450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 160, Stanford, CA 94305
433A
War diaries have become one of the most prominent literary genres in wartime Ukraine, ranging from everyday documentation of life under constant shelling to reflective war memoirs and military chronicles. We have compiled a corpus of printed war diaries (in English, Ukrainian, and Russian) published between 2015 and 2025—split into two subcorpora based on the authors' relationship to combat: diaries written by those who engaged in direct military combat, and diaries written by non-combatants. The corpus also includes oral eyewitness testimonies collected by the nationwide project "Voices of the War," and Facebook posts by widely read bloggers living near the frontline. Together, these texts and accounts offer diverse perspectives on the war and Ukrainian society—sometimes raw and immediate, sometimes aesthetically and poetically elaborate and conceptually framed—yet all capturing a wide spectrum of emotional, physical, and psychological responses to the realities of war.
Understanding the changing attitudes of Ukrainians toward the war requires an integrated approach capable of identifying patterns across a large corpus of heterogeneous texts and oral accounts and visualizing them with computational tools. In this digital project, War Diaries in Ukraine: 2015–2025, we develop computational methods to analyze the evolving perceptions of violence and attitudes toward the enemy; to identify temporal and geographic dynamics in the use of particular words, emotions, and topics; and to detect narrative structures and discursive frames employed by different diarists and eyewitnesses. By making complex patterns in wartime accounts visible and accessible, we scale up the analysis and create new ways to study how social memory emerges from a multitude of personal experiences of war.
Lunch at 11:45 a.m. for in-person attendees
About the Speakers
Yuliya Ilchuk is an Associate Professor and the Director of Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at Stanford University. Her major research interests fall under the broad heading of cultural exchange, interaction, and borrowing between Russia and Ukraine. Her first book, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2021), revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid. Ilchuk’s most recent book project, The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine, revisits the major issues of memory studies and shifts the discussion from collective remembrance to the cultural dimensions of forgetting. Ilchuk has also published several translations of Ukrainian poetry and edited and translated works for the anthology Ukrainian Literary Modernism: A Critical Reader (forthcoming in Academic Studies Press, 2026).
Georgii Korotkov is a PhD candidate in Slavic Studies with a Computer Science minor at Stanford University, where his research examines Soviet and Eastern European translation journals as sites of literary and cultural exchange. His recent publications include "Reader-scale Text Mining and Visualization in the Secondary ELA Classroom" (Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2025) and a co-authored book chapter on Internatsional'naia Literatura as a model of Soviet world literature. His work bridges computational methods—including NLP, network analysis, and full-stack web development—with humanistic inquiry into Cold War publishing history.