The article examines the basic features of B. Okudzhava’s poetics, called sentimental grotesque. It shows that his figurative and lexical structure stems from the opposition of high and low: “man – God”, “household – sacred”, “insect man”. A stable means of creating grotesque images, in addition to the collision of different layers of vocabulary, is the environment of “high” images with household details, the most important of which is worn clothes, often named with the help of diminutives. The poems in which some leitmotivs of Okudzhava’s poetry first appeared are established. The conclusion done,that the sentimental grotesque is a feature of building an image of the world in Okudzhava lyrics of the second half of the 1950s and 1960s.