“The Beetle’s Buzzing. Animated Nature in Works of M. M. Prishvin as a challenge for translation (From the correspondence with Alexander Eliasberg)” retraces the genesis of the first translation of Mikhail Prishvin’s early travel sketches into German. Two years before the outbreak of World War I the Russian nature writer and his translator Alexander Eliasberg became acquainted via mutual friends like Aleksei Remizov, Valery Briusov or Dmitry Merezhkovsky. Their correspondence bears witness to the challenge Prishvin’s experiences in offside Russian nature, as expressed in his atmospheric descriptions, his use of metaphors from myth and fairytale as well as anthropomorphizations, meant to the translator. Eliasberg’s compilation (published 1914/17 in Munich) covers sketches from Prishvin’s travels to the Kyrgyz steppe, the far North, and to the Old Believers in Central Russia’s deep forests.