Abstract: The article is devoted to the analysis of rhetoric and polyphonic textual means and their relations in Fedor Dostoevsky's preface to his novel The Brothers Karamazov. In this research Tkachenko examines rhetoric methods that give a polyphonic tone to the text as well as peculiarities of a polyphonic text and means of affecting the reader. The rationale of the research is caused by the fact that rhetoric structures are still an understudied issue in the studies of Dostoevsky's prose while the author's preface has a big rhetoric potential as a literary form. The research is caused by the fac that the novel polyphony of Dostoevsky has been viewed from the point of view of rhetoric poetics for the first time in the academic literature. Moreover, the author of the article describes different modes of polyphony and for the first time describes the chronological polyphony and polyphony of a textual space partially related to the specific features of the author's preface and important for the main plot of the novel.