The article examines the texts of Gaito Gazdanov’s story “The Beggar” and its translation into English made by Brayan Karetnik from the standpoint of linguistic analysis, combining the use of both qualitative methods (the method of continuous sampling, descriptive-analytical and comparative-contrastive methods) and a quantitative method (namely, statistical). A comprehensive study of the text enables us to identify the stylistic means of expression that contribute to the author’s intention in terms of its ideological and conceptual components and linguistic design, thus obtaining the most accurate understanding of the work, the writer’s style and manner, which, taken together, determine the study’s relevance. A parallel examination of the linguistic means of expression in the original and translated versions provides insight into how precisely and completely the author’s intention is conveyed in the target language, which is a new approach in the study of Gaito Gazdanov’s works. A linguistic analysis of the texts has revealed that the life components of the story’s protagonist, the Parisian Gustave Verdier, who voluntarily chose the lifestyle of a beggar, are meaninglessness, denial and devaluation, indifference, freedom, loss of identity, emptiness, routineness, dullness and alienation, doomedness. Linguistically, these components are realized through lexical, syntactic, morphological, and phonetic expressive means: repetitions (anaphors and enumerations), negations, gradations and antigradations, synonyms and antonyms, comparisons, parallelism, zeugma, rhetorical questions, and alliteration. Both in the original and the target language, attention is drawn to the preference for the personal pronoun “he” over the proper name, almost complete absence of dialogues, descriptive nature of the narrative, abundance of participial phrases and homogeneous clauses, as well as several foreign (French) insertions.