One of the main characteristics of a literary text is its absolute anthropocentric character, consisting in the fact that the main image subject is a human being, i.e. the character in any literary work. Nowadays the issues of dialogue speech have intensive development as the communicative function of language is the most organically expressed in the dialogue and naturally appears in the process of dialogical interaction of people. The article focuses on the peculiarities of the dialogue as a particular compositional form of fiction and its role in creating the character image (gender, age, national, racial, local and temporal characteristics, social status) through explicit and implicit linguistic means. Description of character traits, names of women and men, age, nationality, profession, education, social status are explicit means by which the character image is created. Among the implicit means there are functionally coloured words in the characters’ speech, jargon, dialect and means that require the additional background knowledge to interpret them (allusion, place names, references to dates of historical events, names of famous people, names of books, theaters, etc.) on behalf of readers.