The literary success of the German romantic writer Friedrich de La Motte Fouquet - quite a significant figure in Germany in the 1810s - turned out to be short-lived. The only work of this “overly prolific,” according to his contemporary Ludwig Tieck, a writer, that has stood the test of time, was the fairy tale “Ondine.” But in Russia and with it, Fouquet was not lucky: the brilliant poetic translation of Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky completely eclipsed the figure of the German author. Since then, a century and a half ago, the story of a mermaid in love in Russia has not even been attempted to be translated. It was Zhukovsky’s “romantic tale” that was published at the beginning of the 20th century with color illustrations by the English artist Arthur Rackham, originally created for Fouquet’s story. A prose translation of “Ondine” was made already in the 20th century by the German philologist, researcher of literature of the 17th–18th centuries, Nina Aleksandrovna Zhirmunskaya.