prayer

The article is aimed to consider the genre of prayer presented in the diaries of Leo Tolstoy. An analysis of the entries reveals that over the course of his life Tolstoy recorded several dozen prayers he made up. The article examines recorded appeals to God in syntactic, semantic and pragmatic terms. The research uses methods of description, conceptual and pragmatic analysis. The study reveals that Tolstoy violates the accepted canons, modelling an individual appeal to God.

This article is devoted to the description of genre system of religious style. The basis of the proposed classification of genres advanced by the author is the constructive principle of pretextuality reflecting such extralinguistic factors forming the style as religious consciousness and religious activities. The principle of pretextuality ensures succession preservation of religious concepts. The prototext in Christianity is the Gospel, which contains the genre samples, canonized invariant genre models which are offered to call protogenres.