The work examines the features and historical and cultural significance of memoir prose, theoreti-cal and methodological approaches to the study of the genre. Based on the work of A. Urusova, an attempt was made to identify the aesthetic beginning of the memoirs in the totality of their dis-tinctive features: personal experience (through the prism of the author’s individual perception), factuality, retrospectiveness, authenticity, as well as a comprehensive and new look at the work of the Karachay writer, characterized by a non-standard set axiological models of self-expression, a tendency towards clairism, modality. Because of the study of the text of A. Urusova’s book “Yomur tanyshlany sagynyu” (“Memories of contemporaries”, 1975), which reflected the histori-cal fate of the Karachay people through the prism of the activities of passionaries, the concept of historical and typological study of the memoir genre was substantiated, the features of the style and language of memoirs, principles images, the role and place of memoirs in the cultural life of the people and era are revealed. The theoretical significance of the work is in deepening ideas about various literary phenomena, in particular the genre of non-fiction prose - memoirs. Research methods: cultural-historical, descriptive-functional, biographical, historical-typological.