The subject of the article is the question of alternatives to classical tradition in the Russian literature of the late 17th — 19th centuries. Classical tradition is understood as the historically connected plurality of obviously and absolutely model authors and model texts which are perceived as aesthetically perfect in absolute degree. Such perfection is determined by the fact that these model texts reach the final goals of mimesis, which for the classical tradition consist in viewing the world of ideas and intending to incarnate eidos in the real language, rather than an imitation of reality. The article studies the poetry of S. S. Averintsev. The analysis of its thematic, genre and verse dominating features allows to see the peculiar development of literary trends of late 17th — early 18th centuries in Averintsev’s poetry connected with the transformation of autochthonous artistic sources which generated a whole range of original texts, including poetic ones. These works existed as if in two dimensions: that of traditional literature and that of Western European literature. Such historic correlation made Averintsev’s poetry an attempt to present the classical tradition in Russian literature as a direct development of medieval verbal principles in their Moscow variant. A similar position was supported by philological conceptions of the scholar and was also confirmed by statements of a number of literary critics, as well as by poetry of O. A. Sedakova, congenial to Averintsev. The article raises the question of correlation of such perceptions with historical and literary facts: was Averintsev’s poetry the actualization of the potentials that really existed in Russian literature?