Ekaterina Zadirko
- PhD student
Contact
About
Research topic: "Growing up Soviet: Writing the Self in Male Teenagers’ Diaries (1930s –1941)"
Supervisor: Prof Emma Widdis
Before coming to Cambridge, I completed a BA in Russian and Spanish philology at Russian State University for Humanities and an MA in History at Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences. My research encompassed a variety of topics, including Soviet science fiction literature, visual aspects of the 20th-century Russian poetry, and history discourse on Wikipedia.
Languages Russian (advanced) Spanish (intermediate) Italian (intermediate) French (basic)
Scholarships/Prizes Rowan Williams Cambridge Studentship (Cambridge Trust), 2022 Higher School of Economics Best Teacher Vote, 2022
Conference papers “I Will Become Someone”: Adulting Strategies in a Soviet Teenager’s Diary (1937–1941), British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Annual Conference 2024, April 5–7th, 2024 “This Is Not Art but the Most Real Life”: a Soviet Teenager’s Diary between Autobiography and Fiction (1937–1941), Annual Graduate Student Conference “The Art of Self-Obsession? Interrogating Slavic Ego-Documents and Autofiction”, October 6–7th, 2023 “It Is Not That Easy to Be a Writer and…Not That Difficult Either”: Literary Ambitions of Teenagers in the Stalinist Era, Annual Conference “Constructing ‘the Soviet’”, European University in Saint Petersburg, April 24–25th, 2020 Publications “Zastoi Period”: A Wikipedia Article as a Form of Historical Knowledge in Public Space: http://gefter.ru/archive/22911
Research
My current project is focused on adolescent diaries in the late 1930s Soviet Russia. I seek to explore how male teenagers experienced growing up through self-writing in the pre-war Stalinist era. I analyse their diaries as discursive spaces for mastering cultural patterns in order to socialize in the Soviet environment and to navigate increasingly complex intellectual and emotional experiences as they moved from childhood to adulthood. At the same time, I regard keeping a diary as a coming-of-age practice in its own right, playing a vital role in the integration of young people into the Stalinist society and culture.
Teaching and supervision
Russian Oral B SLC2 SL15.