E.T.A. Hoffman’s Adventure on New Year’s Eve as a Pretext of Anna Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero

The article identifies one of the precedent sources of the Poem Without a Hero - the short story by E.T.A. Hoffman Adventure on New Year’s Eve. The revealed intertextual overlap is due to similar models of the world, whose commonality is primarily manifested at the spatial level. It is shown how the romantic duality in the Hoffmanian sense (set in this novel) generates narrative strategies in Akhmatova’s text (a game with narrative modes complicated by a love conflict) and a number of motivic-figurative paradigms that are “embedded” in the plot (paradigms of borderline, mirroring, duality). It is proved that the Poem Without a Hero is a new way of working with tradition, when the plot-narrative scheme, correlated with profoundly identical models of the world, attracts the corresponding topoi and author’s images. In this context, intertextuality becomes a genuine mechanism of literary tradition.