Projekt

Ukrainian diaristic accounts of life under Nazi occupation are as rare as they are precious. Any further diary that adds to the number of available records constitutes an important find. Lev Nikolaev (1898-1954), a Kharkiv-based professor of medicine and researcher in the field of physical anthropology, kept a detailed personal record of his life under German occupation. In 2014, the grandson of the professor Sergiy Kurganov let Dr. Viktoria Naumenko into the family archive. There she discovered the original diary notebooks of Lev Nikolaev from the war years and the prewar periods. This biographical source stands out from other testimonies of the Nazi occupation due to the complexity of the author's self-reflection and the dramatic twists and turns in his life. The diary documents the stages of the German occupation of Kharkiv day by day. The entries reveal not only the atrocities committed by the Nazis and everyday life under occupation, but also how the author comes apart with his initial illusions about the German occupiers. In this research project, Dr. Viktoria Naumenko pursues the following goals: to restore a fascinating, complex personal source, explore it, add critical annotation, and bring it to the attention of a global reading public.