Pis’ma iz tjur’my’ Il’i Sel’vinskogo kak mistifikacija

The cycle ‘Letters from Prison’ by Il’ja Sel’vinskij is usually reckoned among his early works. It is believed that these poems (from 10 to 13 depending on the edition) were written by the poet in 1919-1920, when he was imprisoned in Simferopol and Sevastopol. Meanwhile, in our opinion, the poems of the ‘Letters from Prison’ were written much later, most likely in the early 1960s. They are considered early poems as a consequence of a successful mystification carried out by the author. In this paper we present various arguments that support this point of view: from biographical and textual to lexical and statistical.