Purpose: This article studies the formation and functioning of irony in the narrow sense as a method based on linguistic means. The significance of this phenomenon is determined by the created ironic meaning, taking into the extra-linguistic components, features of the linguistic personality, subtext, etc. Since irony is based on such phenomena as context, subtext and content two-dimensional nature, which can be viewed by considering linguistic and extralinguistic components, it is appropriate to distinguish between non-reflective and reflexive ironic evaluation. The variety of methods for creating the ironical assessment in the writer’s literary texts allows us to assert that irony depends on the linguistic personality of the writer, his verbal inclinations to the language game, reflected in the linguistic and extra linguistic means of representing evaluation in the author’s prose. Method or methodology of the work. Methodological framework of this research paper, inter alia, includes the postulate of the acting character of the language, the postulate of the anthropocentricity of the language, as well as the systematic approach based on the principle of treating the text as an integrity of all its interrelations. For a comprehensive study of the prose by Arkady Averchenko, linguo-cognitive, linguo-cultural and linguo-pragmatic approaches are used, as well as methods of frequency and contextual analysis, the interpretative method and the method of semantic analysis. Results. Methods and means presented in the fictional prose by Arkady Averchenko for creating a language game, comic effects, ironical evaluativity at various levels of the linguistic and extra linguistic systems are elements of literary reality creating occasional links, which form new unusual meanings, interpretations and estimates.by combination and interaction. Scope of application of the results. The materials of this article can be used at giving special courses and special seminars on the writers’ idiostyle, the analysis of the literary texts, the interpretation of hidden meanings; in preparing lecture and practical classes on linguistics, speech communication, stylistics, Russian literature, linguoculturology, as well as writing graduate qualification papers, master’s theses.