In the center of our attention is the journalistic style of V.G.Rasputin, shifts in thinking and linguistic form, reflecting the evolution of the writer's creative personality. The movement of his journalistic thought is considered on the material of the newspaper article «How many years will be in the XX1 century», which opens the postmantic period of creativity. Three variants of the text are compared, in which arguments of their own position, based on precedent phenomena, are gradually formed.