ven a nuisance, especially since it's not love; it doesn't have love's charm". "Went to Tyutchev's prepared to love her. She's cold, petty, aristocratic". "Alas, I was cold towards Tyutcheva". "I'd almost be prepared to marry her impassively, without love, but she received me with studied coldness". (B:39) There are girlish hints in the sisters' letters to each other about the possibility of marriage between the daughter of a celebrated poet and one of Russia's greatest novelists, but Kitty once said she was so discriminating that the opposite sex would just have to put up with her never marrying. She never did. She did buy the Varvarino estate in 1873 and began the building of a clinic and a school, also writing children's books and doing a children's version of the Bible. Anna was Tyutchev's favourite and wrote a fascinating diary of her life as lady-in-waiting to the empress (C:19). She married Ivan Aksakov, a major publicist, public figure in the field of Slavophilism, and the poet's first biographer. Tyutchev travelled through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, visited Paris and, his duties being far from onerous, enjoyed a full social life, returning for a short while to Russia in 1830. A number of poems written during these early years in Europe show the increasing importance of the beauties of west European nature in his life, while there is a tendency to employ images of bleakness when depicting the east European countryside. Coming back from a diplomatic mission to Greece in 1833, he decided to tidy up his desk. In 1836 he wrote to his friend, Gagarin: "What I have sent you is but the tiniest handful of the pile that time has amassed but which fate or some act of incomprehensible providence has dealt with. Having set about sorting my papers in the twilight, I consigned to the abyss the major part of my nocturnal, poetic imaginings, and did not notice this till much later. At first I was somewhat vexed, but soon consoled myself with the thought that the library at Alexandria had also burned. Incidentally, the translation of the entire first act of Part 2 of Faust was there. It's possible that was better than all the rest". Only one hundred and fifty two lines of his translations of Goethe remain while one hundred and fifteen from Part 2 were lost. For whatever reason Tyutchev did throw out his work, we are facing a significant literary loss, though it seems to have bothered him little, for there will have been poems of the quality of the best ones still in our possession among the pile of papers he destroyed, and Act 1 of the second part of Faust contains the kind of description Tyutchev would have done superbly. While he was capable of getting rid of his work on purpose, we simply have no proof. What we do know is that his poetic eye was very much fixed on the universe around him and not on the scraps of paper for which he had the scantest respect. It is possible that, as Barabtarlo has pointed out [A:2/425], Tyutchev was in the habit of destroying rough drafts and, since his fair copies tend to look like his rough drafts, a genuine mistake must be considered. The flippant tone of this section of the letter is characteristic of his dismissive attitude towards his best work. He describes the lyrics in question as mere elucubrations poetiques/poetic imaginings (almost "ravings"). Such an attitude resulted in his being known as a poet of worth among only a handful of close friends and partly explains why he played no direct part in the Golden Age of Russian poetry. The situation changed slightly in 1836 when, after constant cajoling, Gagarin finally persuaded his friend to send him some lyrics. Gagarin showed them to Zhukovsky, then to Pushkin, and in the same year sixteen Poems Sent from Germany appeared in Pushkin's journal Sovremennik/The Contemporary, over the initials "F.T.". More appeared later, but for a variety of reasons sparked off little interest in Russia. Tyutchev was not at this time a conspicuous member of the literary scene in his homeland; he was careless when it came to preserving his own lyrics and indifferent to their publication; and the age of realistic prose was on the way in. Tyutchev was "discovered" in the 1890's by such poets as Bryusov, at a time when the idea of pure art, or Art for Art's Sake, was becoming popular. The late thirties and middle years of the century were the age of Belinsky and Dobrolyubov, for whom art had to be socially relevant. Belinsky was also the leading light in the westernising movement which was fundamentally opposed to Slavophilism, the latter to become of increasing importance to Tyutchev as he grew older and settled in Russia. Considering Belinsky's great influence and the rise of the Russian novel, it is hardly surprising that Tyutchev's poetry initially raised little interest. In May 1838 fire swept the steamer Nicholas I on which Tyutchev's wife and family were travelling to Germany. On board was the young novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818-83). He has given a frank account of the incident in Un Incendie en Mer/A Fire at Sea, describing the panic which swept the vessel and his own terror (B:40ii, vol. 14/186). It seems that Eleonore ("Nelly") Tyutcheva, encumbered by three small children and a nanny, showed great courage and was one of the last to leave the ship. The highly-strung woman who had attempted suicide (probably more of the call-for-help kind) in 1836, did not survive the ordeal and died in August of that year, household tensions having exacerbated her condition. Extreme grief did not prevent Tyutchev from flinging himself into the fast social whirl of Lake Como, at the time being visited by members of the Russian imperial family, and where he met and became friends with Zhukovsky. In 1839 he married Ernestine von Dornberg. They had been lovers for six years and she was already having his child. Having been allowed to marry but refused leave of absence, he locked up the legation and left, losing secret documents in the process (A:18v). The couple settled in Munich. Tyutchev's decision to take leave of his post despite his superior's refusal of permission had left him jobless. Ernestine possessed a rather calmer personality, not to mention more personal capital, than Eleonore. In his memoirs, Meshchersky, editor of the Grazhdanin/The Citizen, wrote the following of the couple as he observed them in later years in the family seat of Ovstug: "The soul and heart of this family was Ernestine Fyodorovna ... a poetic and sublime woman in whom the intelligence, the heart and the charm of a woman fused into one harmonious and graceful whole ... Fyodor Ivanovich himself was some kind of visitor in spirit to this household ... Life's prose did not exist for him. He divided his life between poetic and political impressions." (C:15/65) In the early 1840s the poet wrote a number of nationalistic poems and published his first political letter, the Lettre a M. le Docteur Gustave Kolb/Letter to Doctor Gustav Kolb (A:33i), attacking the German press which saw Russia as a threat to German unification. In it he also attempted to explain Russia's role in relation to what he saw as the revolutionary West. This idea was to evolve into the later theme of the legitimacy of humble, peasant, Orthodox Russia opposed to the fundamentally illegitimate, anti-Christian Europe and recurred in two further articles written during the years 1848-50 (ibid.) and some political poems, the latter produced from 1844 to 1873, nearly half his surviving output in terms of lines written. At their worst they are tendentious, biased and turgid though, despite what some commentators have always thought, rarely anything less than sharply thought out and often cleverly expressed. At their best they possess a highly eloquent quality of indignation and frustration. The political verse was the only part of his poetical output he made any effort to publish. He was known to have taken such work along to an editor personally while he could scribble lyrics of worth on scraps of paper for others to find, dictate them, send them in letters, and generally not appear to care whether they ever saw the light of day. Gagarin's insistence that he be allowed to get his friend's poems published might well have been the kind of trigger annoying Tyutchev enough to make him throw them out in a fit of pique. As a writer destined for a place in the history books, the odds were stacked against Tyutchev. Obviously when impelled as a poet to write, his interest lasted as long as his inspiration and afterwards he felt no need to take any trouble over the physical manifestations as the emotions in which they took their source had been replaced by others. His political writings answered a different need and were calculatedly produced to make influential people see things from his point of view, not to mention ultimately persuade his former employers to look favourably on him once more and, after his marriage, give him a job. This worked, and after Tyutchev settled in Russia in 1844, it was as an increasingly respected government official. Although he and his family visited the West several times over the following years, Russia had become his permanent home. Several poems written from this point express longing for the blue skies, warmth and light of Western Europe, and on many occasions he refers to Russia in such unflattering terms it is difficult at first to understand his constantly passionate defence of that country. And, despite adoring nature, he spent most of his time in towns. Indeed, "this champion of Russia and its peculiarly eastern way of life was seldom happier than when he was leaving for the West; while Russia's greatest nature poet was throughout his Russian years at least, a confirmed city-dweller". (A:14/17) In 1846 he met Elena Deniseva, over twenty years his junior. The ensuing love affair scandalised polite society and caused the partners intense emotional suffering and bitterness. Elena's mother was Principal of the Smolny Institute, a girls' school where Darya and Ekaterina were pupils. Elena more than cared passionately for him. She was neurotically convinced that she and she alone was the real Mrs. Tyutcheva and that only external circumstances prevented their marrying. She was known for irrational behaviour and tantrums, at least once throwing an object at her lover. He could not endure life without her. She bore them three children. Fully aware of all this, Ernestine remained stoically faithful, although once did suggest they separate for a while. As the affair became a major talking point, society shunned Elena, though Tyutchev remained in as much demand as ever in the salons of the capital. It caused displeasure at court level and resulted, peripherally, in old Mrs. Deniseva being forced to leave her post. The love affair produced a small body of lyrics rightly considered to be among the finest love poems in Russian. Short, sometimes employing a dialogue technique in which the lyric-hero appears to be conversing with his lover, sometimes taking the form of monologues, and frequently characterised by a cogent, highly lyrical and profound sense of his own inadequacy and selfishness, the Deniseva poems bare the love affair like an open wound. In these and other works about love and his relationships with people close to him, there is often a quality of anger and open contempt for the opinions of a narrow-minded public ever ready to cast the first stone. Tyutchev's deserved reputation as a great nature poet should never be allowed to eclipse his standing as portrayer of the love-hate relationship which accompanies an illicit love affair. He is a ruthless analyst of the anguish tormenting an individual in his blackest moments. While he never ceased writing entirely, there is a hiatus from 1838 to 1847. In 1847 he began composing once more in quantity. He was reinstated in government service in 1845 and in 1848 became Senior Censor in the Russian Foreign Office and ultimately a fairly liberal Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Censorship. During 1848 he wrote La Russie et la Revolution/Russia and Revolution (A:33/i), an article dealing with the role of Orthodox Christians as saviours of their brother Slavs in the west. A third article, La Papaute et la Question Romaine/The Papacy and the Roman Question (ibid.), attacked the Catholic Church for the secularism which had, in Tyutchev's mind, inevitably infected it since its break with Orthodoxy. From this point, these themes are frequently reinforced in the poetry. Tyutchev remained till his death obsessively anxious about Russia's historical destiny, characteristically never pulling his punches, certainly in his letters and often by hint and image in the lyrics, when it came to expressing disapproval of official Russian policy. He experienced genuine anger and grief at the Crimean debacle and never lost his capacity for berating the West, the Vatican and the waning Turkish empire. He maintained a steady, often impassioned interest in foreign affairs generally. His statements about politics, oral or written, are clever, frequently sarcastic, and constantly nationalistic, although, despite not trusting it politically, his love of the west never deserted him. His shock at the Russian defeat in the Crimea was repeated, if not so publicly, at France's rout in the Franco-Prussian War. His personal happiness was marred by several blows. Elena's death of tuberculosis in 1864 shattered him. Family bereavement followed. Two of Elena's children by him died, as well as his eldest son Dmitrii, his daughter Maria, and his brother. With that dark humour which never left him, Tyutchev compared his existence, rapidly emptying of those close to him, to the game of patience in which one by one cards vanish from the pack. All the same, till the end he was unable to resist the charms of a young, pretty woman, as a jocular album contribution tells us in 1872 [376]. It expresses doubt at what his senses tell him, in other words that a fine day (the woman) has arrived in November (his old age). Increasing ill health and anguished thoughts of his own death tormented him during the final years, although a certain amount of probably harmless womanising was still possible. The widow Elena Bogdanova was his last fling and, while nothing is thought to have come of it, it showed the aged Tyutchev still capable of that selfishness which could all too easily be interpreted as lack of concern for his own family. Such difficulties and grief accompanied at this late stage a growing reputation as a poet. While the poetic output of the last half dozen years of his life is often considered mediocre, he composed several masterpieces during this period. They cover the common themes of personal suffering and ageing [284, 309], man's relationship as an individual to Nature [289], nature description, sometimes with a clever political subtext [295, 297, 298], superbly indignant attacks on narrow-minded people [300] and the Vatican [370], epigrammatic profundities [311, 347, 385], and an astonishing, elegiac description of the gardens of Tsarskoe Selo [307]. Despite composing lyrics of genius, Tyutchev remained totally uninterested in his work. In January 1873 the first of several strokes partly paralysed him and on July 15th. he died. CRITICAL Pantheism is a synthetic view of the universe, an outlook bringing together all facets of creation, making of all things one and not permitting any categorisation of existence into "nature", "man", "God" or "gods". Tyutchev certainly appears to be a pantheist. Whether there is ultimately a consensus of opinion about the question of his poetic attitude to nature, suffice it to say that many of his lyrics are so replete with sensation in the face of its beauties that "pantheistic" is one of several labels which will endure over the years. In short, often aphoristic lyrics written in simple, lucid Russian - despite a number of archaisms, which remain quite easy to cope with - he depicts nature as an ordered, palpable entity with which man is often at one. Equally there are lyrics expressing his sense of being cut off from nature, in which he is aware of currents of disorder. Tyutchev's poetry - and Tyutchev the man, in many ways - are bipolar. Tyutchev's poetic images for this order and disorder are "cosmos" and "chaos", and he employs a wide range of vocabulary to describe them. Chaos is frequently seen to be a result of man's drawing back from the whole in order to observe existence, split it into separate phenomena and compartmentalise these. When Tyutchev writes of that aspect of existence we commonly refer to as "nature", he indulges in no trite pathetic fallacies; his apostrophes to nature are deeply experienced statements of wonder and empathy. There is no vapid philosophising, drawing of predictable moral conclusions nor attempt to construct scientific or philosophical structures to explain things; his scenes represent his sense of man's physical and mental oneness with the universe, the universe not only of space, but of time. "In Tyutchev's poetry, the temporal epochs of human life, its past and its present fluctuate and vacillate in equal measure. The unstoppable current of time erodes the outline of the present." (A:20/487) In sensing man's position in the universe, Tyutchev produces in his best lyrics a feeling of genuine awe. The reader feels the movements of the air and the sea, the heat of the sun on peaks, warm rain from a spring sky, and such nature phenomena are there for their own sakes. When he describes mountain summits as bozhestva rodnye/gods who are our cousins [49], he does more than simply transplant classical deities into a given landscape after the fashion of the eighteenth century mimicking its Roman mentors. He is, indeed, behaving more like many classical authors themselves, for whom nature was literally peopled by gods. Dealing with a world Tyutchev felt was teeming with its own kind of life leaves the reader with the impression that man, while observing nature, is himself one of its creations. In the best poems, the immediately accessible visual-audial-tactile level, the "feel" of the poem, is more than merely a set of references to Hebe, Zeus, Pan or Atlas, "titanising" nature, as Gregg puts it (A:14/78). In Tyutchev, mythologisation is a powerful poetic technique and involves an ability to animate a scene in such a way as to recall to us a common, ancient sense of belonging and oneness. To claim that simple "titanising" is taking place is to demean this writer, whose poetic statements bear some resemblance to Vico's. The latter's "new science" castigated "our civilised natures" because by them "we ... cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men" (B:43/22). Tyutchev resurrects an ancestry scientific man had apparently forgotten. Natural objects and phenomena in his nature poems are portrayed in a manner strikingly innovative for the age, precisely because of this skilfully manipulated awareness that man is literally part of nature and not apart from it. "Myth" in Tyutchev is neither toy nor pretty poetic game. Myth is a kind of truth every bit as valid as the scientific "truth" he attacked in the early poem addressed to A. Muravyov, A.N.M. [13]. Myth is seen as ancient man's way of explaining the universe and, years after Newton and Descartes, it remained as valid as ever to Tyutchev, despite, or perhaps because of being "unscientific". In this sense Tyutchev fits into the broad Romantic mould of Lamartine and Hugo, who represented a revolt against the rationalism of the pre-Revolutionary years in France. As for the difference in feel between the earlier "European" nature poetry and the later "Russian" lyrics, while his attitudes and emotions were subject to different ageing and environmental influences, I feel it is glib to consider that "the image of nature, which had been largely mythocentric in the early Munich years and anthropocentric in the following decade, is now very largely its own excuse for being." (A:14/193) Tyutchev's attitude towards nature never changed. He was a floating particle in it, unable to comprehend it, unlike Pascal who believed he could understand it through reason, and whether we have in mind the lush, warm, bustling quality of the Munich years (Kozhinov rightly mentions the mnogolyud'e/populousness of the early years (A:17/352-353)), or the desertedness of the Russian works, the same awareness of being subservient to nature is evident. The changes affecting Tyutchev the man, the poet, the diplomat, the errant husband did not alter the sense of awe with which he dealt with the natural world around him. Tyutchev produces some amazing results. Sometimes it is as if a mystery is about to unfold over the earth, as when nocturnal lightning-flashes tease the clouds, Kak demony glukhonemye/Vedut besedu mezh soboi/like deaf-mute ghouls/debating heatedly [298]. In Son na more/A Dream at Sea [92], and Kak okean ob''emlet shar zemnoi/Just as the ocean curls around Earth's shores [64], the boundary between two kinds of reality, that of dream/hallucination and diurnal, observable existence is hazy. Man is often described as being abandoned and frighteningly alone in an incomprehensible, boundless universe, and when this is not stated it is implied. Behind the cosmos, the chaotic elements of the thing that is Tyutchev-in-nature are ever-present, part of an essential, inescapable reality, a Pascalian duality evident from the earliest poems, in his letters and refusing to leave him in peace even in his final years. At first glance the western-nature lyrics are his most attractive works. They are certainly the most numerous and, even permanently settled back in Russia, he often wrote poems of reminiscence in which some of the magic of the European days raises its head. They are descriptions of sun-soaked lands, vernal and aestival days, warm nights by the Mediterranean beneath clear, star-filled skies. They are also, as a rule, skilfully anthropomorphic. When it comes to concreteness, incredible accuracy of detail and photographic precision in placing objects in a landscape, those poems describing Russia's countryside are far superior and earn Tyutchev a special place in Russian letters as a poet who, despite his dislike of his native land, has produced among the finest verses possible about the bleaker aspects of that country, so much so that one questions the traditional approach whereby he is seen as a poet of the West who also wrote about Russia. The sharp-limned landscapes of the "Russian" poems are almost entirely lacking in the "European" ones, whose unbelievable landscapes are deceptive, for they are frequently vague. In them the reader feels heat but does not always see a great deal to suggest it to the eye. In the greatest Russian poems, things are generally "seen". In Russia it is not often the case that laughing, benign nature distracts him, makes him feel contented. He observes the harsh reality of his surroundings for what it is and depicts it with unerring sureness of touch. His Russian nature poems are not indicators of any sense of well-being. Many of them are "cold" and it is in them that we discover some of the most wondrous visual effects of his entire oeuvre. In Na vozvratnom puti/On the Journey Home [241], ponderous clouds and stagnant pools make a feeble hearkening back to western blueness (11.14-16, pt.2) mediocre by comparison. The perfectly placed strand of spider-web across a furrow in Est' v oseni pervonachal'noi/There is a fleeting, wondrous moment [233], is evidence of the poet's huge talent in describing scenes, here implying, as Tolstoy noted, restfulness after hard work by the peasants in the fields by the careful positioning of a single, aptly chosen object. In these and others, heady mythologisations are supplanted by sad, bleak external reality. But the resulting poetry is astonishing. This is not to say that there are no "warm" poems describing the Russian countryside. The movement of Tikhoi noch'yu, pozdnim letom/Quiet evening late in summer [153], eight lines produced as if in a single exhalation, not even constituting a sentence, is not exceptional. In Neokhotno i nesmelo/Timidly, unwillingly [151], simple images culminate in a charming image of the sun shyly peaking down at a land "crumpled" (smyatennaya) by a warm shower. There are others. While as descriptions they are better, there is, nonetheless, something missing, and it is something in the poet himself: quite simply, while geographically at home, in spirit he is not. This ability to create superb poetry about locations he does not enjoy living in is further evidence, if it were needed, of his gift. When Tyutchev is at his best in those early years (1822-44) when he lived and worked in Western Europe, he is truly great. In one of his masterpieces, Letnii vecher/A Summer Evening [41], the almost magical sense of peace is achieved by transforming the earth into a giantess from whose head the setting sun rolls heavily, while stars become creatures physically hoisting up the sky and a nature-goddess sensually splashes her feet with cold water after a day of oppressive heat. There is in such works a sense of excitement and sensual delight, occasionally a hint of apprehension, in the presence of natural beauty which cumulatively produces skilful landscapes, remaining at once superb natural descriptions and indicators of the poet's state of mind. The picture is wonderful, unparalleled in that era, and it is doubtful if any purely concrete treatment could improve upon it. In Snezhnye gory/Snowy Mountains [49], the earth is an enormous female expiring in the sun while youthful mountain peaks play games with the sky. By stark contrast one of the very few early Russian nature poems, Zdes', gde tak vyalo svod nebesnyi/Here the sky stares inert [68], contains sparsely sprouting bushes and lichens, ugly creatures of nightmare, inmates of some fevered dream even before Tyutchev uses that smile (Kak likhoradochnye gryozy/like fevered dreams). Tyutchev will always be best known for his nature poetry which has, perhaps, been anthologised at the expense of other kinds. His nature lyrics are extremely simple to read, relying on short, uncomplicated verses and generic language (in Tyutchev there are few birches, oaks or elms; there are many "trees"). As in the lyrics of Pasternak, it is often as if we are surveying a scene for the first time, objects and their surrounding phenomena appearing as they were "on the first day of creation". (See [100].) Such poems as those described are, in addition, much more than a series of nature descriptions of genius. His poems contain images so nodal that they become the lynchpins of whole poetic scenarios. Son translates both "sleep" and "dream". Tyutchev is a master at playing with this word. Dreams become part of diurnal life, linking man with his inner life. Nature sleeps and dreams change into young deities playing around woods and mountains. Sleep can be the erotic state of half-slumber or the nightmarish version of hell blazing from the night sky. In the form of half-sleep, or dozing, it forms part of daily life and we all readily daydream (his words for this kind of dreaming being gryozy and mechty). Dream, attained through sleep, may be a harking back to ancient memory, individual or collective. Son zheleznyi/iron sleep represents the atrophied intellects and hearts of the Russia of Nicholas I. Sleep can be the romantic escape route from daily reality into fantasy. From the very beginning, in such an early work as an adaption of Heine's Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam/A spruce tree stands alone [21], he is mesmerised by the quality of dream, for "it... (Heine's poem - FJ) is a dream-poem. Its melody soothes asleep the Argus-eye of common sense ... And again, it is a poem about a dream; about the bitter sweetness of all passionate yearning for things so remote that only in dream can they be ours". (C:23) Sleep/dream is tantalisingly multi-purpose. What is more, it does not develop through a series of stages as a poetic image. Rather, as part and parcel of life at any one moment, it is present from the start. "Night", "Time", "Space" - these and others are concepts of the first importance to Tyutchev. His expression of what lies behind the facade of the universe and those dark elements within man's inner being owes more than a little to Pascal, one of whose Pensees goes, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me" (B:31/233). Tyutchev once remarked in a letter to Ernestine (1858), "I don't think anyone can ever have felt themselves as empty as I do faced by these two oppressors and tyrants of humanity: time and space". Night in Tyutchev is the poetic image often covering economically and simply the vast notions of time and space as they affect man in his struggle through life. A given scene in Tyutchev has little to do with any Schellingian idea of some primordial blackness out of which we gradually move. Such an "evolution" does not exist in Tyutchev. He is preoccupied with eternal night forever threatening man while ever aware of fullness, of man being part of a living nature, a result of its creative impulse. However he expresses his feelings about his universe of cosmos and chaos, whether Tyutchev/man is central or peripheral, Nature does not change. There are too many strands to Tyutchev's talent as a poet of nature to deal with in such a short introduction. There is lyrical position, the up-down movement of so many of his pieces, be it someone looking down at a river along which a steamer chugs [111], or as if flying and gazing down into a valley [48], staring up into the sky at star-deities looking down at him [167,176], or experiencing the sickly, hallucinogenic sensation of floating above a nightmare storm [92]. The use of a sudden flash from or into a different time, sometimes almost a different universe, is common, its earliest manifestation being Problesk/The Gleam [27]. Weaving natural phenomena into the very body of a woman, as in the raindrops image of [102,106] and the sky-woman picture of [257], is one of his most effective techniques, and the sense of some sound being almost out of earshot [100], are but a few of the different and powerful techniques Tyutchev brought to Russian poetry. Tyutchev was renowned for the attentions he paid to women; not to an ideal, to some poetic notion of femininity, but to flesh-and-blood women. "Tyutchev knew the woman (zhenshchinu - FJ) (for depth of passion, no-one has yet matched him), but Femininity (Zhenstvennoe - FJ) was the field of Lermontov, Fet, Vladimir Solovyov, Blok" (C:20, vol.1/217). There are many poems to many women and matching up verse and female can be an amusing guessing game. His lines vary from K Nise/To Nisa [25], apparently written in a fit of pique - he clearly did not always get his own way, sexual or otherwise - to K N. N./To N. N., a poetic masterpiece of lust [51], through the playfully lightweight Cache-cache/Hide and Seek [40], the mysterious, languorous Ital'yanskaya villa/An Italian Villa [127], dealing with his affair with Ernestine, the poems to Elena which show lovers' arguments and recriminations, to his final old man's reminiscences about past glories. Tyutchev the love poet does not allow of anything other than a woman's full commitment to him, shows his irritation at Elena's demands to be the one woman in his life, and treats of his awareness of his lifelong selfishness. There is a dramatic quality to some of these poems, even those with no other protagonist (for Tyutchev's lyrics can be monologues, the audience before him and another character just off stage, listening). Equally, the love poems give space to the genuine and soft aspect of the emotion and to Ernestine's strength. Love in the lyrics is a mixture of deep, genuine, tender feeling and lust, fired, especially in the Deniseva years, by a sense of conflict. His love affair with Elena produced gems of poetic anger, as in Chemu molilas' ty s lyubov'yu/What you guarded in your heart [200]: Akh, esli by zhivye kryl'ya Dushi, paryashchei nad tolpoi, Eyo spasali ot nasil'ya Bessmertnoi poshlosti lyudskoi. *** God, if your soul had wings to leave your body, to lift you by the nape from the crudeness of the crowd, to keep you safe from man's eternal rape! Equally he can address himself with unconcealed cruelty, almost contempt: I, zhalkii charodei, pered volshebnym mirom, Mnoi sozdannym samim, bez very ya stoyu - I samogo sebya, krasneya, soznayu Zhivoi dushi tvoei bezzhiznennym kumirom *** a weak magician in a little magic role created by myself, and faithlessly I face it, blushingly aware of my part, the lifeless idol of your living soul [199]. In Ital'yanskaya villa/An Italian Villa [127], having taken the reader through a soothing description of the villa, its cypresses and babbling fountain, Tyutchev, there with his mistress, Baroness von Dornberg, while his family was in St. Petersburg, makes those very natural items voice the lustful sensations undoubtedly running through the lovers: Vdrug vsyo smutilos': sudorozhnyi trepet Po vetvyam kiparisnym probezhal, - Fontan zamolk - i nekii chudnyi lepet, Kak by skvoz' son, nevnyatno prosheptal *** Suddenly - turmoil: A spasm quivered through the branches. The fountain fell silent, yet from it some wondrous sound, muffled, as if in sleep, shivered. Admittedly the poem concludes as the poet openly wonders whether he and his mistress have crossed a "forbidden threshold", suggesting that the life they are living right then is "wicked", that their love is "turbulently hot", but until that final stanza, love is in the hands of the nature surrounding them. Spurred on by the possible marriage of Gorchakov to his niece and by the attendant gossip, Tyutchev attacked the scandal-mongers in an indignant work in which Nadezhda Akinfeva's soul is "cloudless", its "azure" untroubled by wagging tongues. He concludes with a typical piece of cleverness: K nei i pylinka ne pristala Ot glupykh spletnei, zlykh rechei; I dazhe kleveta ne smyala Vozdushnyi shyolk eyo kudrei. *** Not a speck of dusk adheres when those nauseating churls sow their stupid calumny which cannot even crumple the airy silk of her curls [300]. The physical attributes of the woman, dealt with in terms of the sky and the air around her (the speck of dust floating in it), become as important in this poem as the direct effect exerted on her by what society had to say about the affair. The superb music of Vostok belel. Lad'ya katilas'/The east whitened [106], with its liquid repetitions running through each stanza, bears a long with it a concrete, possibly sexual situation which is inseparable from the verbal expression of the coming of dawn. There is a great deal of self-centredness in Tyutchev's depiction of love. In a remarkable work on Elena's final days [275], he produces one of his most characteristic types of poem, one in which nature and woman are somehow interlinked, nature remaining, as always, indifferent to human suffering: Ves' den' ona lezhala v zabyt'i, I vsyu eyo uzh teni pokryvali. Lil tyoplyi letnii dozhd' - ego strui Po list'yam veselo zvuchali *** All day she lay oblivious. To lie across her body shadows came. Outside the tepid rain of summer streamed, splashing through the trees in happy games As warm, summer rain falls through branches, gaily and loudly splashing, the dying woman comes to and mutters how much she had loved it all. Shadows, literally and figuratively, gather over her, yet Tyutchev saves his burst of anguish for the realisation that he will have to "survive" her death. This is not the only example of a lyric in which he complains that he must survive someone else's agony. The image of love as the one thing Tyutchev could forever hold on to, despite the vicissitudes of a fate he so often reviled, stayed with him till his death. The very last word he wrote was "love": Voskresnet zhizn', krov' zastruitsya vnov, I verit serdtse v pravdu i lyubov' *** Life lives again, again blood flows and my heart believes in truth and love. [393] It remains to look at the political poems. They have never been seriously studied as poetry. Not all are tasteless. Some are even good. A few, perhaps, may be better than a small number of his non-political lyrics. In the quality of their indignation and the unswervingly accurate, clever sniping backed up by witty rhymes and memorable metres, they will have caused more than one pompous figure to wriggle uncomfortably. Some, of course, are dreadful, but Tyutchev was fully aware of this. Conscious all the time of his every line being the subject of scrutiny of the censors of whom he was, in later life, an influential member, he knew precisely what to say, to whom, when and how, although he did occasionally get it wrong and found his own works the target of the editing pencil. (See [39, 132, 370].) Gregg (A:14/146) appears to see a flaw in Tyutchev's personality which produces such apparent ravings as those lines from Russkaya Geografiya/A Russian Geography [149], in which the poet describes the Nile and the Ganges as elements of the Russian empire. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Tyutchev was an exceptionally intelligent and cunning writer and chose his themes and times carefully. It should not be forgotten that from the time he began writing till the year he died, Russia was embroiled in one ajor foreign-policy adventure or war after another, among them the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, the Russo-Turkish war (1828-9), three Polish uprisings (1830, 1846, 1863), the Crimean catastrophe (1853-6) and the Khivan campaign of 1873. Nationalism is a heady force, especially at times of war and depression, and, bearing in mind Russia's eternal paranoia about invasion, borders and ice-free ports, Tyutchev's nationalistic outpourings can easily be understood. It is inaccurate and misleading in the extreme to attribute these political works to some psychological aberration. To claim that the ideology of the political verse is "expounded with the repetitive rigidity of a child's catechism, their realia .. the kings, swords, flags and altars of a boy's adventure book ... enunciating with obsessive regularity the themes of betrayal of Russia, punishment and the necessary submission to authority" (A:14/146) is to misunderstand verse which, while taking the message seriously, in his heart of hearts Tyutchev must have cringed at. To continue by saying that if "ultra-nationalism is taken to represent an adult's refusal to accept maturity, then it becomes (as in Tiutchev's case) an infantile disorder" (ibid.) is to make of relatively straightforward matters something co