Abstract: The subject of this research is the category of tonality — one of the key text categories that reflects mentality of the author of the text. Essay, as a peculiar genre that functions at the intersection of publicistic and fiction styles, has its own typical range of tonality. Examination of the category of tonality in essays is a relevant  trend in the humanities. Well-known Soviet essays written by V. M. Peskov, which are considered exemplary, representative, and retain their relevance, served as the material for this work. The conducted analysis of V. M. Peskov’s essays reveals versatile means of explication of tonality and individual manner of the author. The novelty consists in observation that the texts of V. M. Peskov reflect the general tone of freedom and friendliness, the tone of conversation with the audience. His essays also reflect a clear authorial “Self”. Different essays mark different means of explication of tonality: in essays dedicated to nature, the author often applies metaphors, personifications, neutral words with positive connotations and words that express rational evaluation for imagery depiction of landscape with love for nature; in essays dedicated to people, the essayist often uses neutral lexicon with rational-evaluative or positive-evaluative connotations for creating image of the character; in essays dedicated to local culture, V. M. Peskov often applied emotionally expressive lexicon, words with suffixes of subjective evaluation, expressively syntactic constructs, special visual expressive means (personification, epithets, hyperbole, etc.) and colloquialism for admirable depiction of the local life and culture. Different techniques of explication of the category of tonality impose descriptiveness, attractiveness and influential power on the essay.

Abstract: The subject of this research is the category of theme – one of the leading text categories that reflects the subject matter of speech and extra-textual reality. Analysis of the category of theme in the essay genre is a relevant trend in modern linguistics. The essays by V. M. Peskov, whose works are considered exemplary and representative for the scientific research in the field of humanities, serve as the materials for this article. Among the essays of the Soviet period, the essays of V. M. Peskov rightfully hold a special place and retain its relevance. The research methodology contains categorical-textual analysis based on the category of communicativeness. The novelty consists in application of the categorical-textual method towards analyzing the genre of essay, which implies a combination of uniform by means of explication textual categories, and with a high degree of objectivity, allows to determine the characterological features of the genre and functional style. The means of explication of the category of theme in the genre of essay have the following peculiarities: incorporation of several functions in a single nomination (primary, basic, principal); application of diverse additional nominations (referentially identical nominations, synonyms, taxonomic nominations, substitutions, grammatical transformations, zero nominations). The analysis of a wide range of additional nominations demonstrates that the essays by V. M. Peskov with a high degree of confidence can be attributed to the field of publicistic, fiction and colloquial styles; or in other words, the genre is at the intersection of several functional styles.