M. Kuzmin is one of the few poets of the early XX century whose lack of connection with the literary canon does not lead, like his colleagues, to loud rebellion (See: Markov V. F. On freedom in poetry: articles, essays, miscellaneous. St. Petersburg, 1994, pp. 27-47). However, the poet, being in the very center of poetic search, remains free to choose individual means of artistic expression. We put forward a thesis about the paradoxical nature of Kuzmin's poetics. The desire of the artist of the word, as on a cubist canvas, to depict the world in all its manifestations simultaneously forces the poet to violate the rules and laws of grammar and vocabulary (it is not by chance that O. E. Mandelstam spoke of the" deliberate negligence " of the poet). We should not forget that in some periods of his work Kuzmin uses the Zaumi technique and writes poems in the style of "nonsense "(for example, "Pskov August"), and his short stories of the 1920s, such as "Blue Nothing", "Five Conversations and one Incident", "The Stove in the Bathhouse" come closer to poetics See: Gheron G. Mixail Kuzmin and the Oberiuty: an Overview // Wiener slawistischer Almanach. Wien, 1983. Bd. 12. S. 87-101). By language paradoxes, we mean various types of semantic and syntactic transformations of the poetic language that lead to a violation of the semantic uniformity of the text, a deliberate violation of logical connections and, thereby, expand the view of the text. The traditional means of breaking the semantic uniformity of a text is antonymy. Kuzmin actively uses antonyms as the main lexical way of expressing antitheses: Ah, am I, dark one, I will enter that bright garden; Louder and sweeter is the silence of my lips, / Than the grandeur / Of sonorous Choirs; Sadness with hope hands sniffle; The victim and the murderer mingle wonderfully; Who will confirm love with separation?; A terrible angel in a sweet face is imagined to me; Poison is poisoned-peaceful waves (Here and further cit. by: Kuzmi ... Read more