The article deals with the problem of the use of phraseological units in literary texts. With reference to the lyrics by Mikhail Shcherbakov, the author investigates into the authorial transformations of phraseological locutions as a form of the language game. The article introduces the concept of “phraseological modifi cation” which is defi ned as the change of the form or the meaning of a phraseological unit, clearly detected by the addressee, but maintaining the correlation of that unit
with its standard form and meaning. The author provides a review of existing classifi cations of phraseological modifi cations and suggests her own classifi cation based on the direction of transformation — into the idiom (called intraphraseological) or outside, directed to the context
(called extraphraseological). The author considers various kinds of modifi cations used by different authors and in different text styles (e.g. augmentation or cutting of an idiom, replacement of one of its components, phraseological interference, etc.), as well as those that are specifi c for Mikhail Shcherbakov's lyrics (e.g. extension of an idiom to a text).