Escribir en campañacartas de soldados desde el frente

Laburpena

During the Spanish Civil War thousands of combattants wrote in order to attend to their most important needs while in uniform: maintaining morale, receiving support from family and friends, keeping themselves busy during periods of idleness, leaving testimony of an unprecedented historical event, or simply surviving the horrors of a war that for many meant irreparable loss and incalculable suffering. This study approaches the epistolary practice of soldiers during wartime in order to explain what letters meant to persons in such unusual circumstances, while revealing the uses and functions that soldiers attributed to such personal writing. To this end it raises questions such as the way in which letter writing took place and received encouragement in the trenches, even among illiterate soldiers; the influence of censorship on the writing process and the presence of silences in correspondence as a result of self-containment regarding feelings and specific events; the figure of female correspondents and the impressive amount of correspondence they produced; the importance of the places and conditions of preservation of this sort of documents when interpreting them; and the ideological and propagandistic use of personal letters not only during the war but after it as well.