The article discusses the stages of conducting a philological analysis of a literary text to the audience, contributing to the correct understanding of the work, developing reading abilities. The levels of reading of the text are characterized, the methods of identifying the functional and stylistic load of the language means of the text are described. The study of the text in the figurative-linguistic plane is associated, first of all, with the study of the functioning of the word in communicative and aesthetic aspects. The ways of revealing the content-subtext information in the literary text are indicated.