Epic novel by L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace" as a polyphonic structure

The article is devoted to the revealing of the phe-nomenon of polyphony in the Tolstoy???s works. The article explores the phenomenon of polyphony in a general sense: thepolyphony is as the equality of mutually exclusive elements within the same seman- tic context / image / concept as to in the synchrony and in the diachrony. The relevance ofthe problem is due to the fact that the phenomenon of polyphony in the Tolstoy???s works was previously considered from the standpoint ofliterary criticism, but almost never analyzed in the context of text linguistics. The pur- pose ofthis work is the analyzing ofthe phenomenon of polyphony from the standpoint of text linguistics in the epic novel ???War and Peace???. For this purpose the main task of the study is to combine two ap- proaches in the analysis of a literary text: linguistic and literary approaches. In the semantic structure ofthe analyzed work, the phenomenon ofpolyphony will be expressed in the existence ofmutually exclu- sive meanings within the same semantic context, object (image), within the same concept, therefore the semantic structure of the image and the con-ceptually significant concepts of the epic novel will be endowed with a system ofopposed to each other meanings, which will lead to polyphony ofthe entire semantic structure of the text as a whole.