diary

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.

The article verifies the hypothesis that Leo Tolstoy’s diary has the form of a hidden dialogue of the writer with various subjects: with himself, with third parties, with God. Dialogue is understood as a form of individual development. The article determines that Leo Tolstoy’s diary represents a program of self-improvement, which is achieved through goal-setting and self-assessment. In the traditional perception of the diary genre, entries are interpreted as a form of autocommunication, carried out for the purpose of self-identification of the individual.

The diary is a lyrical speech genre, if we consider speech genres from the point of view of the universal triad that goes back to the antiquity – epic, lyric and drama. Diary is a recognition of the special price of the word, consistently saving a grain of everyday life experience. The article outlines the idea of a two-step indirect diary addressee. The first step: «I» is the author, meaning him(her)self in some future tense. The second step is the turn to the descendants, to an unknown reader-interlocutor, to likely biographers, etc. – on demand.