Daily life of military hospital trains: research potential of the anthropology of frontline extremity

The article deals with the understudied aspects of frontline everyday life: the casual life of military hospital trains during the wars of the first half of the twentieth century. During the functioning of the railway military evacuation service, its structure and management system was changing, the capacity for transporting wounded soldiers increased and the infrastructure improved. Meanwhile, most of the problems of the daily life of the military hospital trains remained the same. The purpose of this work is to reveal the research potential of the anthropology of extreme situations of war using materials related to the daily life of military hospital trains in Russia in the first half of the twentieth century. A wide range of methodological approaches, from social history to emotionology, can be used for the analysis of “small life-worlds”, an example of which was the intentionally constructed space of an ambulance train. Strategies for survival in the marginal circumstances of a mobile rescue vehicle and the extreme nature of being between the theater of operations and the rear - between life and death - can be explored in line with historical and anthropological approaches. In addition to archival materials, personal documents were used as the research sources. The corpus of the ego-documents of mid-level medical workers (sisters of mercy) is the most complete, with the ego-documents of sanitary workers and doctors less available and the narrative sources created by the railway employees practically absent. The interpretation of visual sources (photographs and newsreels) and the representations of an ambulance train image in artistic culture can also be challenging. The study resulted in identifying gaps for further research and finding resources for applying new research trends. Historical psychology allows us to consider the formation of adaptation practices in the field conditions of the war time and reveal the compensatory functions of cultural events in the limited space of an ambulance train. Imagology and gender studies can be effectively used to analyze interethnic and gender communication practices. Interdisciplinary research proves to be the most effective means for dealing with this topic and opens the possibility for the preparation of monographs.