n War Time, written in a folk or pseudo-folk vein, for it doubles the German piece in length and introduces material utterly foreign to the spirit and movement of Herder's work, though the new material does owe a little to Russian folklore. On the other hand, parts of Tyutchev's work are a direct translation or close copy of the German. Tyutchev sticks closely to the original when he chooses to, as in his translation of two short pieces from Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night's Dream, which he probably translated from a good German version, and Hippolytus's death scene from Racine's Phedre. These are skilful renditions, as are a number of shorter works from Heine and Goethe and sections of the latter's Faust (Part 1). But where do we stand with the extract from Hugo's Hernani? It is significantly and deliberately altered in some ways yet retains very large sections of the original. Do we consider the lyric entitled Sakontala to be a translation? It resembles only superficially the originating scene from Kalidasa'splay and is not much like the Goethe version often said to be its inspiration. Classical Sanskrit literature being so popular in the nineteenth century through the work of such as A. Schlegel (1767-1845), Tyutchev's Sakontala should probably be seen as one more of many poems written on one of its themes. The question of what motivated him to alter other works in the subtle ways he did remains, and is beyond the scope of this book. Because it can be so difficult to know exactly where to draw the line between Tyutchev's original lyrics and his translations/adaptations/paraphrases, I have considered each of his works as part of the one evolving body of poetry without attempting to classify into "lyric", "political" and "occasional", fully aware that I go against standard practice in adopting this approach, although Liberman has recently adopted the chronological manner of grouping the lyrics. (A:19) It has been too common in the past to present the reader with the bulk of what all would agree is his best lyric poetry, leaving other types of verse, for example the political pieces, in what has sometimes amounted to an appendix. A number of Tyutchev's "lyric" poems, if we follow Pigaryov's categories, are mediocre and some of his political and, indeed, a handful of the so-called "occasional" verses, including a few written in French, are far from inferior. Five of his French poems are good and two are among this reader's personal favourites. To present an undiluted diet of lyric poetry written over roughly fifty years is to give an erroneous impression of Tyutchev. It would be equally misleading to produce a book of solely political verse. It is likely that Tyutchev wrote in these categories more or less simultaneously and we are probably on safe ground in asserting that there is no period of his creative life when he was not producing nature lyrics, political verse, love poetry, superficial occasional lines, philosophical statements and taking limerick-like swipes at people he did not like. Whatever spurred him to write a remarkable description of sunset (Letnii vecher/A Summer Evening [41]), occurred at the same time as the Russo-Turkish war (see Olegov shchit/Oleg's Shield [42]) and coincided with an alluring young female turning his head to anything but poetry, as in the erotic, possibly adulterous K N.N./To N. N. [51]. Since poems of all categories were certainly fermenting at any one time, it seems logical to deduce that they all represent in some way the poet as he was at that time. The chronological approach does need to be reinforced. To this end I present Tyutchev's work as I do. While the exact chronology of the poems before 1847 will probably never be established, I have adhered to the best chronological sequence I can come up with at present. Works clearly showing someone else's influence appear beside those considered truly original. Of course, while a large number of his early nature poems could be said to trace their genesis to German romanticism, a point made early this century by Tynyanov, and Tyutchev being very much a poet who saw the world through literary eyes, the best of them, while sharing imagery and themes with German lyrics, are uniquely characteristic of Tyutchev and often considerably more innovative than many of the works which may have inspired them. It has often been said that there are cycles in Tyutchev. Poems written to his mistress, Elena Deniseva, are said to make up the so-called Deniseva Cycle. These were produced over several years and in no way constitute a cycle, let alone a "novel in verse". (See A:20, vol.1/58) His relationship with Elena did not cramp his style when it came to writing to and about other women, including his first and second wives and Amalia Krudner, whose name and presence crop up at various stages of his life in letters and poems. Whether poems to women are in question, nature descriptions or lyrics with all the imagery of chaos so beloved of Tyutchev, he simply was not the poet to produce a cycle on any theme, being so unforgivably careless when it came to looking after his work once the interest of immediate inspiration had evaporated. Nodal themes and commonly recurring groups of images, such as the so-called "Holy Night", do not suggest cycles any more than the lyrics addressed to his mistress. Heine's Nordsee/North Sea, parts of which Tyutchev translated, is a cycle. The lyrics take a theme and present it from different angles and with different nuances, but however much each poem might differ from another, they are deliberately, artistically linked by the sea/abandonment theme, or whatever one might wish to call it. It is not even useful to consider that he wrote lyrics loosely connected, as did Lamartine in his group of Meditations Poetiques/Poetic Meditations, number 1 of which Tyutchev translated, for all too often in Tyutchev spontaneity is of the first importance in the writing of his best works and spontaneity and cycles tend not to go hand in hand. The same applies, from a literary-historical point of view, to periods. Continuity is, as Liberman notes, a most important feature of Tyutchev's style, so much so that "it is hardly possible to detect 'periods' in his creative life", differences, when they do emerge, being "unrelated to the juxtaposition of romanticism and realism". (A:19) Ultimately Tyutchev is unique in being a brilliant and great poet who, it could be argued, had absolutely no desire to be any kind of poet at all. "It is possible that nothing leads us closer to contemplation of the essence of literature than working at the translation of poetry, or at least thoughtfully appraising such work." (D:11/147) Translation can enjoy certain advantages over exegesis. Translators become acquainted with "their" authors in a way not always permitted by the kind of interpretation which requires neutral objectivity, ever respectfully acknowledging the work of others, be that good, bad or indifferent. There are countless trenchant statements by countless clever translators concerning the problems inherent in the process of literary translation. Does the translator bring the author to the reader, the "domesticating method", as one writer puts it, "an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-language cultural values, bringing the author back home, or does he adopt the "foreignizing method .... an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad". (D:25/20) Perhaps neither of these methods is applicable to Tyutchev, who, it could be said, was Russian by nationality only and possessed to no significant degree Russian cultural values. To translate one so cosmopolitan, even rootless, perhaps the domesticating and foreignizing methods are irrelevant. Imitation, for all the following caveat, may be the best means of dealing with the source languages, the imitator having "not the slightest intention of bringing the two together - the writer of the original and the reader of the imitation - because he does not believe that an immediate relationship between them is possible; he only wants to give the latter an impression similar to that which the contemporaries of the original received from it". (D:19/41) In my own translations I often strive to give such an impression, so perhaps I join Schleiermacher's ranks of imitators, though while I accept that it is "foolish to argue for the exact reconstruction of a poem in another language when the building blocks at one's disposal bear no resemblance to those of the original", (D:27/107) I do feel that a more than adequate reconstruction is not beyond the grasp of the capable translator. Concerning the reproduction of those formal aspects of a poem which set it apart from any other piece of writing, Jacquin allows the translator pretty well free play: "If rhymed verse becomes blank or free verse in translation (something which is sometimes prose in disguise ...) the poet is betrayed and the reader led astray; for the translation deflects from their functions forms inscribed in tradition. But to preserve rhymes is to restrict one's choice of terms, hindered moreover by lexical and grammatical restraints, to risk sacrificing the other values of the piece to the ornament of sound and thus to destroy its cohesive power". (D:6/52-53) I do not attempt to produce a lyric which reminds an English reader of what he likes in English poetry. Nor is my aim to achieve a general romantic or nineteenth-century "feel", whatever that may be. I do not consider an adherence to formal characteristics to be of the first importance any more than I ignore them, for if they are present in a poem they are important, and if the translator chooses to sacrifice them, something else must take their place in order that the result be poetry and not prose. What is necessary, and it is the only thing that will work, is a juggling act, an ability to read between the lines, keeping one eye on the foreignness of the source and another on what is probably a desire on the reader's part to be presented with something with which he feels comfortable. This idea of "comfortableness" might be considered subjective, even vague, but it is important and can generally be achieved provided the translator can say, with a degree of confidence, "I am acquainted with the person who is that writer". It is certainly likely that in translating lyric poetry, "the translator will have chosen the poem himself, and even more likely that the task will be undertaken with empathy and a degree of personal commitment". (D:20/631) This personal choice, this commitment on the translator's part is of the first importance. The task might be likened to explaining to an outsider what a close relative or friend who has lost his voice is trying to say. Most emphatically, I am not a poet of any description. My target is simply to introduce the reader directly to Tyutchev. Aware of the many well-researched conclusions reached by theorists in the field of translation studies, I believe three things are essential in the attainment of this target. The first and most obvious is a good knowledge of the target and source languages; the second, occasionally more controversial, is a degree of expertise in the manipulation of language, a most important willingness and ability to take risks at the expense of structural fidelity, even at the apparent expense of faithfulness to major images and poetic formulae; the third, not readily appreciated by all translators, is an acceptance of the importance of the writer's life, not only his creative life, for on its own this is a thing in a vacuum, but his personal motivations, his social milieux and his political/historical environment. A close acquaintance with the writer can allow us to clear, at least in part, the hurdles posed by the untranslated words. While words cannot always be translated perfectly (2), once the various possible meanings and their nuances, taking into account the age in which they were written, have been listed, the emotions and thoughts which produced them can be coped with to some extent for, whether we be English or Russian, what makes us feel, think, believe the way we do is universal and, therefore, capable of being translated. The reproduction of the word is not, it follows, my ultimate aim, for the words lead us into the thing the writer is expressing. From the melting pot of my priorities emerges, it is hoped, a new creation which is an accurate statement about Tyutchev in a given lyric at a given time. My translation methods correspond broadly with two of Nabokov's three modes of translation, the "paraphrastic" and the "literal" (D:2, vol. 1/viii). From his early, relatively free translations, Nabokov became more and more dogmatic, even obsessive, scathingly attacking anything other than the purely literal (and by implication his own early, excellent renditions of Tyutchev), once claiming that his ideal translation would be a book of annotations with the corresponding line of verse every few pages: "I want translations in copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page, so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity." (D:12/512) However tongue-in-cheek this comment may be, Nabokov began to work according to it, but such a method of translation is (surely) an extreme business unless translation is to be a purely scholarly exercise enjoyed by the few. Such is not the role of art. Concerning the art of translation, Nabokov wrote, "the person who desires to turn a literary masterpiece into another language, has only one duty to perform, and this is to produce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text. The term "literal" translation is tautological since anything but that is not truly translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody" (D:13/496-512) (3). Such an approach automatically distances the vast majority of readers from precisely what makes great literature enjoyable. Literalists all too often miss the point. I join those translators who are ready, where appropriate to sacrifice rhyme and assonance "to the silent counterpoint of poetic meaning". (D:22/v) While annotated literalness creates a gap between reader and writer, its structural cousin, the search for a different kind of literalness through the minefield of any attempt to adhere to formal characteristics such as rhyme, is an equally dangerous business and retention of a poem's formal aspects should be considered only provided the sense and "feel" of the poem remain intact. In producing a work accurate from the point of view of rhyme and metre, the translator will inevitably be stretching the target language, all too often in a contrived fashion, producing an unnatural effect not present in the source work. While the result might be clever, often very good, it cannot be denied that frequently too much will have been lost. Aiming at contextual literalness produces a "story line" bereft of the music. By making formal fidelity one's aim, one can easily lose sight of meaning in the search for shape. Sensitive, informed paraphrastic translation, it seems to me, is the only way forward. My renderings are literally faithful where appropriate. This is the case with Tyutchev's versions of other poets and with many of the political pieces. There is no point in treating 11-oe maya 1869/May 11th. 1869 [342] in any other than a rigidly literal manner. They are sometimes loosely "poetic", as in Sovremennoe/Today's Event [350], a political item ending in a more "poetic" structure which Tyutchev uses more than once in his best work. I favour a form of rhythmic prose in poems such as [128], where there is a certain narrative feel. A number of poems are as they are because I am happy with them, others, I have to admit, leave me far from satisfied. In the translation of poetry, there is never a final word. There remain those versions which, were Nabokov still with us, would be savaged ruthlessly, works which, from the standpoint of imagery and/or structure I have offered in a deliberate, considered mistranslation, though if there results "a slightly wrong meaning", there remains hopefully "a completely right feeling". (D:24/12) Such a work is [200], my original imagery giving the best effect of which I was capable at the time, the priority being to reproduce the sense of seething, impotent anger and genuine sadness which motivated the poet to write it. The celebrated Formalist, V. Shklovsky, rightly rejects "authomatisation", for it "eats things, clothing, furniture, your wife and fear of war". (D:12/11-12) Shklovsky believed that the artist is called upon to counteract routine by dealing with objects out of their habitual context, by getting rid of verbal cliches and their stock responses. I am in full agreement with Shklovsky on this matter. I would not at this stage undertake a serious translation of poems by Blok, Baudelaire or Holderlin, even enjoying these writers in their own languages, and certainly being able to translate the words and sentences which make up the elements of their works, for I could not approach them with the confidence with which I know a Tyutchev lyric. Given the often scanty information at hand and the abyss of time between us, I feel I have come to know him to some extent, his milieux, his family, the way he felt and thought and passed the time, whether observing his dog chasing ducks or wishing, on a boat trip, his friend was there with a gun for the shooting of fowl, moaning to all and sundry about his gout and rheumatism, complaining to the heavens that he is bored and lonely, irrespective of the heartache to which he subjects those close to him, pulling Schelling to pieces, cursing the British, the French, the Turks and the Vatican, irritating Pogodin with his intellectual arrogance, vilifying the tsar and his ministers for their crass ineptitude, or angry at his daughter for marrying a sailor who - sin of sins - spoke Russian in preference to French. Such proximity is essential in the production of a good translation, for it allows the translator to pull apart convention and rewrite the poet with confidence. Shklovsky's "making strange", making form difficult, "seeing" (videnie) as opposed to "recognising" (uznavanie) (ibid.) should be born in mind as the reader approaches many of my translations. The much-anthologised good poem can lose one of its greatest qualities, that of newness, by being anthologised, whether in a book or in a particular, accepted format in the hands of translators, by being there, by looking more or less the same all the time. I believe that the translator must make the reader sit up and pay attention. He must not be the critic who, in Steiner's words, "when he looks back ... sees a eunuch's shadow" (D:7/21). The translator of any literature worth translating must attempt to be, in subtly different yet similar ways, as creative as the writer he is grappling with. From what I have said above, perhaps it follows that great literature needs retranslating every so often in order to make sense to different generations. While the possessiveness of the committed translator who has "chosen" his poet can allow an illuminating insight into the workings of the writer's mind, it can, of course, work the other way and the good translator needs to ensure that he is producing the writer and not himself playing at being a poet. It is also very easy to become blase about one's knowledge of a foreign language, for unless one is genuinely bilingual, as, indeed, Nabokov was, the brain, albeit translating quickly, nonetheless pauses to translate, and this pause indicates an inability, at times not very significant, to translate instinctively. This pause can also be a useful thing. I have often found, on rendering a poem into English, that an image in the Russian has struck forcefully home for the first time, despite having read the work in question many times. Students of foreign literature could do worse than attempt occasional translation if for no other reason than to satisfy themselves that they have indeed understood what the poet's words actually mean, let alone what might be implied. They should certainly never be put off. If a translator can be so bold as to render Khlebnikov's entertaining Zaklyatie smekhom/Incantation by Laughter into Scots, there is most assuredly hope for the youngest novice (D:4/89). Where I have taken considerable liberties, there will, it goes without saying, be those who point out that I have altered the structure of the poem and, therefore, its meaning. Whatever the case may be, my target has remained throughout the accurate communication of what I believe Tyutchev was feeling, thinking then saying. I hope that more than a handful of educated Russian speakers now feel that they can enjoy the complete poems of this major writer as a result of my approach, despite it being "as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet". (D:1/). The reader unfamiliar with this author will find a story and a life unfolding from the earliest extant poem written on his father's birthday, through truly wondrous nature lyrics, sharp, often hurtful love poems, occasional verse, chauvinistic political pronouncements on Pan-Slavism, philosophical and religious lines, to tormented protests in which an embittered, frightened poet of alienation faces inner turmoil, illness and encroaching death. In the Romantic age of Pushkin and Lermontov we find a seriously "modern" poet; in the realistic age of Dostoevskian and Tolstoyan prose, a poet who would not be disowned by later existentialist writers will be discovered at a time when the reading public is less enthralled by poetry than by Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov. My former supervisor, Dr. R.C. Lane, is a leading authority in the field of Tyutchev studies. Discussions with him have always proved invaluable. He has read the first section of my manuscript and the endnotes and I am grateful to him for his suggestions, encouragement and general assistance, as well as for kindly writing a foreword to the 1983 edition. I have chosen to retain this, for it says what I wish to have said about my approach and, I feel, could not be improved. His doctoral thesis and many subsequent publications represent, in my view, the fullest, most comprehensive study of the poet in English. He has produced articles and reports on various aspects of Tyutchev's life, poetry and diplomatic work and on some of the philosophical influences in the lyrics in addition to a complete catalogue of works by and about the poet up to 1985. Since he first looked at the manuscript, I have amended certain sections. Any defects in the later or, indeed, earlier material are my responsibility alone. R. Gregg's book is a solid introduction offering interesting studies of the poems if often somewhat biased towards psychoanalysis. K. Pigaryov's study and I. Aksakov's biography are essential preliminary reading for the specialist, as are many Soviet contributions. The latter contain essential background information. Some deal intuitively with the inspiration behind the greatest poems and cleverly with their structure, notably Tynyanov's famous article on the short lyric as a "fragment" of the neo-classical ode. The point Tynyanov makes is that Tyutchev, wanting to retain the "monumental forms" of the "dogmatic poem" and of the "philosophical epistle", realising that these had more or less disappeared since Derzhavin's time, found his outlet in the artistic form of the "fragment", the latter, he goes on to claim, realised in the west by the Romantics and canonised by Heine. Inevitably Soviet scholarship has suffered from a requirement to give prominence to approved themes. The so-called Tyutchev-Pushkin question is a case in point. On various somewhat spurious bases (e.g. Pushkin once ridiculed Raich, Tyutchev's friend and tutor), an enmity between the two poets was created. Apart from the fact that such a matter is remarkably irrelevant, it is highly unlikely that there is a great deal of truth in it, if any. More important is the fact that since Tyutchev was never part of the mainstream literary scene in his country and famously made no effort to have his best work read by the public before 1836 (he may have deliberately destroyed some of it), such "professional" hostility would probably never have existed. I have avoided any further reference to this matter or to any concerning a comparison of his talents with those of other writers. Tyutchev has had several translators. Each one worthy of mention has tackled only a very small number of the better known lyrics, with the notable exception of Anatoly Liberman who has taken on the bulk of Tyutchev's best work, sticking rigorously to the formal features, including rhymes. He is the first to have published such a large number of worthy translations of Tyutchev's lyrics, preceded by an excellent introduction. He and I have different attitudes towards poetic translation. He informed me in one of many communications that when I decide not to reproduce Tyutchev's rhyme schemes, the "general aura that okutyvaet" ("enwraps") my renderings tends to make up for this. I am more than happy with this judgement. Work in Europe and the USA, a relatively slow trickle of research, has laid the as yet extremely narrow foundations of the West's understanding of Tyutchev. Considering the importance of his position in Russian literature, it is astonishing just how many students of western European literature have never even heard of this amazing writer. A lot of building remains. I hope this book will fill one of the gaps in the edifice. FOOTNOTES 1. References to the Bibliography go as follows: "A" is a main section, the following number is the item in the section, a Roman numeral is used where an author has more than one contribution, and page numbers come after solidus. 2. Certain commonly occurring words in Tyutchev make this point: (1) dusha (= "soul", "spirit", "darling", "person", "serf"); (2) blago (= "blessing", "boon", "the good"); (3) nega ("sweetness", "bliss", "comfort", "languor"); (4) blagodat' (= "paradise1", "grace", "abundance3"). 3. It is worth quoting in full the relevant section of Nabokov's famous (and infamous) translator's preface to his version of Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin. Nabokov writes, "Attempts to render a poem in another language fall into three categories: (i) Paraphrastic: offering a free version of the original with omissions and additions prompted by the exigencies of form, the conventions attributed to the consumer, and the translator's ignorance. Some paraphrases may possess the charm of stylish diction and idiomatic conciseness but no scholar should succumb to stylishness and no reader be fooled by it. (ii) Lexical (or constructional): rendering the basic meaning of words (and their order). This a machine can do under the direction of an intelligent bilinguist. (iii) Literal: rendering as closely as possible as the associative and syntactical capacities of the language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Only this is true translation". (D:2, vol. 1/vii-viii) A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION In Russian the commonest "e" sound is more or less the "ye" of "yet". However, due to the role played by stressed and unstressed syllables, the full "ye" is not always heard. I transliterate both this and the second Russian "e" simply as "e". Foreign names beginning with "H" tend to start with "G" in Russian. I retain the "H". I stick to general convention in the cases of certain names (e.g. Tolstoy, Alexander, Ernestine). I reproduce the soft and hard signs by ' and '' respectively and represent the letter i kratkoe by "i". I also tend to omit patronymic names. Where appropriate, the acute accent indicates the stressed syllable. This produces the occasional unfamiliar sound, such as "Sevastopol", and not the "Sevastopol" English speakers are used to. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to the following for their assistance: 1. Dr. P. J. Fitzpatrick (Department of Philosophy, University of Durham) for his translations of two of Horace's Carmina and part of a poem by Ausonius. 2. Professor A. Liberman (University of Minneapolis) for his encouragement through several e-mails and for reading and commenting on a small selection of my work. 3. Mr. J. Norton (Director of the Centre for Turkish Studies, University of Durham) for assisting me with information on Mehmed Fuad Pasha. 4. Thanks are due to my former teachers at Durham. Professor W. Harrison showed me that History is important, as well as interesting and entertaining, and he, Mr. L.S.K. le Fleming and Mrs. S. le Fleming, together with Dr. R. Lane, helped a self-taught student with a somewhat chaotic mind to channel his energies and occasionally write something which made sense. 5. Should the anonymous translator of Manzoni's Il cinque maggio ever recognise his/her work, I shall gladly acknowledge this in any future edition. 6. Mr. A. Stansfield (ITS Consultant, University of Durham) explained to me the essentials of web page design. Thanks to him I now have a web site on which parts of this book appear. 7. The manuscript, untidy and very faded in parts, was ably typed up by Miss Julie Bell of the Physics Department. My book is very much a product of happy years as a student at St. Cuthbert's Society in the University of Durham, a centre of learning with which I have never cut the ties and, hopefully, never shall.  * INTRODUCTION *  BIOGRAPHICAL The Tyutchev family tradition, in line with general practice among Russian noble families which liked to link their genealogy with foreign immigrants, had it that a Venetian trader called Dudgi accompanied Marco Polo on his travels to China and, on the way home, settled in Russia. It would be surprising if Tyutchev had not at some time made a flippant quip at the Italian's expense. When d'Anthes was exiled from Russia in perpetuity for slaying Pushkin in a duel, Tyutchev, who never liked living in Russia, remarked, "Well, I'm off to kill Zhukovsky", the latter being the veteran poet and highly esteemed translator (1783-1852) (A:5). From the Niconian chronicle comes the equally attractive tale, impossible to link directly with Tyutchev's family, of the shrewd Zakhary Tyutchev sent by Dmitrii Donskoi as ambassador to the Golden Horde on the eve of the crucial fourteenth-century Battle of Kulikovo. It is said that on receiving a demand for increased tribute to the Horde, the diplomat, on the way home, tore up the Mongol missive and sent the pieces back to the khan. After a great Russian victory, news reached the right quarters and Zakhary became the hero of the tale, Pro Mamaya bezbozhnogo/Concerning Mamai the Godless. The second son of land-owning parents, (1) Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev was born on November 23rd. 1803 (2) in the village of Ovstug, about thirty kilometres north of Bryansk in what was then the Orlov province (C:15). The village of Ovstug was partly in the possession of the Tyutchevs and lies on the river Desna in a densely wooded part of south west Russia. The family would spend winters in Moscow. In August 1812 they moved temporarily to Yaroslavl on the eve of Napoleon's taking of the capital. The boy was raised in a household where French was spoken almost exclusively, although serfs, servants, nannies and the local clergy used Russian. This made him effectively bilingual. Throughout his life he spoke French. His letters are overwhelmingly in French, as are his articles and a handful of verses. In 1812 his education was entrusted to Semyon Raich, a conscientious and gifted student of Classical and Italian literature, enthusiastic poet and translator. Tyutchev went up to Moscow University in 1819, graduated and in 1822 entered government service in the Office of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg. In the stimulating atmosphere of the capital many would-be-poets made small contributions to Russian letters and played their part in the rapidly developing cultural life of the city. German writers and philosophers were being popularised, particularly Schelling, who referred to Tyutchev as "an excellent and most cultivated man with whom it is always a pleasure to converse" (A:5, vol. 3/492). Tyutchev had a less flattering opinion of the German, as a famous conversation between the two men indicates A:1/319). In attempting to reconcile Christian mystery with empirical investigation, Schelling fell foul of Tyutchev's sharp mind, probably more than once. Karl Pfeffel (the brother of Tyutchev's second wife) reports the two having several conversations "in the field of metaphysical speculation" (ibid.). Tyutchev felt an instinctive impatience for any scientific system (a distrust which never altered throughout his life) and for anyone who attempted to explain man's presence in the universe as no more than a gradual process of self-cognition. In Tyutchev's view, what Nature allowed to happen simply happened, in her extreme indifference to man. The argument highlights Tyutchev's insistence on blind faith in the scheme of things, despite being a less than devout person himself, but, of course, intellectual conviction can go hand in hand with daily practice which appears to contradict it. After all, Kant the philosopher was the sharpest critic of the Protestantism to which, in practice, he adhered passionately. Tyutchev's celebrated objection went along the following lines: "You're attempting an impossible task ... A philosophy which rejects the supernatural and wants to prove everything by reason must inevitably be diverted towards materialism in order to drown in atheism. The only philosophy compatible with Christianity is contained in its entirety in the catechism. You must believe what St. Paul believed, kneel before the Madness of the Cross or deny everything. The supernatural is fundamental to that which is most natural to man. It has roots in human consciousness which are far superior to what we call reason, this poor reason which allows only what it understands, in other words nothing". (ibid.) The section ending at "the Madness of the Cross" (La Folie de la Croix) is as much as most commentators choose to quote. The lines following it, however, might be seen to indicate a nod in the direction of a more general sense of man being but a mote in God's eye. The word "nothing" returns us, perhaps, to the formlessness Schelling was striving from but which Christianity as well needed to escape by producing its own system. That Tyutchev actually adhered to his belief, at least publicly, is born out throughout his life in poetry, conversation and letters. Some of what he thought appears to have been passed on to his clever, influential daughter Ekaterina ("Kitty"). Writing to the great statesman and proponent of conservative nationalism, K. Pobedonostsev (1827-1907), who considered Tyutchev's daughter to be his closest friend, Ekaterina, around whom a significant literary circle often met in her aunt Darya's house, complained of The Brothers Karamazov that Dostoevsky had ignored the fact that "there are deep streams which cannot, should not be touched by the word of man" (B:11iii, vol. 15/495). This comment concerned worries expressed in her circle that Ivan Karamazov's rebellion would be taken more seriously by more people than Zosima's teaching. The comment certainly smacks of the public Tyutchev. While Tyutchev studied at Moscow, a number of his friends enthusiastically experimented with the relatively untried medium of literary Russian, some as members of Merzlyakov's "little academy". During much of the eighteenth century Russian had tended to be an unwieldy tool for a generally tedious and imitative literature. At the turn of the century such writers as Derzhavin (1743-1816), Karamzin (1766-1826) and Lermontov (1814-41) and Batyushkov (1787-1855) were laying the groundwork of the new literature. Their efforts were crowned by the prolific genius of Pushkin (1799-1826), whose compositions secured Russian literature its rightful place in Europe. In the year he obtained his first appointment, Tyutchev was offered a post in the Russian legation in Munich, thanks to the efforts of an uncle. Shortly after his return on leave to Russia in 1825, the Decembrists staged their revolt. After it the police arrested scores of young revolutionaries and idealists who had been no more than spiritual sympathisers with the instigators of the uprising. The ringleaders' original sentence, quartering, was commuted to hanging (Russia had not seen the death penalty used for fifty years) and many others wasted their lives in the army in skirmishes with southern tribes or in exile in Siberia. The generally unrebellious Tyutchev produced an interesting work entitled 14-oe dekabrya 1825/December 14th. 1825 [30], in which the comparison between autocracy and a glacier is tempting for those seeking a revolutionary beneath a conservative veneer. He refers to the insurgents as misguided people. His sadness at their fate is real. The most accurate gauge of Tyutchev's feelings about the Decembrists, if not of his intellectual conclusions, is the poem itself. As a polemical piece directed against would-be revolutionaries it is weak. As an early example of his better poetic imagery it is fairly effective; the glacier image hardly flatters the regime of Nicholas I. The poem is an indication of a growing, very public conservatism and nationalism which lasted all his life, as well as of his day-to-day view of Russia as a cold, undesirable place, both literally and figuratively. Tyutchev's concern about the dangers of revolution, especially close to Russia's borders, became a passion lasting until his death. He would interpret various western European policies as a series of efforts to deny Russia her geographical heritage to the advantage of the Turks. Tyutchev was obsessed by the Eastern Question. Returning to Munich in 1826, he married Eleonore Peterson (nee von Bothmer), a twenty-six year old widow with three children. She had three more by him (3). Both were impractical people and experienced financial hardship. Little is documented about Darya, but Anna and Ekaterina are revealed in the memories of various people as intelligent, energetic and creative women in different ways. Indeed, Tolstoy himself showed more than a passing affection for Ekaterina. A selection of his comments from 1857 to 1858 gives some idea of the degree of interest he had in her: "Tyutcheva is nice". "I'm beginning to like Tyutcheva in a quiet way". "Tyutcheva. 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