The article considers a hypothesis about the possible influence of the cycle of poems by A. de Musset “The Nights” on the poem by A. A. Fet “The Nightingale and the Rose”. The urgency of the topic can be explained by the increased interest of researchers of the last decade in the motif of the nightingale’s love for the rose in Eastern, Russian, and Western literature, and in the poetry of Fet in particular. In this regard, a detailed survey of literary studies on this issue seems timely. The authors turn to the identification of the main semantic roots of this motif and specify the distinctive features of their semantic nuances in different national literatures: from the philosophical-religious foundation to the writer’s desire to decorate the text with an oriental detail. The authors of this study, employing historico-comparative and analytical methods of textual research, conclude that de Musset’s poem “May Night” may have influenced the poem written by Fet both from the structural point of view (dialogic structure) and from the point of view of choosing certain artistic images: bird / nightingale, flower / rose, poet / muse, mountain / rock, etc.