FYODOR TYUTCHEV

By Lyubov Tsarevskaya

Tyutchev's amazingly, sonorous, musical and lyric verse is something every Russian gets to know at an early age. Many of his lines now enjoy wide currency here in Russia and Russia's greatest poet Alexander Pushkin and the formidable Leo Tolstoy both heaped praise on Tyutchev's inimitable verse.

Fyodor Tyutchev was born into a noble family of modest means at Ovtsug in the Oryol region on December 5, 1803. Obtaining excellent home education, he then moved on to become Moscow University graduate. Falling in love with literature at an early age, he started making Russian translations of Horace at the early age of twelve and wrote his first poem at sixteen. Because every respectable nobleman living in mid-19th century Russia was supposed to take up a civilian or military career, Tyutchev opted for a diplomatic job serving his country as a diplomat with the Foreign Ministry headquarters in St.Petersburg and later was posted to Munich and Turin successfully combining official paperwork with writing poetry. He was married to Eleanor Peterson, a widowed scion of a family of old Bavarian aristocrats. After her death, he married Ernestine Dehrnberg, also a German.

On the face of it, his life looked so quiet and successful, but hiding under that impression of well-established felicity was intense moral endeavor.

Tyutchev the poet never sought fame and public admiration and only a chosen few of his contemporaries managed to recognize in him the big time poet he really was. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was the first to appreciate Tyutchev's larger than life talent describing him as “the finest poet of a truly philosophic caliber, after Alexander Pushkin.” Christian philosophy factored in very heavily m Tyutchevs writings where he managed to portray the hard hitting elements, the fear and helplessness man feels when confronted by their all-crushing might, wrote about God's will which brings man's life and the Orthodox faith into one as the eternal moral foundation of Russian life.

Twenty two years spent outside Russia, his foreign wives and his mingling with the European cultural elite never made him embrace the European civilization values. As a
professional diplomat, Tyutchev became strongly convinced in Russia being an Orthodox superpower that was, is and will always be a major element of global strategy and human history as a whole.

Russia is baffling to the mind,

Not subject to the common measure,

Her ways — of a peculiar kind,

One only can have faith in Russia…


This stirring verse still rings very true today and it always will… Tyutchev's inimitable lyrics inspired many equally stirring love songs written by leading Russian composers, including Sergei Rakhmaninovv who wrote this beautiful romance based on Tyutchev's famous Spring Waters poem.

Source:The Voice of Russia