“Imaginary orphanhood: Khlebnikov and Kharms in the context of Russian and European modernism” is an attempt to subject the artistic works, manifestos and life-creative practices of the first avant-garde to an unbiased examination, independent of both the cult of the avant-garde and the inertia of its perception that has developed over a century. The monograph problematizes the nature of the first avant-garde, the legitimacy of the unique place it occupied in today's literary canon, and the scope of its innovation. In the development of this research program, fascinating intellectual routes are laid out from existing interpretations of the famous works of Khlebnikov and Kharms - through their contextualization - to new ones. As a result, both writers reveal a rich pre-avant-garde pedigree. The analysis of the work of Khlebnikov and Kharms reaches its dramatic peak when discussing their programmatic gestures of breaking with tradition (like throwing Pushkin from a modern ship). both writers turn out, without wanting it, to be typical representatives of modernism, sharing intellectual fashions, plots, motives, life-creative and advertising strategies with their era. Their belonging to modernism is also demonstrated in the section devoted to the numerological topos of Russian literature. Having learned the mathematical repertoire from his modernist contemporaries, Khlebnikov used it to create his own automythologems (like the “King of Time”), to which modernists such as Kuzmin and Zamyatin, Mandelstam and the Oberiuts then reacted in a non-trivial way. For philologists specializing in avant-garde and modernism, and a wide range of readers.