Heine and the Russian Poets from Lermontov to Blok

The importance of Heine’s influence in nineteenth-century Russian literature is an assured and well-attested fact. Heine belongs among that select company of poets who have found a second home in Russia. ¹ Her foremost poets and men of letters all played their part in that remarkable reception and assimilation. The very substantial study by Jakov I. Gordon, to which I am much indebted for information and stimulus, makes this claim even more emphatically: ‘Die russische Literatur ist ohne Heine schon kaum mehr vorstellbar, ja seit den sechziger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts ist er der bekannteste, meist gelesene und geschätzte ausländische Dichter in Rußland.’ ² In attempting to offer something like a bold outline of the extent of Heine’s reception among Russia’s greatest poets in the past century, I shall therefore of necessity confine my observations to a number of representative and telling examples.