or wherever my unique routine was set up, they are experts at relaxation. On Sunday, we sit in a room on a wooden bench for ten hours.

I don’t know who can be “disciplined” by such activities, except a cripple with a bad back. But maybe that’s their goal. But you know me, I’m an optimist and look for the bright side even in my dark existence. I have as much fun as I can.

While sewing, I’ve memorized Hamlet’s soliloquy in English. However, the inmates on my shift say that when I close my eyes and mutter something in Shakespearean English, like “in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” it looks as if I were summoning a demon.

But I have no such thoughts: summoning a demon would be a violation of the prison regulations.

2023

January 12th

In my two years behind bars, my only truly original story is the one about the psycho. Everything else has been told and described numerous times. If you open any book by a Soviet dissident, there will be endless stories of punishment cells, hunger strikes, violence, provocations, lack of medical care. Nothing new. But my story about the psycho is fresh; at least, I’ve never seen or heard anything like it.

So, let me give you an idea about the SHIZO, the place where I sit all the time. It is a narrow corridor with cells on either side. The metal doors offer little to no soundproofing, plus there are ventilation holes above the doors, so two people sitting in opposite cells can have a conversation without even raising their voices. This is the main reason there has never been anyone in the cell opposite mine, or in my entire eight-cell section. I am the only one there, and I have never seen any other punished convicts the whole time.

And then, about a month ago, they put a psycho in the cell across from mine. At first, I thought he was faking it. He was very active. If you tell a kid to act like a madman, that’s what he’ll come up with. Screaming, growling, hitting, barking, arguing with himself in three different voices. But, in the case of my psycho, seventy per cent of the words are obscene. There are a lot of videos online of people who think that they’ve been possessed by demons. This is very similar—the growling wail (my favourite of his three personas) comes on periodically and doesn’t cease for hours. That’s why I stopped thinking he was a faker; no normal person can yell for fourteen hours every day and three hours at night for a month. And, when I say “yell,” I mean the kind of yelling that makes your neck veins swell up.

For the past month, I’ve been going nuts and starting every check-up by demanding this lunatic be transferred elsewhere. It’s impossible to sleep at night or read during the day. They don’t transfer him, and they go out of their way to emphasize that he is a convict just like me.

And then I find out a wonderful detail: this nutcase was incarcerated (he got twenty-four years for killing someone) in another place, and a month ago they moved him here, and now they keep him in a punishment cell so that he can, so to speak, keep me entertained.

I have to admit that this plan is working: I never get bored, nor do I ever get a good night’s sleep. Being ill here is something else: during the day you suffer in a cell with a fever and long for it to be night, when they lower your bunk bed and give you a mattress, but at night you listen to the cheerful barking of your neighbour. As you know, sleep deprivation is one of the most effective tortures, but formally I can’t complain: he’s an inmate like me, he was also put in a punishment cell, and it’s up to the administration to decide who gets put into which cell.

But as usual in such situations I am amazed at something else.

This was all planned. Someone thought of this and implemented it at the regional or federal level. You can’t transfer a convict for no reason at all; there’s a rule about serving your whole term in one camp. So there was an order from above: Put pressure on him. And the generals and colonels at lower levels held a meeting: So, how shall we put pressure on him? And someone wanting to distinguish himself said, We have a madman in such-and-such prison; he screams day and night. Let’s take him to Navalny.

What a great idea, fellow-officers. Comrade Colonel, proceed and report on it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that they took a raving madman from a prison hospital and declared him sane, just to keep him in a cell across from mine.

The moral of this story is simple: The Russian prison system, the Federal Penitentiary Service, is run by a collection of perverts. Everything in their system has a sick twist: the infamous mop rapes, sticking things up people’s anuses, and so on. It wouldn’t occur to a bad-but-sane person to do such a thing. Everything you read about the horrors and fascist crimes of our prison system is true. There’s just one correction needed: the reality is even worse.

January 17th

It has been exactly two years since I returned to Russia. I have spent these two years in prison. When you write a post like this, you have to ask yourself: How many more such anniversary posts will you have to write?

Life and the events around us prompt the answer: However many it may take. Our miserable, exhausted motherland needs to be saved. It has been pillaged, wounded, dragged into an aggressive war, and turned into a prison run by the most unscrupulous and deceitful scoundrels. Any opposition to this gang—even if only symbolic in my current limited capacity—is important.

I said it two years ago, and I will say it again: Russia is my country. I was born and raised here, my parents are here, and I made a family here; I found someone I loved and had kids with her. I am a full-fledged citizen, and I have the right to unite with like-minded people and be politically active. There are plenty of us, certainly more than corrupt judges, lying propagandists, and Kremlin crooks.

I’m not going to surrender my country to them, and I believe that the darkness will eventually yield. But as long as it persists I will do all I can, try to do what is right, and urge everyone not to abandon hope.

Russia will be happy!

June 4th

It’s my birthday today. When I woke up, I joked to myself that I can now add the SHIZO to the list of places where I’ve celebrated it over the years. And then, like many other people who reach a certain age (I turned forty-seven today, wow), I thought about my accomplishments over the past year and my plans for the next.

I haven’t accomplished much, and this was best summed up the other day by the psychologist at our penal colony. The procedure requires that before you are sent to the SHIZO you must be examined by a medical officer (to check whether you will be able to withstand it) and a psychologist (to make sure you don’t hang yourself). Well, after our meeting, the psychologist said, “This is the sixteenth time we’ve put you in the SHIZO, but you keep cracking jokes, and your mood is much better than that of the commission members.” That’s true, but on the morning of your birthday you have to be honest with yourself, so I ask myself the question, Am I really in a good mood, or do I force myself to feel that way?

My answer is, I really am. Let’s face it, of course I wish I didn’t have to wake up in this hellhole and could, instead, have breakfast with my family, receive kisses on the cheek from my children, unwrap presents, and say, “Wow, this is exactly what I dreamed of!” But life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can be achieved only if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay. And the day will come when speaking the truth and advocating for justice will be commonplace and not dangerous in Russia. 

But, until that day comes, I see my situation not as a heavy burden or a yoke but as a job that needs to be done. Every job has its unpleasant aspects, right? So I’m going through the unpleasant part of my favourite job right now.

My plan for the previous year was not to become brutalized and bitter and lose my laid-back demeanour; that would mean the beginning of my defeat. And all my success in this was possible only because of your support.

As always, on my birthday, I want to thank all the people I’ve met in my life. The good ones for having helped and still helping me. The bad ones for the fact that my experience with them has taught me something. Thanks to my family for always being there for me!

But the biggest thank-you and biggest salute I want to give today goes to all political prisoners in Russia, Belarus, and other countries. Most of them have it much harder than me. I think about them all the time. Their resilience inspires me every day.

June 19th

Some people collect stamps. Some collect coins. And I have a growing collection of amazing court trials. I was tried in the Khimki police station, where I was sitting under the portrait of Genrikh Yagoda. I was tried in a standard regime penal colony, and they called it an “open trial.”

And now they’re trying me in a closed trial in a maximum-security penal colony.

In a sense, this is the new sincerity. They now say openly, We are afraid of you. We are afraid of what you will say. We are afraid of the truth.

This is an important confession. And it makes practical sense for all of us. We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.

August 4th

Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where “life” is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime.

The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. You, not I, are being frightened and deprived of the will to resist. You are being forced to surrender your country without a fight to the gang of traitors, thieves, and scoundrels who have seized power. Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.

November 13th

When you are looking for a wife, be sure to check the potential spouse to see whether she has been registered as a juvenile delinquent. I didn’t do that and here I am.

On a daily basis, the administration informs me that they are unable to deliver another letter from Navalnaya Y. B. The correspondence was seized by the censor because it contained evidence of preparation for a crime. It applies to all recent correspondence.

I wrote to her, saying, “Yulia, stop preparing crimes! Instead, cook some borscht for the kids.”

However, she can’t stop. She carries on inventing new crimes and keeps writing to me about them in her letters.

Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, she told me that in her school days, she, along with her friends, conspired to steal a briefcase from a classmate and study the trajectory of an object flying out of a second-floor window. Just to clarify, the flying object was the briefcase, not the classmate. Although, actually, I’m not so sure now.

Even back then, her criminal inclinations were evident. Not a spouse, but more like some kind of outlaw.

December 1st

I have no idea which word to use to describe my latest news. Is it sad, funny, or absurd?

I am brought letters and the conversation begins:

“Any letters from my wife?”

“Censored.”

“Any papers from my lawyer?”

“Censored.”

“So what do you have?”

“There’s one from the investigator.”

I open the letter from the State Investigative Committee: “We inform you that a criminal case has been opened against you for a crime under Part 2 of Article 214 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Two episodes.”

They initiate a new criminal case against me every three months. Rarely has an inmate in solitary confinement for more than a year had such a vibrant social and political life.

I have no idea what Article 214 is, and there’s nowhere to look. You’ll know about it before I do.

Nevertheless, this seems to be a case of positive feedback, as the scientists might say. If this Kremlin gang of corrupters, traitors, and occupiers does not like what I (we) are doing, we must be on the right path.

December 26th

I am your new Santa Claus.

Well, I now have a sheepskin coat and an ushanka fur hat, and soon I will get felt boots. I have grown a beard during the twenty days of my travels under escort. Unfortunately, there are no reindeer, but there are huge, fluffy, and very beautiful German shepherds.

And the most important thing: I now live above the Arctic Circle in the village of Kharp, on the Yamal Peninsula. The nearest town has the delightful name of Labytnangi.

I don’t say, “Ho ho ho,” but I do say, “Oh oh oh,” when I look out the window, where I can see night, then evening, and then night again.

The twenty days of my trip were pretty exhausting, but I’m in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus.

They brought me here on Saturday night. I was transported with such precautions and by such a strange route (Vladimir—Moscow—Chelyabinsk—Yekaterinburg—Kirov—Vorkuta—Kharp) that I didn’t expect anyone to find me here before mid-January.

So I was very surprised when the cell door was opened yesterday with the words “A lawyer is here to see you.” The lawyer told me that you had lost track of me, and some of you were quite worried. Thanks very much for your support!

I can’t regale you with stories about polar exotica yet, because I can only see the fence, which is very close.

I also went for a walk. The “exercise” yard is a neighbouring cell, a bit bigger, with snow on the ground. And I saw guards, not like in central Russia, but like in the movies, with machine guns, warm mittens, and felt boots. And with the same beautiful fluffy German shepherds.

Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m totally relieved that I’ve finally made it here.

Thanks again to everyone for your support. And happy holidays!

Since I’m Santa Claus, you’re probably wondering about the presents. But I am a special-regime Santa Claus, so only those who have behaved really badly get presents.

December 31st

This is the third New Year’s Eve. I have taken the traditional family New Year’s Eve photo using Photoshop. I am trying to keep up with the times, and on this occasion I asked to be drawn by artificial intelligence. I hope it turned out fantastic; I won’t see the picture myself until the letter reaches Yamal.

“I miss you terribly” is kind of incorrect from the point of view of Russian syntax. It’s better to say, “I miss you a lot,” or “I miss you so much.”

But, from my point of view, it is more accurate and correct. I miss my family terribly. Yulia, my children, my parents, my brother. I miss my friends, my colleagues, our offices, and my work. I miss you all terribly.

I have no feelings of loneliness, abandonment, or isolation. My mood is great and quite Christmassy. But there is no substitute for normal human communication in all its forms: from jokes at the New Year’s feast to correspondence on Telegram and comments on Instagram and Twitter.

I miss being able to argue with people who send stupid, identical greetings and pictures via their WhatsApp list on New Year’s Eve. It used to annoy me, but now I just think it’s cute. Imagine someone sitting down and sending everyone a couple of kittens with hats under a Christmas tree.

Happy New Year to everyone.

Don’t miss anyone. Not terribly, not much, or very much. Don’t miss your loved ones, and don’t let your loved ones miss you. Continue to be a good, honest person, and try to be a little better and more honest in the coming year. That’s pretty much what I wish for myself. Don’t get sick, and take care of yourself.

Arctic hugs and polar greetings. Love you all.

2024

January 9th

This idea I had, that Putin would now be satisfied with the simple fact of having me in a cell in the far north rather than just keeping me in the SHIZO, was not only overoptimistic but also naïve.

I had just come out of quarantine when it was reported that “the convict Navalny refused to present himself according to the regulations, did not respond to the educative work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself.” I got seven days in a SHIZO.

A wonderful detail: in a punishment cell, the daily routine is slightly different. In a normal cell, your “exercise” takes place in the afternoon. Even though it is a polar night, it is still a few degrees warmer in the afternoon. In the SHIZO, however, “exercise” starts at six-thirty in the morning. But I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is.

My “exercise” yard is eleven steps from one wall and three to the other; not much of a walk, but at least there’s something, so I go outside.

It hasn’t gotten colder than −32°C [−25.6°F]. Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you are sure you can grow a new nose, ears, and fingers.

Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at six-thirty in the morning. And what a wonderful breeze blows into the courtyard despite the concrete fence, it’s just wow!

Today I went for a walk, got frozen, and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character’s dead-horse trick in “The Revenant.” I don’t think it would work here. A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes.

Here you need an elephant. A hot or even a roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant in Yamal, especially at six-thirty in the morning? So I will continue to freeze.

January 17th

Exactly three years ago, I came back to Russia after treatment following my poisoning. I was arrested at the airport. And for three years I’ve been in prison.

And for three years I’ve been answering the same question.

Prisoners ask it simply and directly.

Prison officials inquire about it cautiously, with the recording devices turned off.

“Why did you come back?”

Responding to this question, I feel frustrated in two ways. First, there’s a dissatisfaction with myself for failing to find the right words to make everyone understand and put an end to this incessant questioning. Second, there’s frustration at the political landscape of recent decades in Russia. This landscape has implanted cynicism and conspiracy theories so deeply in society that people inherently distrust straightforward motives. They seem to believe, If you came back, there must have been some deal you made. It just didn’t work out. Or hasn’t yet. There’s a hidden plan involving the Kremlin towers. There must be a secret lurking beneath the surface. Because, in politics, nothing is as straightforward as it appears.

But there are no secrets or twisted meanings. Everything really is that simple.

I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.

And, if you’re not prepared to do that, you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone who’s not currently in prison lacks convictions. Everyone pays their price. For many people, the price is high even without being imprisoned.

I took part in elections and vied for leadership positions. The call for me is different. I travelled the length and breadth of the country, declaring everywhere from the stage, “I promise that I won’t let you down, I won’t deceive you, and I won’t abandon you.” By coming back to Russia, I fulfilled my promise to the voters. There need to be some people in Russia who don’t lie to them.

It turned out that, in Russia, to defend the right to have and not to hide your beliefs, you have to pay by sitting in a solitary cell. Of course, I don’t like being there. But I will not give up either my ideas or my homeland.

My convictions are not exotic, sectarian, or radical. On the contrary, everything I believe in is based on science and historical experience.

Those in power should change. The best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections. Everyone needs a fair legal system. Corruption destroys the state. There should be no censorship.

The future lies in these principles.

But, for the present, sectarians and marginals are in power. They have absolutely no ideas. Their only goal is to cling to power. Total hypocrisy allows them to wrap themselves in any cover. So polygamists have become conservatives. Members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have become Orthodox. Owners of “golden passports” and offshore accounts are aggressive patriots.

Lies, and nothing but lies.

It will crumble and collapse. The Putinist state is not sustainable.

One day, we will look at it, and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable.

But for now, we must not give up, and we must stand by our beliefs.

Alexei Navalny died on February 16, 2024. ♦

This is drawn from Patriot: A Memoir.

Published in the print edition of the October 21, 2024, issue, with the headline “Prison Diaries.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir