The article deals with establishing the specific role of inner speech in a literary text as a tool for introducing the unreal into the real world, based on the example of the short story by M. L. Kashnitz The Straw. The authors rely on the idea of speech positions in the heroine’s internal dialogues with the absent or potential interlocutors; on the concept of active silence, which in fact means the actualization of the heroine’s idea; on the idea of restructuring the essence of the “I” in a complex process of autocommunication.
