The case for oral history, as made by Leo Tolstoy

Monica Rokus and friends at school in Košice, 1967

Two things that I have been reading recently have caught my eye and shaped the way I think about some of the materials being gathered as part of Recording Voices & Documenting Memories. The first is an extract from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. On the capture of Moscow by Napoleonic troops in 1812 Tolstoy writes:

“The stories and descriptions of that time all speak without exception of self-sacrifice… despair, grief and heroism… In reality, it was not like that. It seems so to us only because all we see in the past is the general historical interest of the time, and we do not see all those personal, human interests that the people of that time had. And yet in reality the personal interests of the day are so much more significant than the general interests that as a result the general interests are never felt (or even noticed at all). The majority of the people of that time paid no attention to the general course of things, but were guided only by the personal interests of the day. And those people were the most useful figures of that time.”

Of course Tolstoy is not discussing oral histories and the benefits of interviewing eyewitnesses in this paragraph, but the extract does remind me of another quotation, which is about oral histories in particular, and which conveys something rather similar. In an article entitled Talking about War, historian Edward Coffman writes:

“Meeting and talking with [interviewees] provides a human touch and a richness that one cannot get from paper documents and, in many instances, one can get information that is not available elsewhere.”

One of my favorite clips from all of the oral histories gathered to date is that of Melania Rakytiak recalling the Warsaw Pact invasion as she experienced it in Bratislava in August 1968. I think I find it so interesting because she contrasts information about “the general course of things” – panic buying, queues in shops, food shortages and the requirement of a birth certificate to buy baby milk – with her own “personal interests” throughout the invasion:



In the paragraph I cited above, Leo Tolstoy was not talking about oral history (which was not even a concept until after his death). But he does express one of the strengths of oral history particularly well. It seems to me that speaking to people who witnessed historic events in Czechoslovakia and the United States during the 20th century provides information on both the “general course of things” and “the personal interests of the day.”

-posted by Rosie Johnston