The article considers text in terms of Daniil Harms's peculiarly normative poetics. Attention is paid to the domineering factor of the writer's work -the category of zaum, on the basis of which the characters' world is built. The author-character-reader relationships are extremely specific. Harms's works are filled with phantasmagoria and destruction, both in terms of phonetic-graphic, lexical-semantic, and situational aspects. Through desemantization, illogism and absurdity of everything and everyone, Harms brings his character and the world around him to liberation from the "mundane husk" and closer to God, to selfknowledge. Deconstruction (destruction), which characterizes an abstruse text, is the basic principle of Daniil Harms's texts. Harms's striving for zaum at the language level is reflected, in particular, in the use of onomastic vocabulary, anthroponyms, a large number of neologisms (even within the same text), semantic and syntactic nonsense, spelling and punctuation deviations; at the level of plotit is the use of completely ridiculous situations, caricature and de-individualization. In Harms's works, all sorts of deviations from linguistic norms and rules do not destroy the text, do not lead to the system destruction, but reveal the creative potential of the linguistic artist.