There is a tradition in literary criticism of contrasting an author's early works with his late works and declaring the last ones to be the embodiment of decadence. This is how the artistic evolution of Viktor Shklovsky, Leonid Leonov, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Nikolai Tikhonov, Nikolai Aseev and others is often described. (The consistency of this view of the creative biography of this or that writer with its real facts and their real aesthetic significance is as a rule very subjective). Eduard Limonov's poetry is clearly divided into three periods (the early one, the ?migr? one and the late one) and is seen by most literature scholars and critics as a pattern of movement from early masterpieces to later works of a not very high level. This article attempts to revise the prevailing view of E. Limonov's late poems, which, in the author's opinion, are not inferior to the poems of the early period. The article proves that the negative attitude to E. Limonov's texts created in the 2000s is largely due to the scandals surrounding the figure of the poet in the media, which have above all political reasons. A close study of Limonov's later poems reveals that their artistic level is not inferior to the aesthetic quality of the earlier texts. What concerns their formal features include experiments in shifting accents, truncating and modifying endings, changing and adding morphemes, breaking syntactic constructions, and playing with indentation in the graphic design of the poem. The article shows that these experiments, already found in the early works of Limonov, become more radical in the later period of his poetic career
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