Fyodor Tyutchev

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Fyodor Tyutchev wrote roughly 400 short poems across his entire life, yet he rarely bothered to write them down. When he did, he frequently lost the scraps of paper they were scribbled on. He called them bagatelles, trifles not worth publishing. His first collection did not appear until 1854, and it was assembled by Ivan Turgenev and others without any help from the poet himself. Yet those same poems would eventually be memorized by generations of Russians, set to music by Rachmaninov and other composers, and recognized by the Russian Symbolists as the work of a great poet. The question that runs through Tyutchev's life is how a man who spent 22 years abroad, who spoke French better than Russian, who never cared about his literary reputation, came to be counted among the most quoted poets in his language.

• 2. A Family of Deep Roots

  ›

  The Tyutchev family traced its lineage to a figure named Zakhariy Tutchev, mentioned in a 15th-century epic tale about the Battle of Kulikovo. That text described him as the most trusted man of Dmitry Donskoy. Sent as a messenger to the enemy commander Mamai, Zakhariy managed to expose traitors and return alive through his diplomatic gifts. It is a striking ancestral echo for a man who would spend decades as a diplomat himself.

  Fyodor's father, Ivan Nikolaevich Tyutchev, served as a court councillor managing the building and restoration of Moscow palaces through the Kremlin Expedition. One of Ivan's sisters, Princess Yevdokia Nikolaevna Meshcherskaya, became a hegumenia known for founding the Borisoglebsky Anosin Women's Monastery. Fyodor's mother, Countess Ekaterina Lvovna Tolstaya, connected the family to two distinguished Russian houses: the Tolstoys on her father's side and the Rimsky-Korsakov noble line on her mother's side. Her uncle was the war general Alexander Rimsky-Korsakov.

  Fyodor was born into this world on the Ovstug family estate near Bryansk. The weight of those family connections, the diplomatic instinct, the literary culture, the intertwining with Russian aristocracy, would shape everything that followed.

• 3. The Making of a Poet

  ›

  By the age of 13, Fyodor had joined the literary circle of Professor Merzlyakov in Moscow. Two years later, at 15, he published his first printed work: a translation of Horace's epistle to Maecenas. From that early moment, his poetic language set itself apart from Pushkin and his contemporaries through a deliberate use of majestic, solemn Slavonic archaisms.

  The guiding figure in those early years was his family tutor, Semyon Raich, a minor poet and translator. From 1819 to 1821, Tyutchev studied at the Philological Faculty of Moscow University. On graduating, he entered the Foreign Office, and in 1822 he accompanied his relative Count Ostermann-Tolstoy to Munich to take up a post as a trainee diplomat at the Russian legation. He would remain abroad for the next 22 years.

  Munich brought him into the orbit of the German Romantic movement, and that influence is visible throughout his poetry. He knew personally the poet Heinrich Heine and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The city also brought his first serious love. He fell for Amalie von Lerchenfeld, the illegitimate half-sister of a young Bavarian diplomat. Their relationship nearly ended in a duel, probably with his colleague Baron Alexander von Krüdener, in January 1825. Amalie was pressed by her relatives into marrying the much older Krüdener instead. She and Tyutchev stayed friends and moved in overlapping diplomatic circles for decades. Poems including Tears, K.N., and Ia pomniu vremia zolotoe are believed to have been inspired by her. Their final meeting came on the 31st of March 1873, when Amalie visited him on his deathbed. The following day he wrote to his daughter Daria: "Yesterday I felt a moment of burning emotion due to my meeting with... my dear Amalie Krüdener who wished to see me for the last time in this world and came to take her leave of me. In her person my past and the best years of my life came to give me a farewell kiss."

• 4. Diplomat in Exile

  ›

  In 1826, Tyutchev married Eleonore Peterson, a Bavarian widow and the Countess von Bothmer, whose late husband had been secretary of the Russian mission in Munich. Neither Eleonore nor his second wife Ernestine understood Russian at first, which is less surprising given that Tyutchev himself spoke French better than Russian and conducted nearly all his private correspondence in that language.

  In 1836, a former Munich colleague named Prince Ivan Gagarin obtained Tyutchev's permission to publish a selection of his poems in Sovremennik, a literary journal then edited by Pushkin. Pushkin recognized their quality. The public did not respond.

  The following year brought a turning point that was not literary but administrative. Tyutchev was transferred to the Russian legation in Turin. Finding the city uncongenial, he left his post without official permission to marry Ernestine von Dörnberg in Switzerland. She had already become his mistress while Eleonore was still alive and had borne him a child. His unauthorized departure was discovered, and he was dismissed from the Foreign Service. He lived in Germany for five more years without any official position.

  Eleonore's death in 1838 silenced him as a poet for roughly a decade. He turned instead to political writing, publishing articles in Western periodicals including the Revue des Deux Mondes, laying out his views on Russia's place in the world. He finally returned to St. Petersburg in 1844 and was quickly reinstated in government service as a censor, eventually rising to become Chairman of the Foreign Censorship Committee and a Privy Councillor.

• 5. The Denisyeva Cycle

  ›

  In 1850, Tyutchev began an affair with Elena Denisyeva, who was more than twenty years his junior. She remained his mistress until her death from tuberculosis in 1864. They had three children together. The relationship produced a body of lyric verse that critics have placed among the finest love poetry in Russian literature.

  The poems of the so-called Denisyeva Cycle are permeated, in one critical description, with a sublime feeling of subdued despair. Scholars have variously called the cycle "a novel in verse", "a human document, shattering in the force of its emotion", and "a few songs without comparison in Russian, perhaps even in world poetry". The poem Last Love is most often cited as the emblematic work of the whole sequence.

  That an affair conducted in secret, by a diplomat who regarded his own poems as trifles, could produce verses of that scale is one of the central puzzles of Tyutchev's career. The cycle was recognized only gradually, in part because Tyutchev himself was a reluctant publisher. When Nikolay Nekrasov listed Russian poets in 1850, he praised Tyutchev as one of the most talented among what he called minor poets. The first collected volume of his verse appeared only in 1854.

• 6. A World of Night and Chaos

  ›

  The roughly 200 lyric pieces at the core of Tyutchev's achievement, whether describing nature or the passions of love, place a premium on metaphysics. His poetic world is described as bipolar. He operated habitually with paired categories: night and day, north and south, dream and reality, cosmos and chaos, the still world of winter and spring teeming with life. Each image carried a specific philosophical weight.

  Night, in Tyutchev's poetry, was defined by critics as a poetic image that economically covers the vast notions of time and space as they affect man in his struggle through life. In the chaotic, fathomless world of night, winter, and the north, his figures feel tragically abandoned and alone. That modernist quality, the sense of frightening anxiety, helps explain why Tyutchev's reputation did not peak in his own lifetime.

  His poem Silentium!, written in 1830, is often called archetypal. Its rhythm was crafted specifically to make reading in silence easier than reading aloud. Its imagery is anthropomorphic and charged with pantheism. The poem opens: "Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal / the way you dream, the things you feel." The translation printed here is by Vladimir Nabokov. It was not until the late 19th and early 20th century that the Russian Symbolists, including Vladimir Solovyov, Andrey Bely, and Alexander Blok, recognized Tyutchev as a major poet and brought his reputation to the prominence it holds today.

• 7. Music and Legacy

  ›

  Tyutchev's poems have drawn composers across more than a century. Nikolai Medtner's Night Wind piano sonata of 1911 was inspired by the poem "O chem ty voesh' vetr nochnoy...". Rachmaninov set Tyutchev's Spring Waters to music in a well-known song. Georgi Catoire set Silentium! as an art song in the early 20th century. Boris Tchaikovsky, who lived from 1925 to 1996, included a setting of Silentium! in his 1974 cantata Signs of the Zodiac.

  Composer Lyubov Streicher, born in 1888 and died in 1958, set Tyutchev's texts in her Romances, as did Ukrainian composer Valentina Ramm. The Ukrainian composer Valentyn Sylvestrov, born in 1937, made a setting of Last Love that was recorded by Alexei Lubimov and Jana Ivanilova on an album called Stufen. Julian Cochran set two poems related to night, The Night Wind and The Night Sea, for soprano and piano.

  Tyutchev died following a series of strokes, in Tsarskoye Selo in 1873, and was buried at Novodevichy Monastery in St. Petersburg. His second wife Ernestine survived him by 21 years. One of his short political poems has passed into something close to a popular Russian maxim, in John Dewey's translation: "Who would grasp Russia with the mind? / For her no yardstick was created: / Her soul is of a special kind, / By faith alone appreciated." At the end of Andrey Tarkovsky's film Stalker, a character recites a Tyutchev poem, a detail that suggests how deeply his voice had embedded itself in Russian cultural memory by the late 20th century.