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The paper examines different types of quotations in the early prose of an Ossetian-born Russian émigré writer Gajto Gazdanov (1903-1971). The analysis is divided into three parts: 1) the description of the Author’s biography, works and figure within the context of the first wave of the Russian emigration; 2) the identification and the definition of the dominant intertextual processes in Gazdanov’s prose: direct quotations (of a text, a work, a title), epigraphs, stylisations (i.e. the conscious imitation of the style of a writer); 3) the detailed analysis of these procedures in three emblematic texts: Tovarishch Brak (1928), entirely built on the subtext of A. Pushkin’s works; The Dragon (1928), which quotes the title of a story by E. Zamiatin and reworks its plot; The adventurer (1930), a stylisation of a prose by E. A. Poe with Poe himself as the main character. The reference to classic Russian and foreign authors in the writer’s early prose has the function of literary experimentation and it would have been refined over the years. This characteristic, which makes Gazdanov ‘strange’ for the contemporary emigration critics, marks instead his early adoption of postmodernist procedures.