The focus is on Hoffmann, without whom it is difficult to imagine the development of Russian prose. The lecture examines how his imagination, grotesque, and interest in doubles resonated with Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok, and their successors, and also helps to look at familiar school classics and the genre of romantic prose in a new way. The name of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann usually comes up in the context of German Romanticism, the tales of the Nutcracker, and dark fantasies about mad musicians and strange mechanical dolls. Meanwhile, his texts have deeply rooted themselves in Russian culture and influenced how domestic writers viewed man, the city, and their own era. The lecture will explore how Hoffmann's motifs moved to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the fictional spaces of Russian prose. It will become evident how whimsical grotesque and eerie humor resonate in the pages of Gogol, how themes of duality and internal division resonate with Dostoevsky, and how fantasy on the edge of dream and delirium is reinterpreted by Turgenev and Saltykov-Shchedrin. A separate plot will be the attempts of Odoevsky to build his own dialogue with his German counterpart in writing.