THIS TRANSLATION IS BASED UPON TWO SURVIVING FRAGments of An-sky’s war diary, now held at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow. The first section was written between January 1 and March 8, 1915, and the second between September 9 and October 10, 1915.
An-sky wrote his diary in Russian, but he frequently used Yiddish and Hebrew in his daily interactions as well as his diary entries. His diary also contains occasional phrases in German, Polish, French, and other languages. This translation seeks to preserve the multilingual texture of the original by presenting foreign terms and expressions in italics. Readers will find explanations of all foreign terms in the notes.
Yiddish terms are transliterated here according to the YIVO classification system. Russian and Hebrew words are transliterated according to the Library of Congress system, although diacritical marks have been omitted, and exceptions have been made for names that have gained common spellings in English (e.g., Gorky, rather than Gor’kii; Jabotinsky, rather than Zhabotinskii). The spelling of some Russian names has also been modified in order to facilitate pronunciation (e.g., Fyodor, not Fedor).
Place-names used in the diary refer to locations that were then part of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires and are found in today’s Russia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. An-sky’s Russian spellings have been retained for locations that were then part of the Russian Empire and eastern Galicia. Names of locations then part of western Galicia (found in today’s Poland) are given with Polish spellings.
An-sky’s dates for his diary entries were given according to the Julian calendar, which fell thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar and was used in Russia until January 1918.