The legacy of the European Romantics and the motif of a traveler in the night (A. S. Pushkin and M. Y. Lermontov)

This article examines European origins of Pushkin's and Lermontov's romantic motif 'wandering in the night' in the works of German and English Romantic poets. The image of the night as an «echo» of the day held an important place in the hierarchy of «universal empathy» in the Romanticist poetic thinking («the light also shines in the night», interpret-ing the biblical text: «and the light shines in darkness, and darkness has not embraced it» (John 1:5). In the famous works by Pushkin and Lermontov, «The Winter Road», «The Possessed», and «I Go Out Alone on the Road...», wander-ing in the night is immersed in an atmosphere of romantic dual reality. The motif of communication in poetic texts is by no means the property of our global communication age alone, but goes back to earlier eras: Antiquity (Homer's Odys-sey), the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (the poetry of Dante and Chaucer), Pre-Romanticism and Romanticism (the poetry of Goethe, Eicheldorf, and Hölderlin). Pushkin's later poem «The Wanderer» (1835) goes back to John Benja-min's poem «The Way of the Pilgrims» (1678). Pushkin's poetic quest of the 1830s turned to the motifs of Salvation and Light, the search for the Right Way (the image of a young man reading a book (the Bible) in «The Wanderer», showing the traveler the Right Way and the narrow gate of Salvation). Lermontov, in his famous nocturne «I go out alone on the road...» (1840s), creates an image of a traveler in the night, which is closely related to the tradition of the German Romantics: Goethe, Eichendorff, and Hölderlin. Pushkin's «night inquiries» in 1830 and 1835 texts, with refer-ences to John Benjamin's English poem and to the Lake School poets W. Wordsworth and R. Southey, are a striking proof of F. M. Dostoyevsky's thoughts on the «universal empathy» of our great poet.