Latvia

THE STORY OF IRINA PILKE: "THE DIARY OF A LINNET"

Irina Pilke was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1925. Between the years 1945-1991, she kept a journal where she recorded her life events through drawings made by herself.

Her total work, which she named "The Diary of a Linnet", consists of 8 diaries of 100 pages each (800 pages altogether).

For 46 years, Irina Pilke recorded big and small events of her life as a woman from Latvia, her country, under the Soviet regime. In 1991 she stopped adding new entries to her illustrated diary, thinking that that was the end of the Story. However, before that, she had managed to narrate her life story creating for her and a few of the people around her -who were her only readers for a long time- a work that is unique and incomparable.

Irina Pilke is no longer alive.

Unesco National Commission, Latvia