This article discusses how the conceptual poet Vs.N. Nekrasov talked about Kozma Prutkov as a literary persona, A.K. Tolstoy as the most prominent of Kozma’s creators, and “prutkovskian” traits in contemporary literature and A.K. Tolstoy’s prose. For Vs. Nekrasov the making of Prutkov was a fruitful attempt to “neutralize” some potentially dangerous consequences of so-called “literature-centrism”. Some of the texts under analysis were taken from Vs. Nekrasov’ personal archives (transcripts of speeches, reports for the Russian Theatre Society, drafts, etc.) and are now published for the first time.