Girls' Diaries as Historical Sources

The paper interprets two different versions of the girl’s diary of the Croatian author Zora Ruklić, published in 1938 and 1983. In the repeated, supplemented version of the diary, the diarist articulates herself as a member of a radical youth group that in 1911 and 1912 not only participated in student demonstrations in Zagreb but also organized the (unsuccessful) assassination of commissar and ban Slavko Cuvaj in June 1912, the first political assassination in Croatia. As a fifteen-year-old girl, the author directly documented the political events in which she participated, and the two versions of her diary are interpreted in parallel with the help of theories about the genre of the diary of Irina Paperno, Rebecca Hogan, and Philippe Lejeune