The purpose of the article is to attempt to consider the epistolary and diary as forms and means of communication and to clarify the significance of their communicative functions for biography. It is these documentary sources that play a particularly important role in reconstructing biographies. Thanks to these ego-documents, it is possible to recreate in extraordinary detail the biographies of the diary author or those who conduct a letter dialogue. Each of them appears as a communicative personality, whose activities can be analyzed by introducing modern principles of researching communicative practices. In the process of analysis, the historical-comparative method, textual analysis, as well as source research methods were applied, the basis of which is objectivity and historicism, which make it possible to study the communicative features of diary and epistolary writing. The novelty lies in the desire to apply the communicative functions of letters and diaries for a deeper disclosure of biographies, to identify mechanisms for analyzing letter dialogue and diary narrative, which is directed at the author himself or at an imaginary addressee. Thanks to the sciences that study communicative practices and communicative personality, biography can significantly expand its methodological arsenal. An epistolary, like a diary, is a form of biography of the author of a letter or diary. Correspondence and diary writing create a kind of communicative field in which dates, events, society, history, culture, politics, or everyday life of a particular era are reproduced with particular care. The author of a letter or diary appears as a communicative personality, whose analysis can be carried out at three defining levels: verbal-semantic, linguocognitive, and motivational. Epistolary communication reveals the cognitive experience of the sеnder and the addressee, their needs, the peculiarities of communicative consciousness, as well as the mastery of the art of communicative means. Of great importance for biography is the communicative intention of the diary author, the thematic range of the diary writing, and the type of the diary itself.

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