About the book: 2024 / Aesopian language is a means of bypassing censorship and conveying to the recipient what cannot be said in plain text. Russian literature treated Aesopian language as a sad necessity, and therefore developed a huge arsenal of allegories: metaphors, allusions, anachronisms and parodies. The text of the dissertation of Lev Losev, a famous poet and literary critic, published for the first time, is an excursion into the history of the issue, a detailed classification of “Aesopian” techniques and an analysis of numerous examples from Soviet literature. Among the heroes of this book are Daniil Kharms, Evgeny Schwartz, Arkady Belinkov, Evgeny Yevtushenko, and the Strugatsky brothers. The book is preceded by an introductory article by Alexandra Arkhipova (included by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in the register of foreign agents), examining Aesopian language from the perspective of anthropology, folklore and history of the 20th century. Lev Losev (1937–2009) – one of the leading poets of the “philological school”, literary critic, memoirist, biographer of Joseph Brodsky, teacher of Russian literature at Dartmouth College (USA).