Once more about the little fish’s song from Lermontov’s narrative poem The Novice [Mtsyri]

Abstract

Scholars sound very tentative when mentioning E. T. A. Hoffmann’s influence on M. Lermontov’s work. The only testimony of Lermontov’s awareness of Hoffmann’s oeuvre dates from 1840, yet it is almost unimaginable that the poet, always up to date with latest works of literature, would not have discovered the German Romantic author sooner, especially since he was widely read in Russia. In particular, the fairy tale The Golden Pot (1814), which provides the material for comparison with The Novice [Mtsyri] (1839), was published in 1839 in the same journal Moskovskiy Nablyudatel that had printed the first reviews of Lermontov’s works, and may therefore have been known to the poet. The article focuses on a literary parallel that has thus far escaped scholarly attention: the fish of gold in Lermontov’s poem and the gold snake in Hoffmann’s novella. The author argues that the parallel is more pronounced than the often suggested similarities between the fish and the ‘sirens’ of Goethe’s The Fisherman and Heine’s The Lorelei. The article studies the fragments of the snakes’ first appearance in The Golden Pot and the encounter with the gold fish in The Novice in terms of vocabulary and motifs.