The aim of the work is to represent the idea of the fractional perception of one’s own self within the boundaries of the poetic text using the example of the fusion of mystical, real and conventional playspace in the poems of O. Paz and G. Maliev. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the chosen aspect of studying the ways of selfidentification of the subject in the field of modernist discourse based on the example of Mexican and Ossetian literature. For the first time in the history of Ossetian philological research, Maliev’s work is subjected to a comprehensive literary analysis in the context of intercultural connections and influences. Paz’s and Maliev’s texts explicate the theory of stratified wholeness of understanding of the world and man in it. In Paz, the cyclical nature of the time loop and the division of the lyrical self reflects both the current methods of modernism - surrealistic games with the subconscious and creative techniques - and the idea of the eternal search for the ideal, lost time, the harmonious and enduring “now”. In Maliev’s work, the problem of identity manifests itself in the search for the self, through an attempt to meet the elusive guest, whose essence is something native, close and, at the same time, otherworldly and transcendent. The commonality of the poets’ worldview consists in the same choice of poetic space (night, deserted street) and in the impossibility to come into contact with a doppelgänger, a shadow, a guest, as an embodiment of the phenomenon of Ouroboros, a temporary loop of selfrejection in the world of looped loneliness. The result of the study presents the assertion that the search for selfhood in the literature of the early twentieth century moves away from tragic reality into a playful, conventional sphere, when the idea itself becomes the semantic center, and the end result is not as important as the striving for it.