This article is based on the analysis of the commentaries to Goethe’s “West-Oestlicher Divan” for a new bilingual edition; the purpose of these commen- taries was to explore the inner wholeness of a book created at the boundary of Eastern and Western cultures, and also its metapoetical plot. The problem of the commenting is that the whole plot is “beaded” on the frame of Eastern poets’ quotes and images – precise, minimally changed, retold, versified, often given without quote marks, as if “dissolved” in Goethe’s works. These quotes are fit into various contexts and create a special “evasive” book form, where the meaning of a word “blinks” from between sep- arate words, voids, cycles, finding its way into Goethe’s paraphenomenal symbolic re- ality that is one for the poetic word-symbol, nature, East and West.
The article analyzes poetological motifs and images that compile an independent metapoetic plot in Goethe’s “West-Eastern Divan”. From the point of view of the author of this article, the unity of the book is determined by means of the subject motif of the "oral", "stated" word. This Word becomes the cornerstone of both the natural "living» form (Gestalt) and the poetic form. Thus on the border of different cultures Goethe creates his art conception which eliminates the distinction between an eastern poetic word constructed on hints and allusions escaping its exact definition and western plastic form of a symbol.
The article dwells on autobiographical documents (diaries and letters) devoted to Goethe from the Moscow archive of E.Medtner. The author reconstructs an cultural utopia -- another one among Russian symbolist projects of self-fashioning: transforming Goethe from an aesthetic model and an object of personal cult into the founder of a new religion «Saint Wolfgang».