A folk antagonist in the poetry of Vladimir Vysotsky

One of the directions in studying Vysotsky’s artistic heritage is to study his works in terms of how mythical and folklore poetics is realized in them. The article examines the creative interpretation of antagonists’ images and related motifs in Vysotsky's lyric poetry. The folklore artistic world is, to a great extent, demythologized in the poet's works, since Vysotsky portrays a special reality, where traditional connotations of folklore images no longer work. One of Vysotsky's most frequently used devices is "estranging", which, on the one hand, lets the reader (and the listener of the bard’s songs) "look at oneself from a different angle". On the other hand, it allows the poet to recreate an inverted, carnival world, which shows the anomalies of the real one.