Historians of Samara University, with support of the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), will conduct large-scale studies of the era of World War I, applying the scientific approach new to Russian historiography – researching historical processes in terms of their temporality.

Temporality in history is a special temporal parameter that shows how people in a particular era perceive the surrounding time and current events, how their interpretation of the past, present and assessment of the expected future change, how it causes society and its way of life change and organize itself in a new way. That is, to put it simply, when studying temporality of historical events, historians record changes in the views, emotions and views of people who lived at that time, including even the simplest, everyday things – from food prices to crop expectations, for example. It’s like a kind of history of human feelings, history of feeling and awareness of time, and not a dry list of historical dates and official events. Herewith, this subjectivity of opinions does not mean that different people had no common views. The task for historians is to find common ground in these particulars.

In their study, Samara researchers intend to explore temporal experience of combatants – direct participants in the fighting of World War I, moreover, experience from different sides of the front, from various countries. However, experience of non-combatants – those who remained in the rear and did not directly encounter the enemy anywhere – will also be the object of analysis. Previously, Russian historians did not use the methodology of temporal analysis of historical events, and abroad this scientific approach was presented only in individual studies. The project of Samara historians became one of the winners in the RSF competition for conducting fundamental scientific research and exploratory scientific research by small individual scientific groups. The allocated grant is designed for two years of researching.

“For Russian historical science, our project is of innovative nature and its implementation can be considered as creation of a new approach in Russian historiography. It will, in fact, be a new look at World War I. Military historians are usually passionate about narrative related, for example, to detailed description of battles, counting losses, and telling about types of weapons. Our team is interested in problems of a different kind. War has many dimensions, inter alia, it can be viewed as organization of the lives of millions of people: during the war, the society restructures, and people obeys to new rhythms of life, new temporality. This is how this process proceeds, how people adapt to war, and what interests us within this study. This is an interesting and very difficult job, we will need to dig through a lot of archival materials – both Russian and foreign. But first of all, of course, we will focus on Russia”, said Yaroslav Golubinov, Dean of the Faculty of History at Samara University, a member of the Russian Association of Historians of World War I.

In this study, key sources of scientific data will be autobiographical materials – letters, memoirs, diaries, that is, texts, in which their authors speak about themselves in one way or another. Visual sources – photographs and newsreels of that time – will be studied, as well.

“There are so many visual sources on the history of World War I that no one is able to view and analyze them all. Letters and diaries have been partially published and partially digitized, but many of them are still waiting for their researcher in the archives of Samara, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. Many foreign documents are available via the Internet”, noted Yaroslav Golubinov.

Scientists plan to identify common traits and particular features of various aspects of the “temporal mode” of war – ways of realizing and mastering front-line time by combatants, which will make it possible for the first time to compare the temporal practices of the Eastern and Western Fronts of World War I, how people felt and how they spent their life time at different fronts.

“The temporal mode is a way of organizing life. The individual and society as a whole devote some time to everything in their being, plan it, spend it on something, sometimes on trifles from the point of view of distant descendants, and then a cataclysm happens, and everything changes. And everyone begins to cherish the time, take care of it and try not to waste it. We are interested in awareness of time and temporality and how the combatants and non-combatants disposed this time. Someone was in a hurry to live, and someone was not. This is very close to the history of emotions – nostalgia, melancholy, longing, despair – when we experience emotions, time, for example, subjectively “shrinks” or “lengthens”, explained Yaroslav Golubinov.

Findings of the research are expected to become the themes of Samara historians’ reports and presentations at national and international conferences, and a series of articles will also be published in scientific journals. Besides, it is planned to prepare a popular scientific publication “Another Time: Temporality in Military Experience of Combatants of 1914–1918”.

“Due to implementation of this project, the era of World War I must be comprehended more completely and fully. Combining historical, sociological and cultural issues will make it possible to create an integral image of the past, moving away from usual, but one-sided interpretations of the events of the Great War of 1914–1918”, emphasized Yaroslav Golubinov.