The article dwells upon the problem scarcely investigated in literary studies: a folklore tradition in O. Mandelstam’s poetry. The researchers studied manifestation of mythological tradition in the poet’s artistic world and revealed different archetypal models but they paid no attention to folklore elements. Only folklorists and ethnographers, while describing children's games associated with the theme of death, refer to one text of the poet illustrating their scientific research. This remark made it possible to develop the idea of folklore tradition existing in the acmeist’s works having a latent character. The folklore commentary of one of the poems makes it possible to understand an image structure of the text in other way and brings a reader to the ontological level of the content.