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Abstract:

This article identifies one of the possible sources of A. Pushkin’s poem “When I wander along the noisy streets…” by tracing motifs and images that echo those of Goethe’s poem “The Wanderer”. Pushkin’s anonymous prose translation of the latter poem entitled “The Artist and the Village Woman” was published in Issue 13 of “Bulletin of Europe” in 1814. The magazine’s publisher V. Izmailov placed A. Pushkin’s poem “To a Poet Friend” after Goethe’s work. Pushkin may have also been acquainted with the poetic translation of Goethe’s poem made by V. Zhukovsky in 1819 and published under the title “The Traveler and the Villager” in the magazine “Son of the Fatherland” in 1823. In 1824, the translation was included in the third edition of “The Poems of Vasily Zhukovsky”, which Pushkin received in Odessa in 1824. This article publishes for the first time the text of a contract between the head of the Printing House of Moscow University M. Nevzorov (which published the “Bulletin of Europe”) and V. Izmailov, which is kept at the Central State Historical Archive of Moscow. This contract shows that it was V. Izmailov who placed Pushkin’s poem by “To a Poet Friend” after the translation of the work of the “glorious Goethe”. Thus, young Pushkin began his journey in poetry under the wing of the great Goethe.