Methodological suggestions are offered for teaching metaphor in Russian as a native language instruction with the didactic objective of familiarizing students with the linguistic means of metaphor creation, its poetic-expressive potentials, and usage in colloquial and literary Russian. It is proposed that students' everyday experience be utilized in demonstrating how metaphors are produced, what communicative and artistic functions they can perform, and how they relate to other devices of figurative language use, e.g., simile, metonymy, or personification. Appropriate passages from Russian poetry and prose are utilized as teaching material to illustrate a metaphor's potential in the "hands of the masters of the Russian language." Examples of metaphor analysis in the classroom are produced. (Z. Dubiel in LLBA 2001, vol. 35, n. 4)