Abstract: The focus of this article is the author's analysis of the autobiographical material and journalistic work of the prominent Russian writer A. I. Kuprin, written by him during the years of his emigration to Finland (1919-1921), as a resource for reconstructing the identity of the “Russian refugee” through the images of Russian and European sociocultural spaces that he penned as "own" and "alien" / "other". The article describes the historiographic discourse of the trend to converge history and literature, and of the “linguistic turn” in the context of the development of modern source studies of Russian history. The author proposes methods for analyzing fictionalized memoir texts, ego-sources, with the aim of enriching the traditionally dominant procedure for studying the history of text creation and in order to provide a more meaningful analysis. The author's special contribution to the study of this topic is the article's use of special methods for studying the language of text sources, which have allowed to reveal the meanings of key concepts and ideas that were important for their creators and the introduction of a number of significant concepts into the historical discourse, among which are the concepts of historical memory and identity.