Owns of Eastern Siberia in the second quarter of the 19th century in Vasily Parshin's travel notes

The article analyzes the works of the Siberian ethnographer Vasily Parshin about various aspects of everyday life of the cities of Eastern Siberia in the second quarter of the 19th century. Vasily Parshin is a Siberian memoirist, educator and writer of the first half of the 19th century. He prepared several manuscripts on local history and was a member of the intelligentsia of Transbaikalia. His works covering a variety of aspects of life in Siberian towns became widely known. His works are classified as travel notes and are included in the corpus of Siberian memoirs. The main works of the author are identified and the informative value of travel notes for researchers is shown. Some manuscripts are unpublished and stored in the Archive of the Russian Geographical Society. The main purpose of writings was to make readers familiar with the distant and little-known region of the Russian Empire. The works focused on the towns of Transbaikalia and on Irkutsk, which was connected with Parshin's preferences and research objectives. The researcher studied other towns of eastern Siberia to a lesser extent. In his works, Parshin described the appearance of the towns and assessed town infrastructure. He relied on his own experiences and observations; he considered various aspects of town residents' life. Parshin also described citizens' everyday culture. According to his observations, most of the towns continued a rural way of life. The way of life and occupations of the bulk of townspeople were similar to those of rural residents. The author paid attention to activities of the town population and tried to identify the causes of underdevelopment of the towns. Taking into account reader interests, the memoirist described the manners and leisure time of townspeople. He showed specific features of residents of different towns in illustrative examples. On the basis of his personal observations, Parshin determined the features of the local people's psychology. Thus, his travel notes are a valuable historical source in the study of everyday life of Russian provincial towns. On the basis of his own observations, Parshin strove to give full information about the external appearance, way of life, occupations, customs and morals of the town population.

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