The article deals with the novel “Narcissus and Zlatoust” by Hermann Hesse, the Swiss-German writer of the XX century, a famous master of the artistic word. The author considers the pragmatic potential of the stylistic means of comparison which characterizes the author's individual picture of the world. The implementation of the pragmatic potential studied is shown on the example of the semantic spheres “Flaws”, “Church” and “Subjects”.

Basedon the novel “Demian. Story of the Youth Written by Emil Sinkler” there are determined the functions of comparison and the ways to express it in the individual author’s world picture by a Swiss and German writer H. Hesse. There is revealed the artistic aesthetic and pragmatic potential of comparison by the example of the denotative sphere “Subjects and Artifacts”.