Narratives of traditional folk culture bearers about the war can be regarded as an independent genre variety (subgenre) of autobiographical story, for which personal principle is crucial. Rural residents’ stories about the war are marked by egocentricity which characterizes dialect speech in general. War stories represent stable types of dialect narrative with thematic unity, common semantic and narrative organization, and pragmatic principles. The conceptual basis of war stories is the theme of personal suffering. The narrative organization of villagers’ stories about the war is characterized by a clear temporal structuring, which correlates,among other things, with the chronotope of the speaker’s personal participation in the event. In the dialect speakers’ stories about the war, the characteristic features of dialectal communication, such as pictorial speech and combination of narrative topic with the situation of current communication, are vividly manifested (due to their emotional intensity). The specificity of the genre of the folk war story is also provided by a number of characteristic pragmatic principles: authenticity, didacticism, verbalization of religious and mythological notions. The reference of the bearer of traditional folk culture to the theme of war underlies the choice of the means used in the narrative, namely semantics, syntactics and pragmatics of the text, which indicates the genre-forming potential of the war theme.