Category of tonality in the genre of essay (on the example of essays of V. M. Peskov)

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.