Complex speech events are a special form of communicative interaction, have a complex structure and are fixed in the language in the form of names. Interpretation of texts of memoirs and stories about life, as well as media texts about events, should take into account the cognitive aspects of the presentation of the event in the text - the features of the reference and text events, as well as the existence of a prototypical event. Analysis of complex speech events on the material of memorial texts allows us to determine the socio-cultural factors that form this or that event concept.