A Man with a Gun: The Hunting Sketches of a Soviet Youth (According to the Diary of a Provincial Schoolboy 1947–1952)

. The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the lifeworld of a Soviet schoolboy between 1947 and 1952 based on the diary of Nikolai Kozakov, a provincial young man. The author considers the diary as a special historical source belonging to the group of ego-documents. Referring to the daily diary entries of the rural teenager, the article attempts to discover significant components of everyday life in the Soviet village and to reveal the connection between the “spirit of the epoch” and social expectations, imagination and value orientations in their individual refraction. The concept of social time, first introduced into scientific discourse by Pitirim Sorokin and Robert Merton, serves as the theoretical and methodological basis of the study. In order to adapt it to the analysis of historical sources, the author uses the approaches of Umberto Eco related to the understanding of the absent structures as elements of social orders in society. This methodology makes it possible to combine the analysis of diary narrative with the ideas about social and normative order, which the diary writer did not verbalize but shared with his contemporaries. The additional meanings that are also found in ego-texts make them an important source for understanding both social time and collective perceptions of the epoch. N. Kozakov’s personal diary presents the Soviet village as social space functionally oriented to preparing the young generation of Soviet teenagers for future independent adult life. A shotgun is presented as a symbol of independence, responsibility, and adulthood of the rural young man. In the diary, the practices of obtaining, using, and caring for the gun form a special type of narrative about socialization in the Soviet village. Preservation and reproduction in the family environment of orientations towards the values and models of behavior of an urban resident, inherited from the pre-evacuation period in the family, awakened a special style of social imagination in N. Kozakov. The intersection of socio-cultural coordinates of the two worlds (rural and urban ones) presented in the texts of the diary in an individual dimension, allows us to reveal the multidimensionality, heterogeneity, and aggregate state of the lifeworld of a Soviet teenager.


Introduction
In 2016, art photographer and artist Kirill Glushchenko published separate book containing excerpts from the diary for 1962 of Nikolai Kozakov, a rural driver and mechanic. 1The web-site "PROZHITO" published excerpts from Nikolai Kozakov's diary for 1948-49. 2 The author of the diary was born in 1932.Until the age of 10 he lived in Leningrad, and in 1942 he was evacuated to the town of Sergach in Gorky Oblast together with his mother.The first diary entries were made in 1945, the last ones are dated 1997.Nikolai Kozakov's mother taught German at a village school; there is no information about his father.
The publication attracted the attention of historians.Ya.Golubinov's review of the book, among other things, notes: For the artist Kirill Glushchenko, the perfect way to show this mixture of the typical and the extraordinary in the late socialist era in the USSR was to turn to the diary entries and photographs made by Nizhny Novgorod resident Nikolai Kozakov (1932-2005). . .For the artist, [Nikolai Kozakov] became a spokesman for the destinies of those people who live in unremarkable five-storey buildings, which, however, can be seen as "a multitude of tightly pressed destinies" rather than houses. 3e diaries of the rural mechanic became the subject of an open discussion with the participation of philosophers and theatre and film critics (V.Lyashchenko, P. Rudnev, and O. Shentorovich). 4 The participants in the discussion tried to find the place for the story of the "little man" in the great literary and artistic tradition.In the course of the discussion, Nikolai Kozakov was symbolically endowed with a special status.He became the personification of the "silent majority" of the Soviet era, and his personal diary turned into a political tribune from which we can hear the speech of a citizen who could hardly speak out publicly in the totalitarian state.However, the discussion of his diaries did not go beyond the notebooks of 1962.The diaries of other years had not been published by then.
It should be noted that, contrary to the opinion of Ya.Golubinov, the author of the diaries did not live in "unremarkable five-storey buildings."In the post-war years he lived in the village, in a rustic log house.Nor did he belong to the silent majority of the Soviet time.The vast majority of Soviet people did not keep diaries in the late Stalinist era.Besides, it should be taken into account that a person who keeps a diary does not keep silent at all but speeks out, which to a certain extent reflected his stand in life.
Thanks to the cooperation with M. Melnichenko's team, 5 it became possible to get acquainted with the full text of Nikolai Kozakov's diaries and obtain their electronic copy, as the diary entries have not been published in full yet (they will be published in a separate book).Based on the daily entries of this rural young man, the task of the research was formulated: to reconstruct the lifeworld of the Soviet schoolboy between 1947 and 1952, to discover its significant components, and to identify the connection between the "spirit of the epoch" and social expectations, imagination and value orientations in their individual refraction.

Main Body
Diaries belong to the group of sources of personal origin.Not so long ago, a discussion about the theory and practice of using ego-documents in historical research took place in Yekaterinburg at the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 6In a substantial polemic, historians and literary scholars demonstrated the commonality of methodological approach: sources of personal origin are of principal value for understanding the individual and collective space of life as well as the culture of everyday life.The organizers of the discussion summarized: They [ego-documents] allow us to explain the nature of both differentiated and invariant visions of history as seen by different individuals and groups, and at the same time they capture the structuring function of self-descriptive practices, their ability to generate, preserve and modify particular social alliances.For the historians of Soviet society, personal diaries have a special appeal.They contain valuable information about the cultural and social coordinates of understanding the historical epoch by its contemporaries, authors, and addressees of various ego-texts.When analyzing the war-time diaries, which date back to the period when radio and newspapers were filled with power propaganda, I. Savel'eva noted . ..their pages hardly reflect the official "grand narrative" that was already being created during the war in print, film, and literature. 8rsonal diaries preserve the information that historians seek for with great difficulty and often without any results in the official documents of party and Soviet bodies.
Personal diaries are multifaceted.What they preserve and bring to our days is more than the information about the personal private life of their authors.According to Yu. Zaretskii, researchers should consider an autobiographical text as a social action, a communicative act that conveys information about the social time when the narrative was created. 9et us note here that the concept of social time was introduced into the system of humanitarian research by Pitirim Sorokin and Robert Merton.They wrote: . ..social time, in contrast to the time of astronomy, is qualitative and not purely quantitative; that these qualities derive from the beliefs and customs common to the group and that they serve further to reveal the rhythms, pulsations, and beats of the societies in which they are found. 10cial theorists emphasized the collective character of time, its dependence on the specific historical circumstances of the existence of groups and communities.In fact, by means of the concept of social time, they sought to reconcile the group characteristics of behavioral culture and social imagination and forms of thinking that determine the everyday existence of social groups and communities.In addressing the category of social time, present-day historians solve similar problems.They place the analysis of the past into a system of socio-cultural coordinates authentic to the thinking and behavioral practices of people, groups, and communities, and seek to consider the phenomena of the past in the form and status conferred on them by their contemporaries.It is the ego-texts that can be of great assistance to historians in fulfilling these research tasks.
It is worth highlighting that the representativeness of information about culture, collective experience of living, and social practices about which personal diaries tell historians is assessed according to special rules.Quantitative parameters of describing the source base should give way to qualitative characteristics of specific ego-documents, which are often small in number.The work with diaries also requires special techniques of historians' work with the source text.In our case, we assume the use of Umberto Eco's methodology, oriented towards the reconstruction of what is the unspoken but meant.Invisible unarticulated elements of the narrative create a special layer of meanings in the text and influence the narrative as well as assessments and judgments of the author.They are part of the cultural experience that the diary author shares with his contemporaries.As a rule, the institutional factors and patterns of culture generally that are known to and obvious for communities and groups do not need any reflexive description. 11he post-war diaries of Nikolai Kozakov are an interesting and valuable historical document.The entries cover a long period of time.Their author lived in a distant village.There are not many extant sources concerning the everyday life of the Soviet village that are free from the official political narrative of Soviet texts.N. Kozakov was well-read, able to write, well-educated and, which also played an important role, came from an urban environment.His initial socialization took place in Leningrad, "the cradle of the October Revolution," which obviously influences the schoolboy's narrative about the rural environment later.As for the rural environment, our hero did not belong there either by origin, or by his initial socialization, or by his family upbringing, or by the culture transmitted at home.The family of a teacher who was evacuated from a big city was different from the families of the fellow villagers, even after several years of living in this environment under war-time and post-war conditions.Going through the stages of adolescent socialization in a rural school and growing up in the village environment, N. Kozakov perceived the world around him in a more complex way than any other typical village teenager did.Elements of the rural lifestyle dominated Kozakov's whole life.He was obliged to do the routine work of caring for poultry and animals in the family household.The rhythm and character of his everyday practices were also determined by the rules of rural life: Mother wanted to go to the children's center, but on the big road she met Burda who was going to harvest potatoes.So we had to go there too.My back was aching after yesterday's digging, and it was difficult for me to dig.12 N. Kozakov's stories about himself were dominated by the topics related to the forest, incidents in the village, and the routine of studying at village school.At the same time, the diary text reflected his constant development, improvement of selfdescription skills, construction of the special narrative about the adolescent "I" and its place in the village culture.Notebook entries became an obvious aid to the schoolboy who was trying to find his own place in the adults' rather than children's world.
It can be said that our hero was at the crossroads of several culturesurban and rural as well as adolescent and adult,which had an obvious impact on his writing.The adolescent narrative about playing with peers blends with the narrative about weapons and practices of assuming the role of a hunterbreadwinner in his family.The narrative about the demanding standardized world of school and preparation for exams is accompanied by revelations about the theft of ammunition from the military instructor's office.Historians should not blindly follow the course of the narrative.The mix of cultural orders, norms and rules, and social images that the young boy brought into his story reflected the mix of traditions and group cultures of which he was a bearer.External circumstances, such as the war and the prolonged restoration of the rhythms of peaceful existence in the post-war years, affected his socialization.The diary became an integral part of his growing up and social self-determination.The stories written down by the village schoolboy turned into texts about culture and social time, describing the construction of identity according to the patterns of socialist society and according to the attitudes and norms of collective life in the Soviet village.
Let us note that N. Kozakov started keeping a diary at middle school, actually just entering adolescence.His rather limited social experience at that time was compensated for by his social imagination and practices of imitation.He subordinated the written text to those forms of collective thinking that were available to him as an adolescent who perceived the world holistically and egocentrically within the boundaries of local variations of culture of the family, village, school.
Kozakov did not write about the war.His texts paid little attention to the urgent problems of life under the conditions of post-war shortages of goods and food products.The domestic difficulties of existence in rural environment were also left out of the narrative.
Nikolai Kozakov never complained in his diary.In the teenager's environment, complaining meant showing weakness.He strove to appear independent, successful, and strong.He even avoided any mentioning of personal problems associated with stuttering, which evidently complicated his courtship of girls in high school.The topic of stuttering came up when he took the opportunity to undergo a course of treatment in a Moscow clinic: I went to my polyclinic institution where I was to be treated for stuttering.Everything was already prepared there, and on Wednesday (i.e., on June 4) the treatment was to begin. . .I went to Moscow yesterday; they gave me a referral to the District Healthcare Department.I took it to my aunt, and they should now get me a voucher. 13deed, it is a wasted effort to tell in a teenage diary about the difficulties of the post-war period.Everyone knew everything about them.This information did not allow self-expression.Thus, other topics, less large-scale than the war and its consequences, became the priority.
In order to understand all these topics, it is necessary to reconstruct the coordinates of the cultures that N. Kozakov was the bearer of in the pages of his personal diary and to establish from which symbols, patterns, and models of behavior his autobiographical stories were created.
Urban cultural tradition formed the basis of our hero's socialization.However, in the diary entries written between 1947 and 1953, the topic of the city did not appear very often.In our opinion, there were actually not many reasons for tackling it.In the author's notes, the city looked like a confusing, dangerous and unappealing place where life constantly required expenses, money was always in short supply, people at the university and institute seemed unfriendly.Besides, there were many restrictions and conventions in public places, and the hierarchical and atomized character of the urban environment manifested itself in relations with other people.Nikolai Kozakov did not like city life.Nevertheless, in the pages of his diary, he demonstrated orientation towards the values and behavioral patterns typical of urban culture.The source of this orientation was a domestic, mostly oral, family tradition.The author of the diary did not write about the family history either, as it did not need any additional narration.The family history was known to the relatives, and the consequences of evacuation and the life of the German teacher and her son in the village were in a plain view of the village community.But the memory of the urban past, of the time before the evacuation, was preserved in the family.It was brought up to date by official radio reports, newspaper publications about Leningrad and the Siege that his hometown survived.The theme of Leningrad was a prominent subject of Soviet official discourse about the war.In our hero's diary, political messages from newspapers and radio were not usually reproduced.
Only in 1994 did Nikolai Kozakov mention his origin in the pages of his diary.Back then, he fought to obtain the official status of a resident of besieged Leningrad, which gave an increment to his pension, I have finally started to work on the recognition of the status of a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad: I sent letters to the GAGO and the administration of the town of Pushkin. 14. ..Having collected the photocopies of the extant papers related to the Siege, the certificate issued by the GAGO that we were evacuated, and the petition from the Gorky Society of the Siege Survivors, I sent everything to Leningrad (St Petersburg).Let us wait. 15ree months later, in August, he summarized, There were numerous scandals and disagreements, and in the end my pension was increased with a coefficient of 1.15, i.e., I got 60,18 roubles, plus an addition of 19,70, a total of 79,88 roubles. 16mily legends kept the memory of the urban past in their own way.The social imagination of our author during the years at rural school, his dreams of studying at university and obtaining a profession of biologist and a career, which he wrote about in his diary, looked typical for an urban teenager.His family cultivated and supported his motivation for self-realization through education and science-oriented profession.
The family's move to a new place was a kind of preparatory stage before university.It is difficult to say what circumstances forced Nikolai and his mother to change their place of residence.In 1948-49, there were several entries in his diary mentioning that the relations with the owners of their village house had become 14 Diary of N. Kozakov, notebook no. 41, entry dated June 4, 1994 (electronic copy) complicated.It is quite appropriate to assume that the move was a family decision, made primarily in the interests of Nikolai's personal future.The notebook with the entries about the move itself has not survived.
The new place of residence, the village of Kadmitsy, was located on the banks of the Volga River.The village was large, with its own pier.There was regular river communication, which made trips to the city of Gorky possible.And in the future, student Kozakov would have an opportunity to come to his mother in the village for groceries.The choice of the new place of residence and work was made with rationality and calculation of an experienced adult: there was a shortage of teachers in rural schools, so the mother of our hero had no difficulties with her employment.Moreover, in the new village, she was immediately provided with a separate house to live in.
For Nikolai himself, the move was associated with serious adaptation to the changed living conditions, to the new school community, new peers, and new unfamiliar teachers.Additional difficulties were brought by the first romantic infatuation with his female classmate Zhenya.However, in spite of everything, the main goal of young Kozakov was to get good grades in exams and be awarded a medal because the students who finished school with a medal were enrolled in universities without exams.
The diary sensitively recorded changes in the author's social motivations.Records about his classmates, school situations and collisions with new teachers became the main themes of his autobiographical stories in 1950-51.In his senior year, he became more aware of his own social status as a schoolboy on the threshold of adulthood.Studying at university was perceived by him as a ticket to the great independent life and became a priority for high school pupil N. Kozakov.For the sake of achieving his goal, he was more diligent in his lessons, paid attention to academic tasks, carefully prepared for exams.A short pause in his busy studies, connected with a trip to Gorky with his mother, felt like a great holiday: After the cinema we went "home."Mother brought tea and gingerbread from the cupboard.We had tea.Then I wrote down my observations for the day.It is so good to sit here without being dependent on all kinds of blood-suckers!I don't need to wake up at 7 o'clock and pore over my books tomorrow!17 The desire for new status also manifested itself in the adoption of new cultural norms.The young man he had become had to look after himself.Thus, new entries appeared in his diary that demonstrated Nikolai's concern for his appearance: I sat on the porch at the hairdresser's and waited.I had been sitting there for a long time, when finally one of the hairdressers came.He gave me a haircut and cut my hair so short that now it is upright instead of sticking up.I paid two and a half roubles and went home. 18s free time practices also changed.Going to the cinema, meetings friends, dancing to the gramophoneall this determined the new style of behavior of the author of the diary.N. Kozakov tried to emphasize his own education and readiness for university in every possible way.He did not even mind showing off in front of his comrades about his diary-keeping skills: Of all the guys here in Kadnitsy, I more or less like only Vovka Vlasov and him, Yurka.And I have only recently got to know him.But I liked him.Though, of course, he is a bit of a swearer.But that's typical of all country boys.Ivan was the same, and I was very friendly with him.One thing doesn't interfere with the other.Yurka is very simple and cheerful as, probably, all the members of this kind family are.After talking to Yurka, I went home.Soon afterwards the older boys came.We sat there till dark, and then I lit the lamp.I let Vovka read my diary. 19 such notes, one can recognize additional meanings that the author did not pronounce: the villagers constantly swear, are rude, and generally do not understand how to behave in a public place.Nikolai believed that he was different from them because he understood and accepted the norms of cultured urban life.In the pages of his diary, he saw himself as an already established university student.
Creating his own image of a student, and thus a city boy, he imitated the heroes of Soviet television and literature: he smoked cigarettes, philosophized, courted girls, and tried to write poetry.In the pages of his diary, one could see the image of an educated, successful, cultured young man, a representative of Soviet youth, who understands what he wants from life, and is convinced of his good prospects in the future.N. Kozakov's self-perception in 1950 was full of arrogance and selfsatisfaction.He saw his own status so high that he even began to allow himself to evaluate his teachers.Being in conflict with a teacher, Nikolai accompanied his diary entries about her with unflattering judgments and characterizations.
However, as the school teacher's son, Nikolai had no fear of the school administration.His mother's status protected him.Having been once caught stealing ammunition from the military instructor's office, Nikolai did not face any noticeable sanctions and consequences of the act.It ended with his mother paying the cost of the ammunition and the case of the theft did not develop any further.Typical school mischiefs, such as using cheat sheets and simple cheating, were not even considered by him from the point of view of risk.They are described in the diary as common practices among the pupils.
Nikolai Kozakov successfully finished school, passed his exams, and received a silver medal.He entered the Biology Department of Gorky State University.Nevertheless, he could not study in the city.The rules of city life, the demanding nature of university teachers, and their unwillingness to turn a blind eye to any violation of academic routine became too complex a social challenge for him.It turned out that he was not ready for such life; he was not ready for the independence and responsibility that urban communities and institutions implied.In the city, he continued to be a rural boy, unable to adapt to the atomized, dynamic, and demanding social environment.
N. Kozakov's rural socialization and the changes that happened to him under the influence of the village culture turned out to be deeper and stronger than it could be assumed on the basis of hos self-description and self-assessment.His identity was altered by a range of rural socialization factors.His personal diaries, in which he recorded his memories of being a teenage hunter in the famine conditions of the postwar period, allow us to explore his adoption of the norms and rules of rural culture between 1947 and 1949.
The key theme of his first lengthy teenage stories about himself was the topic of hunting, gathering, and nature.Nikolai Kozakov loved to read very much.Therefore, literature became a source of inspiration and imitation for him.On the pages of his diary, he created his own version of.
In the original A Sportsman's Sketches in the 19 th century, young Ivan Turgenev opened the world of rural life to the urban readership, thus telling them about the people of rural background.The Russian classic endowed his heroes with lively characters that manifested themselves through various actions and deeds.A century later, N. Kozakov created his own version of the narrative about the countryside, nature, and hunting, but there are practically no people in his stories.
The center of N. Kozakov's narrative is his own personality.The author's descriptions of rural life are rather limited and contain no social portraits of his fellow villagers.The narrative is about himself and his own experience.From the diary of the young hunter one can learn how he tracked a sandpiper or a grouse, how he successfully caught a hare in winter, or why the ruffs spoiled fishing.
For Kozakov, the reality of nature assumes no other subjects than the hunter himself, and therefore it is the hunter who is the main character of his autobiographical narrative.Some episodes and stories from Kazakov's diary remind Nikolai Kozakov was quite responsible in his self-accepted role as an amateur zoologist.He kept a kestrel (a local hawk) at home.He brought home a wounded magpie and treated it.He made a special cage for keeping birds and had a special notebook where he meticulouly recorded information about his observations.All these things made him different from the adult village hunters he could observe when he visited his friends: I went into their house.The wings of a magpie and a kestrel were hanging on the door of the hay storeroom in a very beautiful combination.There were many skins in the entryway, a mole skin drying on the porch spread on a board, and all sorts of nets and slings.From this fact I conclude that Faika's father was probably a hunter. 23y village hunter regarded birds and animals exclusively as game.For them, they were a source of nourishment, exchange, or sale.Nikolai Kozakov pursued other goals.He sought to act as a scientist.Having accumulated information, he tried to establish contact with Professor I. Puzanov, 24 a famous zoologist, and share with him the information he had obtained: When I got home, I started a letter to Prof[essor] Puzanov about the fork-tailed gull whose egg we found in the summer. 25ories about the gun make an important element of this narrative about personal development of the young hunter.Nikolai Kozakov had the opportunity to obtain a personal weapon at the age of fifteen.The story of its acquisitionthe purchase of a confiscated shotgun in a neighboring village through his mother's local acquaintancesis built up from smaller notes.Gradually, a series of notes about the gun, its maintenance, and use in hunting formed a narrative of initiation, development, and transformation of the boy who used to destroy birds' nests into the hunter and researcher who supplied his family with food and gathered valuable information about the natural environment.continued his usual life among familiar people who were easy to understand in the society where he was also known and understood."The death of the leader" questioned the social skills he had acquired, made his social future uncertain, and destroyed the cornerstone upon which his social imagination rested.There were no diary entries for a long time.
The new reality had to be mastered according to different rules.The diary entries of the second half of the 1950s and later demonstrate the growth of pragmatism in the social life of our hero.The resources of social thinking and creative potential that he used in the post-war years turned out to be in little demand in society.
His personal life was not successful as well.He got married and then divorced, leaving his wife with a young child.He started drinking.He got together with another woman but drinking became part of the family culture.His feelings and romance with women were no longer mentioned in his diary.His career also failed.He became a mechanic, then a driver.With great effort, at the third attempt, our hero managed to get a diploma of higher education, which, however, did not bring great benefits to him.
His adolescent love of nature and woods was not socially supported in the era when state farms became synonymous with the next stage of Sovietization of the countryside.Khrushchev's village was gradually coming closer to the city.The institutional environment of rural life was losing the former freedoms that had allowed a teenage boy to acquire a gun and walk unrestrictedly through village streets and forest trails in the post-war years.The time of village freedoms was coming to an end.The new world was alien to Nikolai, and therefore often criticized in the pages of his diary.N. Kozakov also condemned the Soviet regime, which spoilt the world of bucolic culture described by him in his "hunter's skeyches."

Conclusion
Let us draw some conclusions.Nikolai Kozakov, an ordinary Soviet schoolboy, found himself in a difficult situation.After ten years of life in the big city, he was confronted with rural society and had to master a new type of collective perceptions of the world around him.His growing up and subsequent self-realization in the new life space took place in the post-war years.The village life and his mother's salary partially alleviated the problems of food shortages.Involved in the everyday activities of rural life, he learned new social patterns of behavior, which involved the daily care of chickens, goats and pigs, planting, cultivating and digging potatoes, and gathering and hunting in the nearby forest.The urban cultural skills that were preserved in the family of a German teacher contributed to his fascination with books and eventually encouraged the teenager to try his hand at writing stories about nature in his personal diary.Developing a pattern of behavior based on the patterns of rural life and at the same time oriented towards the values of urban cultural tradition, N. Kozakov constructed for himself a special combined social world.Hunting and nature occupied a privileged place in his everyday life.Rural freedoms opened up opportunities to join the community of adult men early in life.They "drew" a grid of coordinates for behavioral patterns and related ideas about future.Literature, in turn, stimulated the schoolboy's social imagination.Keeping a diary compensated for limited social interaction with less well-read and educated peers.By creating a narrative about the young man's conquest of nature by hunting, Nikolai Kozakov united the imaginary and real space around him in a literary form.
He placed himself and his own actions in the center of social world, where fantasies were mixed with real life experience.On this shaky basis, N. Kozakov came up with a project for his future career.Already at school he imagined himself to be an independent researcher of nature, capable of entering the circle of certified scientists.His further plans envisaged the university education in the field of biology.The experience of joining the community of male hunters, hiking in the woods with his own gun at the age of 15, gave him optimism and confidence in the possibility of fulfilling such a project in the future.
Nikolai Kozakov's encounter with the reality that was represented by the hierarchical and regulated university environment, demanding compliance with formalized impersonal norms and rules, led the young man to a serious internal conflict.His ideas about studying at a university and a future successful career could not be fulfilled.He felt his own helplessness in the city and fled from it back to the village.
Thus, the imaginary world of the ordinary Soviet teenager lost to social reality.In the process of socialization, N. Kozakov built his own self-identity from the available cultural material: ideology, literary traditions, his own practices, and family norms.The Soviet university of the 1950s did not accept our hero's individuality and thus shattered his illusions about science, university community, and his own place in it.The identity of the romantic young hunter did not correspond to the format of the USSR's higher educational institutions, which were perceived by Kozakov as a social elevator.The universities prepared personnel for socialist agriculture rather than naturalists, explorers, or followers of Alfred Brehm.For Nikolai Kozakov, this conflict turned into a collapse of his life aspirations and caused significant difficulties in his career and personal life.The life of the "little hunter" did not turn out the way he had dreamed of in the post-war years, describing his own hunting experience and observations of the forest in school notebooks adapted for his personal diary.