This article is devoted to the archetypal image of the “horse” and the features of its artistic im-plementation in the poetic work of Alim Keshokov, a classicist of Kabardian literature. The article contains two logically interconnected parts. The first part provides a brief overview of hippologi-cal plots in the historical and ethnographic works of foreign and domestic caucasologists, as well as in the prose of M.Yu. Lermontov. The second is an analytical part in a systematic form, through the prism of historical poetics, the typology of the symbolic images of the “horse” in the poetry of A. Keshokov is studied. The content of the article is determined by the alignment of the diachron-ic cut of hippological motifs from naturalistic zoomorphic samples to astral ones. The results of the analysis, the following forms of semantic conceptualization of the mythologeme “horse” in the works of A. Keshokov were established - “rapid pace of life”, “nostalgia for the patriarchal world”, “resistance to civilization”, “emotional connection with the motherland”, “proximity to nature”, “ creative individuality of the artist”, “actualization of ecological collisions”, “priority of the spiritual over the material”. The article also notes a single case of deformation of the arche-typal image of the “horse” in the practice of literary translation.