Urban Everyday Life in Essays for the Rank of Volunteer during the First World War

This article is devoted to the reflection of the theme of urban everyday life in a source of personal origin that is extremely rarely used in historiography – essays written as part of the exam for the title of volunteer. Volunteers are individuals who voluntarily entered military service, having a certain level of education. In their essays as part of the Russian language exam, they described details of their biography or reflections on a particular topic. Some of the essays are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The immediate goal of the article is to demonstrate, using specific examples, that these works can be a valuable source on a number of issues related to urban everyday life, showing the view of a contemporary man in the street on its various aspects. The work examined 25 works devoted to various aspects of urban life. Their authors were of very different origins: poor and wealthy, nobles and commoners, military personnel and civilians just entering service. The author of this article comes to the conclusion that, due to the thematic focus of the works, urban everyday life is covered in them in several planes, namely: in short autobiographies, in the characteristics that the authors gave to their hometowns, in the description of city holidays. Although the works do not contain any information that would be impossible to obtain from other types of sources, they can still serve as a significant addition to a wide range of studies of everyday life in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries.