DOCUMENTS OF PERSONAL ORIGIN OF RUSSIAN JURORS OF THE 1860s — 1890s AS A HISTORICAL SOURCE

The article studies the private documents of jurors of the Russian Empire such as diaries and memoirs and analyses them as a complex of historical sources containing unique information about the course of the trial and the work of the jury. The pool of documents included two diaries and eight memoirs. The author evaluated the authorship, purpose, place of creation of these documents as well as their content and cognitive value. It is noted that the memoirs under the study share the features which are characteristic of most memoirs of the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries: they were originally aimed at publication and intended primarily for contemporaries; the time gap between the original events and the “memories” of them was relatively short (from several months to several years). The selected documents are primarily the ones belonging to jurors who participated in the metropolitan district courts trials. This fact narrows our understanding of the work of jury in the Russian Empire in the 19th century down to metropolitan provinces.