This article presents the results of a study of the dynamics of the value orientations of upper-grade students, based on an analysis of biographical texts and essays. The empirical material, gathered in 1989-1993 and 2002 in St. Petersburg schools, was not published and is kept in the Biography Collection of the sector of social and cultural changes in the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences. A synchronic analysis of the values of school students (diagnostic measurement in the early 1990s and the past nine years) makes it possible to determine the dynamics of the axiosphere of a particular group of young people, upper-grade secondary school students. For the present study, use is made of the most common definition of the term "value": something that is important and vital to the individual. What is meant by the dynamics of the value orientations of school students is any change in the axiosystem (the system of values) of upper-grade students as a social group. It is characteristic of the biographical texts of school students that in contrast to those written by people of other age groups, the students' texts represent a description of their lives covering a relatively brief period of time (from birth to sixteen or seventeen). Thus certain elements of adults' ordinary set of values--work, marriage and family, love for one's children--are missing. This element is compensated for by their essays on the theme "Myself in "N" years," describing the respondent's life after a certain number of years. Sometimes the essays are titled "Letters from the Future." The study made use of sixty-two autobiographies and sixty-two essays about the future. The study showed that the set of values in the essays is "more diversified" than in the autobiographies. In their essays, students had to talk about the future, and almost always addressed the purpose of life, describing terminal and instrumental values in more detail. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.) [This article was translated by Kim Braithwaite.]