Journal «Филология и культура. Philology and Culture»

The beginnings of the documentary genre in Tatar literature can be traced back to the ancient times of the pre-Islamic period. To reconstruct the whole history of the formation we propose the following chronol-ogy: the biographical and documentary information, recorded in the ancient written literary Turkic monuments; the autobiographical facts and biographical information found in the syncretic literary com-positions of the Middle Ages; the formation of the bio-bibliographical genre in the 19th century; the de-velopment of an autobiography as a literary genre in the 20th century.