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* THE POEMS *
1. DEAR DAD!
..........
And you, oh son of luxury, mortal voluptuary,
your life of idle bliss and comfort
rolls peacefully on! But you?ve forgotten, unfortunate man,
that we must all gaze at the shores of fearsome Cocytus.
Your elevated rank, your flatterers, your gold
will not save you from death! Can you really not have seen
how frequently fire-winged lightning
strikes the brows of towering cliffs?
..........
Yet still your greedy hand has dared
to snatch the daily bread from orphans and from widows,
casting families into joyless exile!
Blind man! The path of riches leads to ruin!
The subterranean dwelling has opened before you.
Oh, victim of Tartarus! Oh, victim of the Furies,
the glitter of your splendour, vandal,
will not enchant these dread goddesses!
..........
There you will see the keen axe forever
hanging by the finest hair above your head;
your ulcerated flesh will be garbed
not in purple cloth, but in a blanket of writhing worms!
You will lay your torn members upon a bed
not of the finest, softest down to sweetly lull them,
but no, upon scorching sulphur,
and you will piercingly, eternally howl!
But what is this? This terrifying throng! These bloody shades
maliciously grinning are hurrying towards you!
They died of barbaric persecution;
for this barbarity, await your just reward at their hands!
Suffer, agonise, evil doer, victim of hell?s vengeance!
Your forgotten grave is now covered by grass!
The voice which flattered you up here
has forever fallen completely silent!
3. TO TWO FRIENDS
6.
Charon
Are you really from the land of the living, brother?
You?re so dry and thin. In truth, I?m ready to swear here and now
that your unclean spirit has long been languishing in Hades.
Kachenovsky
Well, friend Charon. I?m skinny and dry from books
and - why hide it any longer?
I?ve been full of bile, vengeful and bad-tempered,
my life as useless as a burned out match.
11. SOLITUDE (LAMARTINE)
Andromache
Once more, Hector, do you hurl yourself into the storm of battle
where, unapproachable with his sword of steel,
the vengeful Pelides fights furiously?
Who will look out for Hector?s son?
Who will teach him his lordly duty,
instil fear of the gods into the baby?
Hector
Am I to pine in burdensome peace?
My heart thirsts for the coolness of battle,
thirsts to avenge Pergamum,
ancient dwelling of my fathers!
If I fall, saviour of my homeland,
I shall gaily go down to the shores of the Styx.
Andromache
In these halls of fame am I fated
to see your sword idle and rusting?
Are all of Priam?s kin condemned?
Soon, where there is neither love nor light,
where the dusky Lethe flows,
soon your love will die!
Hector
All my soul?s hopes, all my impulses
will be swallowed by the silent waters,
but not Hector?s love!
Do you hear? They?re rushing off... The flame of battle is burning!
The hour has struck! My son, my wife, Troy!
Endless is the love of Hector!
15.
O lacrimarum fons....
Friends, I love to let my eyes caress
the sparkling, deep red of the wine,
or peer through the foliage
at the scented ruby of the vine.
..........
I love to watch creation deep
in spring time in sweet fragrance
when the world is slumbering sweetly
and is smiling in its sleep!
..........
I love the face of a pretty girl
ablaze in the breeze of spring,
her cheeks folding into dimples,
the sensual silk of her curls.
..........
But what are Venus?s delights,
the juice of the grape and roses? aromas,
compared to you, oh sacred well of tears,
the dew of the god?s morning light!
..........
Heavenly beams play upon them
and, refracted in fiery showers,
on the storm-clouds of existence
they sketch rainbow-living colours.
..........
And should the pupils of mortal man
be brushed by the wings of the angel of tears,
then the mist will vanish in tearful swirls
and a sky of seraph faces
will before our eyes unfurl.
21. FROM A FOREIGN LAND (HEINE)
Cold, bright,
day has awakened.
The early cock
has shaken its wings.
Warriors, leap up!
Rise, oh friends!
Brisker, brisker
to the feast of swords,
to the fight!
..........
Our leader is before us!
Be men, oh friends,
...........
Victims of foolish notions!
Perhaps you had a youthful vision!
Perhaps you thought you saw
your thin blood trickling,
covering the ice-caps
as if alone it could thaw
that age-old polar face.
Why, it would scarce have time to sparkle
when up there?d gust a breath of iron winter
to murder every tiny trace!
31. (HEINE)
1
He who has not eaten tears with his bread,
who has not in life sat entire nights
crying on his bed,
is unfamiliar with the heavenly powers.
..........
They lure us into existence,
make a crime of weakness,
and after it they torture us to death.
No misdemeanour goes unpunished on this earth!
2
He who would be a stranger in the world
43. A VISION
1
Come in with me - this dwelling is empty.
The gods have let this house go to ruin.
Their altar has been cold a long time and there?s been no change
for silence standing guard here. On the threshold
the attendant does not meet us with a welcome.
Only the walls echo our voices.
Why, oh son of the Muse,
most favoured son, you, endowed with the gift
of the inextinguishably fiery word,
why did you flee your own roof?
Why did you betray your father?s hearth?
Ah, and where, in untimely repose,
did this tempest which carried you off, speed you?
2
So, a mighty dweller once lived here.
Here he breathed song and his breathing
did not seem like that of the playful babbling
of the breeze in the fragrant bird-cherry.
No, his song, more threatening than the thundering clouds,
like divine anger, now brooding, now bursting into flame,
hurtled across the misty firmament.
Suddenly above a green cornfield or an unfading garden
it tore off the rivets
and spewed out darkness and ice and flame,
scorched with fire and furrowed with hail.
Only in those spots where the cloud had torn
did the sky?s azure smile charmingly!
3
They say the frenzied singing of demons
..........
It?s as if the world had been orphaned
by irresistible fate chased and caught,
and nature, after we had fought,
had marooned us, each on his separate island.
..........
Before us there stands our existence,
a spectre on earth?s edge,
and with our friends and with our age
it pales into the distance.
..........
While under the sun there is a birth,
a new and youthful tribe?s begotten
and it has long since been forgotten
that we, our friends, our age, were ever on this earth!
..........
At times, performing some gloomy rite,
we can her metallic sighs
bemoaning our demise
in the silence of the night.
48. MORNING IN THE MOUNTAINS
Midday soars.
It pauses, now holds steady.
It sears the grasslands,
skims and scalds the rills.
Its sheer rays strike dusky woods
which spread beneath the haze.
Below, there is a steel-bright mirror.
Blue currents in the lake invite quick streams
to leave the heat, to scamper by smooth boulders
and plunge beneath the waters into kindred dreams.
While in blissful, fragrant sweetness,
spread-eagled in the sweltering haze,
far overhead, like gods we know as cousins,
above the land that?s left to die,
the mountains? icy peaks play with
the fiery blueness of the sky.
50. THE FINAL CATACLYSM
a childlike-divine toy
and the judgement of others perturbed me little.
But place a sword on my tomb, my friends!
I was a warrior! I fought for freedom,
and served her in truth and faith
in her sacred battle all my life!
57.
1
As in days gone by, before you is heard
the day?s luminary in the system of the planets
and along its predetermined course
thundering, it completes its flight!
Seraphs marvel at it,
but till now who has comprehended it?
As on the first day, incomprehensible
are the deeds, Almighty, of your hands!
..........
And swiftly, with miraculous swiftness,
the earth?s globe turns,
replacing the quiet light of the sky
with the deep darkness of night.
The waves roar over the sea?s abyss,
gouging out its rocky shore,
and the chasm of waters with its cliffs
Lofty presentiment?s
urges and languor,
the soul, thirsting for mastery,
in its seething aspirations,
the coming together of designs
as unfeasible as dream,
..........
all of this he experienced,
happiness, victory, incarceration,
and all the partiality of fate,
and all the bitterness!
Twice he was cast down into the dust,
twice he gained the throne!
..........
He appeared: two centuries
in cruel conflict,
seeing him, suddenly made peace,
as they would before omnipotent destiny.
He commanded them to be silent
and sat between them in judgement!
..........
He disappeared and in exile saw out
his incredible times,
the object of a measureless envy,
of measureless compassion,
the object of frenzied enmity,
of blind devotion!
..........
Just as over the heads of the drowning,
growing into a huge wall of foam,
is the wave which at first played with them,
and the longed for shore
vainly visible to palpitating glances
appears from above,
..........
so memory above his soul,
gathering, lies heavy!
How often this soul desired
to speak out
and, stupefied, onto the sheet already begun,
the hand suddenly fell!
..........
How often before day?s end,
a day of joyless torment,
lowering his lightning-flashing eyes,
folding his arms across his breast,
he would stand, letting the past
possess him!
..........
In his mind?s eye he saw the campaign tents,
the plains of battle,
the long glint of infantry ranks,
currents of cavalry formations,
an iron world breathing
by one command alone!
..........
Oh, beneath such a burden
his heart lost its energy
and his spirit sagged ... but a powerful
1
Lovers, madmen and poets
are forged from one and the same imagination!
One sees demons which don?t even exist in Hell
(the madman, that is), another is equally insane,
the passionate lover, seeing, entranced,
Helen?s beauty in a dark-skinned gypsy.
The poet?s eye, in bright frenzy,
turning round upon itself, sparkles and slips
from sky to earth, from earth to sky,
and, let his imagination but create forms
for unknown creatures, then the poet?s wand
of huge
but you
And all
the rod
As a piece of paper
smoulders, catches, burns
on glowing embers,
Our boat was being tossed by the storm and the sea.
I slept as each wave for its whim toyed with me.
Deep within me two immensities met.
Helpless, I lay by their playing beset.
All around me, like cymbals, the rocks clashed strong,
the waves called each other, the winds sang their song.
By all this chaos of noise I lay drowned,
but my dream was borne over the chaos of sound.
Magically silent, painfully bright,
it flew lightly above the thundering night.
Through the rays of my fever its world could be seen:
the ether shone bright. The world became green.
There were labyrinth-gardens, pillars and halls,
assemblies were massed there, in silence stood all;
I thought all were strangers, but many I knew;
I saw magic creatures. Mystery-birds flew;
The heights of creation, a god, I bestrode.
Far beneath me a motionless universe glowed.
But I heard from below, like a sorcerer?s wail,
the sea-deeps my wanderings stormed and assailed,
and into my silence of dreams burst the lash
of tempests, of howls, of the sea?s frightful crash.
93. (BERANGER)
Blue-grey mingling.
Colour darkening.
Silence possesses sound.
Life and movement have drowned
in the rippling unrealness of dusk,
in a distant hum.
Unseen in the night, a moth sings.
Longing seeks words. Anguish comes.
Everything is me.
I am everything.
..........
Quiet twilight, sleeping twilight,
pour into my being.
Silent, aromatic languor,
take the world, flowing,
bring peace, bring still.
Oblivion, haze.
Sensation, take me, overfill
my soul,
give me void.
In the world?s sleep
pour me, fold me,
let me be destroyed!
108.
124.
MICKIEWICZ?S LECTURES.
May the Heavenly King bless
your happy enterprise,
son of undoubted calling,
son of reconciling love.
..........
Not in vain have you boldly cast aside
the tatters from your shoulders.
God has conquered, your eyes are open.
You were a poet, now you are a prophet.
..........
We sense the approach of Light:
your inspired Word,
like a herald of the New Testament,
Raging, seething,
lashing, whistling, roaring,
leaping for the skies,
the unassailable skies ...
Is it hell, some hellish force
beneath the boiling cauldron
churning up the deeps,
some hellish fire
turning the sea-world upside down?
..........
Frenzied wave-onslaught ....
Nothing stops it, nothing can ...
Roars, whistles, screams, howls ...
Smashing cliffs along the coast ...
Peaceful, haughty,
unmoved by the clowning sea,
motionless, changeless,
born at creation, you stand, our titan!
..........
Battle-maddened,
leaping into fateful struggle
waves come howling back
to beat against your granite face...
The changeless stone
dashes aside the noisy onslaught.
Scattered waters fall apart.
Impotent gusts fall grumbling away.
..........
Stand, mighty cliff!
Just wait awhile.
The thundering waves will tire
of warring with your foot.
Exhausted by its spiteful game
the sea will be subdued.
Forget this howling affray.
Beneath the foot of the titan,
the waves will slink away.
144.
Timidly, unwillingly
sun looks at fields.
Thunder rumbles in a cloud ...
Earth frowns.
..........
Gusts of warm wind ...
Distant growls, spots of rain ...
Greening meadows
greener under threat of storm.
..........
Splitting a cloud a blue lightning-streak ...
White, flying flame
hems its edge.
..........
More raindrops...
Dust eddied up from fields.
Thunder claps
are bolder, angrier.
..........
Once more peeks the sun
askance at fields...
Drowning in brilliance the crumpled land.
152.
155.
NAME DAY
As a token of my love, accept this picture,
understanding it, of course, and the value which we place
on you, though don?t forget, if you?ll forgive my saying,
we like you a lot, though it?s not for your face.
157.
161. LAMARTINE
1
Revolution?s Son, with a fearsome mother
fearlessly you entered battle,
drained of your strength in the struggle.
Your despotic genius could not overcome her!
Impossible conflict, pointless labour!
You carried it all in yourself.
2
Two demons served him.
Two forces merged wondrously within him:
in his head, eagles soared,
in his breast, serpents writhed:
a daring eagle-flight
of wide-spanned inspirations:
and in the very riot of audacity
there was a calculating serpent.
Yet no sanctifying power,
a force of which the mind cannot conceive,
illuminated his soul nor stepped towards him.
He was of earth, not God?s flame.
He proudly sailed, despised the sea,
but on the hidden reef of faith
his fragile boat was smashed.
3
And there you stood, and Russia stood before you!
Prescient sorcerer sensing battle,
you yourself uttered the fateful words:
?Let her destiny come about!?
Your oath was not in vain:
Fate echoed your voice!
But from exile you tossed another riddle
at the fateful echo.
Years have passed. Now back from cramped exile
the corpse has returned to its native land.
On the banks of the river you loved,
turbulent spirit, you?ve rested now,
but you sleep lightly. Tormented during the night,
sometimes you will rise. You?ll gaze at the East.
Suddenly, alarmed, you?ll flee, as if you?d sensed
For the third year now, the tribes have run amok.
Spring has come. With every spring,
like a flock of wild birds before a storm,
the noise is more alarming. The cries become a Babel.
..........
Princes and rulers weighed by heavy thoughts,
fingers trembling on the reins,
minds depressed by ominous anguish.
People?s dreams are wild as fever.
..........
But God is with us! Tearing from its bed,
a mad thing, full of threat and gloom,
suddenly rushing at us is the abyss!
..........
But your gaze did not darken!
The wind screamed. But... ?It will not be so!?
You spake, and once again the waters fell away.
170.
..........
the crown and sceptre of Byzantium,
you won?t deprive us of that!
The universal fate of Russia,
No! You?ll not block that off!
171.
173.
It caught for me
expressions of old friendship
and into musical visions
it embodied the familiar voice.
..........
Now I see, as if through a haze,
a magic garden, a magic house,
and in the castle of the Unsociable fairy
suddenly the pair of us appeared together!
..........
Together! And her song resounded
and from the secret porch
chased the brash braggard
and the loathsome flatterer.
179. TWO VOICES
1
Be manly, my friends, in the fight do not tire.
The struggle?s unequal, the conflict is dire!
Silent above you - the stars in the sky.
Beneath you are graves. Just as silent they lie.
..........
Olympus leaves gods not a thing to desire.
Eternally carefree, from work they don?t tire.
Troubles and labours belong to mankind.
Man cannot know victory. Death?s all he finds.
2
Be manly, fight on, my brave friends.
The battle is brutal, it seems without end.
Stars revolve silently over your heads.
Far below you - the mute, distant graves of the dead.
.........
Let Olympus with envious eyes gaze down
on this war of inflexible hearts.
The fighter who falls beneath Destiny?s darts
has torn from their grasp the victory-crown!
180.
..........
all of them merging, large and small,
shadows of their former selves,
like the element uncaring,
as into the fateful pit they fall!
..........
Ah, human ego, you seduce
the mind of man!
Is this your only fate?
Is this your only use?
183.
190.
Do you know the land where the myrtle and laurel bloom,
where deep and pure is the azure vault of the sky,
where the lemon flowers, and the golden orange
burns like a fire beneath its dense foliage?
Have you been there? There, there would I
like to hide away with you, my love.
..........
Do you know that summit with a path along its steep sides?
The nag wanders across the misty snows.
In mountain crevices there lives a family of snakes,
the avalanche thunders and the waterfall roars.
Have you been there? There, there with you
lies our path. Let?s go away, my sovereign.
..........
Do you know the house of marble columns?
The hall shines and the cupola is radiant.
Idols look out, sad and silent.
?What is it with you, poor child??
Have you been there? There, there with you,
let?s go away quickly; let?s go, my parent.
193.
196.
53
199.
..........
Melancholy was their breathing,
deep in their dense lashes' shade,
languid as pleasure,
fateful as suffering.
..........
And on such marvellous days,
it never happened once
that I would meet them unperturbed,
without a tear springing to my eyes.
202. TWINS
205.
Redness. Flaring.
Sparks spurt and fly.
Over the water there's a dark orchard.
From its copses coolness sighs.
Dusk. Heat. Shouting.
There's a dream I'm wandering through.
There's one thing I keenly sense:
you're in me while I'm with you.
..........
Crackle after crackle. Endless smoke.
A naked, protruding pall.
In inviolable peace,
leaves waft and rustle.
I'm fanned by their breath.
I catch your passionate words.
Thank God that I'm with you.
Being with you is paradise to me.
217.
.........
Let the good spirit
speed her on to meet that
handful of friends still living,
so many dear, dear shades!
221. 1856
223.
229. TO N. F. SHCHERBINA
232.
236. TO E. N. ANNENKOVA
Late in autumn
I love the park of Tsarskoe Selo,
when a still half-dusk
seems to drown it in slumber
and winged visions of white
1.
Dismal hour, dismal sight ...
Speeding onwards through the night ...
Look, a phantom rising from the dead,
the moon has risen in the misty air,
lighting up the wastes ahead ...
There's far to go - do not despair!
..........
As we ride, into my mind
steals the place I've left behind ...
Its moon's alive and it delights
in breathing Lake Leman's cool air.
Wondrous country, wondrous sights!
There's far to go - on through the night!
2.
I was born here,
where giant snow-clouds list
and let faint hints of blue
filter down to touch dark woods
muffled in late autumn mist.
..........
No life at all here ...
Boundless silence, dull and bare ...
The scene's drab greyness broken
only where stagnant pools, touched by first ice,
are glinting here and there.
..........
Not a sound here,
nor colour, movement - life's a drying stream.
Submissive to his fate,
in an oblivion of exhaustion
man exists but in a dream.
His eyes are dulled like fading day.
Although he's only just been there,
he can't believe in lands where lakes reflect
blue mountains caught in golden rays.
242.
258.
265.
..........
How on earth can we excuse this cheek to you?
How can we justify agreeing with
someone who stood up for and saved the integrity of Russia,
sacrificing everything to his calling,
..........
who took upon himself, in desperate conflict,
all the responsibility, all the labour, all the burden,
and who, raising it to life, shouldered
the entire, poor, tormented tribe,
..........
who, chosen to be the bull's-eye of all sedition,
stood and stands, peaceful, unharmed,
in spite of foes, their lies and evil-mouthing,
in spite, alas, of his own people's banalities?
..........
So let this letter to him from us, his friends,
be a shameful piece of testimony!
What we need, prince, is your great grandfather.
At least he'd have signed it himself!
270.
273.
274.
Ocean-billows, night-surging,
here radiant, there blue-grey,
living creature, washed in moon-rays,
breathing, striding, glimmering...
The water-world has no skyline. Bare
but for sparkling movement, growling thunder.
The sea is shot with dull light.
How good it is in the unpeopled night!
Sea-flanks swell above, monstrous currents under.
Whose feast is this? What celebration?
Waves rush, thunder, glisten.
Stars sense them, gaze, listen.
in this shining, in this agitation,
in a dream I am lost.
Into this world I would sink whole,
I would stand up to my soul
immersed, ocean-tossed.
282.
Dying, he doubted,
tormented by an ominous thought,
but not for nothing had God spoken in him.
God is loyal to His chosen ones.
..........
One hundred years of toil and woe have passed
and now, more manly with each passing day,
our Native Speech, given full play,
celebrates his wake.
..........
No longer ensnared,
freed from former fetters,
in all its intellectual freedom
it pays its compliments to him.
..........
And we, grateful grandsons,
for all his good deeds,
in the name of Truth and Learning,
sing Eternal Memory.
..........
295.
315.
It's not the first time the East has been in turmoil,
not the first time they've crucified Christ there,
319.
..........
Yes, there's a wall, all right, but it's a big one
and it's not hard to push you against it.
But what benefit would come from it?
That's what I can't figure out.
..........
That wall is fearfully resilient,
although it's a granite cliff.
One sixth part of the globe
it long ago encompassed.
..........
More than once it's been stormed,
here and there a couple of stones have been broken off,
but after that the warriors
retreated with bruised foreheads.
..........
It stands as it has always stood,
watching, a martial fastness.
It's not so much that it's threatening,
but... every stone in it is alive.
..........
So let the frenzied attempts
of the Germans constrict and press you
to its embrasures and its shutters,
Let's just see what they get hold of!
..........
No matter how blind enmity rages,
no matter how their violence threatens,
this kindred wall will not give you up,
it will not repulse its own people.
..........
It will part before you
and, like a living bulwark for you,
will stand between you and the enemy
and move closer to them.
323. POSTSCRIPT TO THE POEM ENTITLED TO HANKA
331. FIRES
..........
Though in much that happens today
there doesn't seem much sense,
that very genius of the age
is ready to explain it all away.
Some of you might think he's merely barking,
but there's a higher role that he's fulfilling:
he wants to understand and then release
the logical faculty of ducks and geese.
347.
Nature is a sphinx.
The truer she kills you
with her eternal riddle,
it's more than likely,
for centuries,
the truer she has fooled you.
I read my rebuke,
which was eloquent and lively.
I said it all so nicely,
I'm satisfied, so I approve.
354.
..........
here the treacherous kaiser, here the high assembly
of imperial and spiritual princes,
and he himself, the hierarchy of Rome,
sinful in infallibility.
..........
She's here too, simple old woman,
unforgotten since those times,
crossing herself and sighing,
bringing, like a penny, her kindling to the pyre.
..........
Like a sacrificial offering,
your great and righteous man before us all,
already fanned by fiery brilliance,
praying, voice untrembling,
..........
this sacred teacher of the Czechs
unwavering witness to Christ,
stern exposer of Vatican lies
in all his high simplicity,
..........
betraying neither god nor his own people,
undefeated, battling on
for holy truth and for His freedom,
for everything which Rome called heresy.
..........
In spirit he's in Heaven, in family love
he's here still, among his people,
shining, knowing that it was his blood
which flowed defending the blood of Christ.
..........
Oh country of the Czechs, born of one stock!
Do not renounce his legacy!
Oh, finish off his spiritual feat,
celebrate this union of brothers!
..........
Severing the chains with which that holy fool, that Rome
oppressed you for so long,
on Hus's inextinguishable pyre
melt the final link!
357.
..........
"Unity", an oracle of our century has said,
"can only be welded by iron and blood."
Well, we'll try welding it with love.
Let's see which lasts the longer.
361.
.........
And that which you, in days of old,
hid from martial inclemency
in your sympathetic breast
you'll give us back, without casualties the immortal Black Sea fleet.
..........
Yes, in the heart of the Russian people
this day will be consecrated,
it is our external freedom,
it will illuminate the grave's shadows
of the St. Peter and Paul vault.
371.
375.
Here's a
of magic
Oh, this
is worth
378.
British leopard,
why get so riled at us?
Why do you wave your tail
and growl so vexedly?
Where's the source of this sudden alarm?
What have we done wrong?
Is it because, having penetrated deep into
the central Asian steppes,
our northern bear,
our all-Russian man of the land
refused to surrender his rights
to defend himself, even biting back?
To show his friends that he means business,
he's not about to let the world
see him as some hermit-fakir.
He's not willing to let the world,
right in public view,
see him offer his body as a meal
to all the snakes and creatures of the steppes.
"No, that's not the way it will be!" and he raised his paw.
The leopard was so cross at this:
"Ah, scoundrel! You bounder!"
our lion roared in anger.
"How dare this simple bear defend itself
in my presence, raising its paw,
even snapping at me!
You'll see, it'll come to such a pass
that he'll start to think he has the same rights
as me, the radiant lion.
We cannot tolerate such mischief!"
383.
* NOTES *
good-hearted, mild-mannered and placid with a rare moral sense ... neither
intellectually sharp nor talented". (A:1/19)
2. Late Dec. 1815-early Jan. 1816. The twelve-year old Tyutchev
experiments by adapting Horace (65-8 BC), by whom he was much influenced at
this early stage of his writing life. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, born in
Venusia in south-eastern Italy, having unwisely sided with Brutus, escaped
the rout of Philippi. His poetry earned him the attention of Vergil among
others and he was introduced to the great arts patron, Gaius Cilnius
Maecenas, who admitted the young writer to his circle of friends in 38 BC.
Maecenas and Horace became friends and the former gave the poet the small
country estate he had always craved. Horace worked about ten years before
producing the first three books of his eighty eight carmina/odes.
This poem will be the same as one entitled Vel'mozha. Podrazhanie
Goratsiyu/The Grandee. An Imitation of Horace and read by A. Merzlyakov
(1778-1830) at a session of the Society of Lovers of Russian Letters on
February 22nd. 1818. Professor Merzlyakov was one of a generation of
imitative writers of meagre talent whose contribution to the development of
Russian literature in this period it would be uncharitable to ignore, for he
genuinely loved poetry and, if forgotten now, enthused many young writers
with his own passion for writing. Together with heavy neo-classical works he
wrote skilful songs in a folk style. A large proportion of Tyutchev's poem
deals with the unmasking of a shamelessly hard-hearted noble, this theme
elbowing aside the new year one. The poem contains echoes of a whole range
of Russian poets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as
M. Lomonosov (1711-1765), N. Gnedich (1784-1838) and Merzlyakov, as well as
some of the more innovative and important ones, for example G. Derzhavin
(1743-1816) and N. Karamzin (1766-1826).
Tyutchev was taught Latin by his tutor, Semyon Raich (1792-1855), and
his reading of Horace and other Roman poets is evident in certain works.
Chronos: the youngest son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Mother Earth).
Often mistakenly regarded as Time personified.
Memphis: the Egyptian city named in honour of this daughter of Nilus,
god of the Nile.
Ilion: Troy.
Cocytus: one of the rivers of Hell, extremely cold and running parallel
to the Styx. It formed part of the expanse of water to be crossed by the
souls of the dead on the path to Hades.
Eumenides: the Furies.
3. Dec. 4th. 1816. Addressee unknown. The reference in l.2 is to the
martyr St. Barbara, on whose day the poem appears to have been written. The
konets/end of l.14 is probably intended to be nakonets/at last.
4. May 8th. 1818. Tyutchev possessed a copy of Abbe Jacques Delille's
two-volume translation of the Aeneid, in which Delille levels unflattering
criticism at Voltaire's Henriade (published 1805). Reworking some verses of
I. Dmitriev (1760-1837) addressed to M. Kheraskov (1733-1807), Tyutchev
appears to accuse Delille of envy. The lines are written on a copy of the
Henriade.
Kheraskov wrote two vast epics, Rossiada/The Rossiad and Vladimir the
former modelled on La Henriade and dealing with the taking of Kazan by Ivan
IV ("The Terrible"), the latter with Prince, later Saint Vladimir's
introduction of Christianity into Russia. Both were immensely popular at the
time. Dmitriev was a Karamzinian, writing elegant verse and rejecting the
epic norm. One of the founders of the Russian Sentimental school, he
translated and adapted French poets. He wrote several Nadpisi/Inscriptions
to accompany portraits and the following is clearly the inspiration for
Tyutchev's epigram:
Puskai ot zavisti serdtsa zoilov noyut;
III).
Tyrrhena regum progenies, tibi
non ante verso lene merum cado
cum flore, Maecenas, rosarum et
pressa tuis balanus capillis.
..........
iamdudum apud me est. eripe te morae,
nec semper udum Tibur et Aefulae
declive contempleris arvum et
Telegoni iuga parricidae.
..........
fastidiosam desere copiam et
molem propinquam nubibus arduis;
omitte mirari beatae
fumum et opes strepitumque Romae.
..........
Plerumque gratae divitibus vices
mundaeque parvo sub lare pauperum
cenae sine aulaei et ostro
sollicitam explicuere frontem.
..........
iam clarus occultum Andromedae pater
ostendit ignem, iam Procyon furit
et stella vesani Leonis,
sole dies referente siccos:
..........
iam pastor umbras cum grege languido
rivumque fessus quaerit et horridi
dumeta Silvani, caretque
ripa vagis taciturna ventis.
..........
tu civitatem quis deceat status
curas et Urbi sollicitus times
quid Seres et regnata Cyro
Bactra parent Tanaisque discors.
..........
prudens futuri temporis exitum
caliginosa nocte premit deus,
ridetque si mortalis ultra
fas trepidat. quod adest memento
..........
componere aequus; cetera fluminis
ritu feruntur, nunc medio alvio
cum pace delabentis Etruscum
in mare, nunc lapides adesos
..........
stirpesque raptas et pecus et domos
12. NL Apr. 1821. Tyutchev's vocabulary changes little over the years.
A significant number of words, formulae and images in this mediocre poem are
repeated in later lyrics of genius. Examples are the favourite obveyat'/to
winnow, fan; pri pervom ... svete/at (the) first light; and the child at the
end of the poem who also appears, in adolescent guise, in [75].
13. Dec. 13th. 1831. Dedicated to A. Muravyov (1806-74). A former pupil
of Raich. Muravyov's earlier years were characterised by rationalist views,
giving way in later life to an adherence to Orthodoxy and church ritual.
(See [345]). Tyutchev's thoughts echo those of Raich as expressed in the
latter's thesis on didactic poetry. Expounding his theory of ancient man,
Raich wrote that the ancients "observed nature at a distance which favoured
the imagination and through the veil which covered it; today, people study
it close at hand and, as it were, armed with spectacles. Certain of them,
describing objects, present us with living, laughing, attractive scenes, and
still more often with statues; other draw landscapes which are often dead.
The most pleasant location without living beings, especially man, can afford
us no lasting pleasure; we want to see ourselves in everything and
everywhere. The ancients did not like a soulless nature, and their
imagination often peoples it with living creatures. In brooks they saw
Naiads; beneath the bark of a tree beat the heart of a Dryad; in valleys,
Nymphs weaved round-dances. This is why the ancients' descriptions are
always short, living. They had no need to seek innumerable nuances to
describe an object; all they had to do was personify it and the reader saw
before him breathing imagines, spirantia signa (B:33/250-251).
Raich might well be describing the best of Tyutchev's nature lyrics
here, where an undoubted sense of living nature contains the conviction that
any rationalist view of nature, such as Pascal's "Par la pensee, je le
comprehends" is misguided.
14. Jun. 1822. TR Schiller: Hektors Abschied/Hector's Farewell from
Gedichte/Poems (pt. 1, 1804). An earlier edition was entitled Abschied
Andromachas und Hektors/The Farewell of Andromache and Hector. A slightly
different version is sung by Amalia in the drama Die Rauber/The Robbers, II,
2 (1781).
Andromache
Will sich Hektor ewig von mir wenden,
Wo Achill mit den unnahbar'n Handen
Dem Patroklus schrecklich Opfer bringt?
Wer wird kunftig deinen Kleinen Lehren
Speere werfen und die Gotter ehren,
wenn der finstre Orkus dich verschlingt?
Hektor
Teures Weib gebiete deinen Tranen,
Nach der Feldschlacht ist mein feurig Sehnen,
Diese Arme schutzen Pergamus.
Kampfend fur den heil'gen Herd der Gotter
Fall ich, und des Vaterlandes Retter
Steig' ich nieder zu dem styg'schen Flu?.
Andromache
Nimmer lausch' ich deiner Waffen Schalle,
Mu?ig liegt dein Eisen in der Halle,
Priams gro?er Heldenstramm verdirbt.
Du wirst hingeh'n wo kein Tag mehr scheinet,
Der Cocytus durch die Wusten weinet,
Deine Libe in dem Lethe stirbt.
Hektor
All mein Sehnen will ich, all mein Denken,
In des Lethe stillen Strom versenken,
Aber meine Liebe nicht.
Horch! der Wilde tobt schon an den Mauern,
Infantry Corps, billeted in Moscow where Sheremetev's mother and sister were
in residence.
...who has spirit and serfs: Tyutchev employs an untranslatable pun on
dusha, one of his favourite words, which can mean "soul", "heart",
"feeling", as well as "serf". In this line he uses two difference cases of
the same noun to suggest the liveliness and "spirit" of the young girl as
well as the "serfs" who would come with her estate. The most famous use of
the noun in this sense is, of course, in Gogol's (1809-52) Myortvye
dushi/Dead Souls. The word dusha takes on a predominantly spiritual sense in
a number of later poems.
Nadezhda Sheremeteva (1775-1850) was Tyutchev's aunt. She corresponded
with Gogol and Zhukovksy. Her son-in-law, I. Yakushkin, was sentenced to
twenty years hard labour for his open involvement in the Decembrist
movement.
The hero-agronomist is Count Pyotr Tolstoi, one of the foremost figures
of the Moscow Agricultural Society.
19. Feb. 1823. TR Schiller: An die Freude/To Joy, from Part 2 of the
Poems.
Freude, schoner Gotterfunken,
Tochter aus Elisium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt,
Alle Menschen werden Bruder,
Wo dein sanfter Flugel weilt.
Chor
Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Ku? der ganzen Welt!
Bruder - uberm Sternenzelt
Mu? ein lieber Vater wohnen.
..........
Wem der gro?e Wurf gelungen,
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Mische seinene Jubel ein!
Ja - wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!
Chor
Was den gro?en Ring bewohnet
Huldige der Simpathie!
Zu de Sternen leitet sie,
Wo der Unbekannte thronet.
..........
Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brusten der Natur,
Alle Guten, alle Bosen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Kusse gab sie uns and Reben,
Einen Freund, gepruft im Tod,
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben,
Und der Cherub steht vor Gott.
Chor
Ihr sturzt nieder, Millionen?
Ahndest du den Schopfer, Welt?
Such ihn uberm Sternenzelt,
demonstrate that folk song was the source of all literature. He believed in
the close relationship between nature, i.e. man's physical environment, and
the cultural evolution of the human race. Herder was also convinced that
nation states ought to be independent, equal and brotherly. This idea of
self-determination went down well with those Slav states less powerful than
their vast eastern neighbour, but this warm-hearted man's ideas evoked
little sympathy in authoritarian states such as Russia. His Ideen zur
Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit/Ideas on the Philosophy of the
History of Mankind and Folk Songs served to convince many Slav patriots that
they, indeed, carried the future in their hands. Karamzin introduced Herder
into Russia, as he did so many writers.
The source of the Herder poem is the Heimskringla/The Circle of the
World, a cycle of sixteen medieval Icelandic sagas. This poem concerns the
final battle of the great hero-king Hrolf kraki, told by his great champion,
Biarki.
Har: Har the hard-gripping, a warrior.
aedile: a Roman officer.
27. NL autumn 1825. R. Brandt considers the possibility that Raich's
Aeolian harp was the poem's inspiration, though Pigaryov points out that
during Tyutchev's stay in Russia in 1825 Raich was not in Moscow. The
presence or absence of such an instrument is probably unimportant, though
Tyutchev did often write on the spur of the moment, so could well have heard
such a harp or something which reminded him of it.
The techniques of using a sound or object out of place is common in
Tyutchev's work. As here, where the harp perturbs the listener, so a lark's
voice at night [104] and the chirruping of swallows [368] when snow still
lies are two examples of many which make him question the evidence of his
senses.
28. NL mid-1826. TR Byron Lines Written in an Album at Malta. (Sept.
14th. 1809); one of his occasional pieces from 1807-24.
As o'er the cold, sepulchral stone
Some name arrests the passer-by;
Thus, when thou views't this page alone,
May mine attract thy pensive eye!
..........
And when by thee that name is read,
Perchance in some succeeding year,
Reflect on me as on the dead,
And think my heart is buried here.
Byron addresses his poem to a woman, Tyutchev to his friends.
Despite huge popularity in Europe, Byron (1788-1824) exercised little
if any direct influence on Tyutchev, although his involvement in the Greek
struggle for independence would certainly have interested Tyutchev, for whom
the Eastern Question became an obsession.
29. NL mid-1826. A loose adaptation of Goethe's quatrain from
Nachlese/Late Harvest (1791).
Will ich die Blumen des fruhen, die Fruchte des spateren Jahres,
Will ich, was reizt und entzuckt, will ich, was sattigt und nahrt,
Will ich den Himmel, die Erde mit einem Namen begreifen;
Nenn ich Sakontala dich und so ist alles gesagt.
***
The early year's blossoms, the late year's fruits,
that which stimulates and delights, which satiates and nurtures,
Heaven and earth, all this I want to give a name to.
You have not seen her; and, therefore, you speak thus.
Vidusaka
That indeed must be charming, which excites even your
admiration.
King
Friend, what need is there of many words?
..........
..........
This immaculate beauty is like a flower not yet smelt, a
delicate shoot not torn by the nails; an unperforated
diamond; or fresh honey whose sweetness is yet
untasted; or the full reward of meritorious deeds. I kn
ow not
whom Destiny will approach as the enjoyer here (of this
form).
Goethe's lyric is but one of many works of the time on a classical
Sanskrit theme, and while similar to Tyutchev's poem in some ways, cannot be
said to be the direct source of it. Referring to Goethe's poem, C.V.
Devadhar was written that he "blends together the young year's blossoms and
the fruits of its decline", combining "heaven and earth in one". According
to Goethe, Devadhar continues, "Shakuntala contains the history of
development - the development of flower into fruit, of earth into heaven, of
matter into spirit". (B: 20/xxiv).
30. Second half of 1826. Written after sentence had been passed on the
Decembrists. The latter were a group of disaffected young officers who
attempted a coup in 1825, primarily in St. Petersburg, hoping to secure
various reforms. Nicholas I was not a listening tsar. The ringleaders were
hanged and others exiled for long periods.
31. NE May 1826 - NL 1830. TR Heine from Die Heimkehr/The Homecoming
Das Herz ist mir bedruckt, und sehnlich
Gedenke ich der alten Zeit;
Die Welt war damals noch so wohnlich,
Und ruhig lebten hin die Leut'.
..........
Doch jetzt ist alles wie verschoben,
Das ist ein Drangen! eine Not!
Gestorben ist der Herrgott oben,
Und unten ist der Teufel tot.
..........
Und alles schaut so gramlich trube,
So krausverwirrt und morsch und kalt,
Und ware nicht das bischen Liebe,
In hellen Farben lieblich hat gemalet! Wohl auf der Stirne glanzt das Meistersiegel,
Dem Macht gegeben in den Geisterreichen;
Doch freut es dich, im bleichen,
Unsichern Schein die Seele zu beirren! Nicht mehr dich selbst vermag ich zu erkennen!
Prometheus Bild scheint vor dem Bild zu brennen,
Doch seltsam wechselnd, seh' ich's sich verwirren!
Bist du Prometheus, der die Wunden fuhlet? Bist du der Geier, der sein Herz durchwuhlet? ..........
Aus Newstead Abbey war Er ausgezogen,
Aus seiner Ahnen altem stillen, Hause,
Wo teure Pfander ihm zuruckgeblieben;
Der Mowe gleich, die unstat im Gebrause
Das Sturm's den Schaum abstreifet von den Wogen!
Wie Ahasverus ward er fortgetrieben
Vom Dache seiner Lieben!
Wie diesem, war ihm nicht vergonnt zu rasten! Vergebens irrt er durch die weite Erde,
Das Gluck im Kampf zu suchen und Gefahrde;
Der dunkle Bann bleibt auf der Seele lasten,
Mag dicht am Abgrund er den Fels erklimmen,
Die kalte Flut des Hellesponts durchschwimmen!
..........
Und bald am goldbespulten Tajostrande,
Bald an der felsumragten Uferspitz,
Wo das Atlantenmeer, als Landerscheide,
Europa trennend von der Mauren Si?e,
Dem Mittelmeer sich eint mit schmalen Bande;
Wo dann, vermischt, hinrauschen stolz, voll Freude,
Die Nachbarfluten beide;
Bald auf den Phrena'n, den sonnenhellen,
Zu deren Hohen aus dem Baskentale
Der Felsensteg, der unwegsame, schmale,
Hinauf sich schlingt, dort, wo die jungen Wellen
Ausstromet der Adour - sieht man ihn ziehen,
Und vor sich selbst, so scheint's, voll Unruh' fliehen! ..........
Bald mit den Toten, die im Kugelregen,
Auf jenem blutgetrankten Feld in Flandern,
Fur goldne Meining, und fur Ehr' und Treue
Berhaucht die Seelen, sehen wir ihn wandern! Ein Weh'n der Geister sauselt mir entgegen!
O teure Erde, Platz der Todesweihe,
Mit frommer, heil'ger Scheue
Tritt dich der Fu?! Dich, mit dem edlen Staube
Gemischt, von jenen tausend, tausend Herzen,
Die hier verblutet in dem Brand der Schmerzen,
Dem Schwert der Schlachten, dem Gescho? zum Raube!
Von Gluten wurdiger Begeist'rung trunken,
Sind sie in freud'gem Glauben hingesunken!
..........
Bald auf der Gletscher Scheitel steht er sinnend,
Wo Wasserfalle tobend niedersausen,
Zum Abgrund, den der Blick nur kann erreichen,
Inde? das Ohr kaum mehr das ferne Brausen
Des Strom's vernimmt, dem engen Tahl entrinnend! So seh'n von Land zu Land wir ihn entweichen,
Bis wo das bleiche Zeichen
and the swan (the latter also part of the Bavarian emblem) "was much
favoured in European poetry, for in this symbolic contest, the eagle is
victor". (C:4ii/363-364) In Tyutchev's poem, the swan is victorious. In
verse by Lamartine, Hugo, Schlegel and Zedlitz, the eagle represents battle
and revolution, while the swan is a symbol of peace and contemplation.
56. December, 1829-early 1830. TR Heine: from Reisebilder/Travel Scenes
(chap. 31, pt.3).
"Ich bin gut russich" - sagte ich auf dem
Schlachtfelde von Marengo, und stieg fur einige
Minuten aus dem Wagen, um meine Morgenandacht zu halten.
Wie unter einem Triumphbogen von kolossalen
Wolkenmassen zog die Sonne herauf, siegreich, heiter,
sicher, einen schonen Tag verhei?end. Mir aber war
zumute wie dem armen Monde, der verbleichend noch am
Himmel stand. Er hatte seine einsame Laufbahn
durchwandelt, in oder Nachtzeit, wo das Gluck schlief
und nur Gespenster, Eulen und Sunder ihr Wesen
trieben; und jetzt, wo der junge Tag hervorstieg, mit
jubelnden Strahlen und flatterndem Morgenrot, jetzt
mu?te er von dannen - noch ein wehmuhtiger Blick
nach dem gro?en Weltlicht, und er verschwand wie
duftiger Neble.
"Es wird ein schoner Tag werden!" reif mein
Reisegefahrte aus dem Wagen mir zu. Ja, es wird ein
schoner Tag werden, wiederholte leise mein betendes
Herz, und zitterte vor Wehmut und Freude. Ja, es wird
ein schoner Tag werden, die Freiheitssonne wird die
Erde glucklicher warmen, als die Aristokratie
sammtlicher Sterne; emporbluhen wird ein neues
Geschlecht, das erzeugt worden in freier
Wahlumarmung, nicht in Zwangsbette und unter der
Kontrolle geistlicher Zollner; mit der freien Geburt
werden auch in den Menschen freie Gedanken und
Gefuhle zur Welt kommen, wovon wir geborenen Knechte
keine Ahnung haben - O! sie werden ebensowenig ahnen,
wie entsetzlich die Nacht war, in deren Dunkel wir
leben mu?ten, und wie grauenhaft wir zu kampfen
hatten, mit ha?lichen Gespenstern, dumpfen Eulen und
scheinheiligen Sundern! O wir armen Kampfer! die wir
unsre Lebenszeit in solchem Kampfer vergeuden mu?ten,
und mude und bleich sind, wenn der Siegestag
hervorstrahlt! Die Glut des Sonnenaufgangs wird unsre
Wangen nicht mehr roten und unsre Herzen nicht mehr
warmen konnen, wir sterben dahin wie der scheidende
Mond - allzu kurz gemessen ist des Menschen
Wanderbahn, an deren Ende das unerbittliche Grab.
Ich wei? wirklich nicht, ob ich es verdiene, da? man
mir einst mit einem Lorbeerkranze den Sarg verziere.
Die Poesie, wie sehr ich sie auch liebte, war immer
nur heiliges Spielzeug, oder geweihtes Mittel fur
himmlische Zwecke. Ich habe nie gro?en Wert gelegt
auf Dichterruhm, und ob man meiner Lieder preiset
oder tadelt, es kummert mich wenig. Aber ein Schwert
sollt ihr mir auf den Sarg legen; denn ich war ein
braver Soldat in Befreiungskriege der Menscheit.
***
"I am a good Russian", I said on the battlefield of
Marengo, and stepped out of my carriage for a few
minutes to say my morning prayers.
As through a triumphal arch of colossal cloud-
Mephistopheles are present. The opening lines are spoken by the three
archangels as they step forward.
1. (Prolog im Himmel)
Raphael
Die Sonne tont, nach alter Weise,
In Bruderspharen Wettgesang,
Und ihre vorgeschriebne Reise
Vollendet sie mit Donnergang.
Ihr Anblick gibt den Engeln Starke,
Wenn keiner sie ergrunden mag.
Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.
Gabriel
Und schnell und unbegreiflich schnelle
Dreht sich umher der Erde Pracht;
Es wechselt Paradieses-Helle
Mit tiefer, schauervoller Nacht;
Es schaumt das Meer im breiten Flussen
Am tiefen Grund der Felsen auf,
Und Fels und Meer wird fortgerissen
In ewig schnellem Spharenlauf.
Michael
Und Sturme brausen um die Wette
Vom Meer aufs Land, vom Land aufs Meer,
Und bilden wutend eine Kette
Der tiefsten Wirkung rings umher.
Da flammt ein blitzendes Verheeren
Dem Pfade vor des Donnerschlags.
Doch deine Boten, Herr, verehren
Das sanfte Wandeln deines Tags.
Zu Drei
Der Anblick gibt den Engein Starke
Da keiner dich ergrunden mag,
Und alle deine hohen Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.
2. In his study, Faust has been perusing a book written by Nostradamus.
As he pronounces the symbol of the earth spirit, the spirit appears in a
reddish flame.
(Nacht)
Geist Wer ruft mir?
Faust (abgewendet) Schreckliches Gesicht!
Geist Du hast mich machtig angezogen,
An meiner Sphare lang' gesogen,
Und nun Faust Weh! ich ertrag' dich nicht!
Geist Du flehst eratmend, mich zu schauen,
Meine Stimme zu horen, mein Antlitz zu sehn;
Mich neigt dein machtig Seelenflehn,
Da bin ich! - Welch erbarmlich Grauen
Fa?t Ubermenschen dich! Wo ist der Seele Ruf?
Wo ist die Brust? die eine Welt in sich erschuf,
Und trug und hegte; die mit Freudebeben
Erschwoll, sich uns, den Geistern, gleich zu heben?
Wo bist du, Faust, des Stimme mir erklang,
Der sich an mich mit allen Kraften drang?
Bist du es, der, von meinem Hauch umwittert,
In allen Lebenstiefen zittert,
Ein furchtsam weggekrummter Wurm?
Faust Soll ich dir, Flammenbildung, weichen?
Ich bin's, bin Faust, bin deines gleichen!
certain images in the above work are reminiscent of Tyutchev's poem Napoleon
[162]. The idea of a colossus such as Napoleon straddling two centuries,
"like a symbol of a superior Will, though self-appointed, to settle chaotic
turmoils" (B:25i/52) was the intellectual commonplace of the day and is not
unknown in Tyutchev. In a letter written in 1865 to E. De Amicis, Manzoni
wrote: "Religion and Fatherland are two great truths, in fact, in varying
degrees, two holy truths". (ibid.). Such words smack of Tyutchev the
political poet.
61. Late 1820s. TR Racine (1639-99): Theramene's monologue from Phedre
(V,6). Possibly late 1820s.
A peine nous sortions des portes de Trezene,
Il etait sur son char; ses gardes affliges
Imitaient son silence autour de lui ranges;
Il suivait tout pensif le chemin de Mycenes;
Sa main sur les chevaux laissait flotter les renes;
Ces superbes coursiers qu'on voyait autrefois,
Pleins d'une ardeur si noble, obeir a sa voix,
L'oeil morne maintenant, et la tete baissee,
Semblaient se conformer a sa triste pensee.
Un effroyable cri, sorti du fond des flots,
Des airs en ce moment a trouble le repos;
Et du sein de la terre une voix formidable
Repond en gemissant a ce cri redoutable.
Jusqu'au fond de nos coeurs notre sang s'est glace;
Des coursiers attentifs le crin s'est herisse.
Cependant sur le dos de la plaine liquide,
S'eleve a gros bouillons une montagne humide;
L'onde approche, se brise, et se vomit a nos yeux,
Parmi des flots d'ecume, un monstre furieux.
Son front large est arme de cornes menacantes;
Tout son corps est couvert d'ecailles jaunissantes;
Indomptable taureau, dragon impetueux,
Sa croupe se recourbe en replis tortueux;
Ses longs mugissements font trembler le rivage.
Le ciel avec horreur voit ce monstre sauvage;
La terre s'en emeut, l'air en est infecte;
Le flot qui l'apporta recule epouvante.
Tout fuit; et, sans s'armer d'un courage unutile,
Dans le temple voisin chacun cherche un asile.
Hippolyte lui seul, digne fils d'un heros,
Arrete ses coursiers, saisit ses javelots,
Pousse au monstre, et, d'un dard lance d'une main
sure,
Il lui fait dans le flanc une large blessure.
De rage et de douleur le monstre bondissant
Vient aux pieds des chevaux tomber en mugissant,
Se roule, et leur presente une gueule enflammee
Qui les couvre de feu, de sang et de fumee.
La frayeur les emporte; et, sourds a cette fois,
Ils ni connaissent plus ni le frein ni la voix;
En efforts impuissants leur maitre se consume;
Ils rougissent le mors d'une sanglante ecume.
On dit qu'on a vu meme, en ce desordre affreux,
Un dieu qui d'aiguillons pressait leur flanc poudreux.
A travers les rochers la peur les precipite;
L'essieu crie et se rompt: l'intrepide Hippolyte
Voit voler en eclats tout son char fracasse;
Dans les renes lui-meme, il tombe embarrasse.
Excusez ma douleur: cette image cruelle
Sera pour moi de pleurs une source eternelle;
Tyutchev cannot resist the temptation to refer to the first dead leaf.
75. 1830. Written on the journey from Petersburg to Munich.
Livonia: the medieval term for the territory of present-day Latvia and
Estonia.
....The bloody time: the period when the German Order of the Knights of
the Sword governed (1202-1562).
76. October, 1830, returning to Munich. The last two lines are a
variation of lines 7-8, st. 1, from Goethe's Willkomm und Abschied/A Welcome
and a Farewell, from Miscellaneous Poems (1763-4).
Es schlug mein Herz, geschwind zu Pferde!
Es war getan fast eh gedacht.
Der Abend wiegte schon die Erde,
Und an den Bergen hing die Nacht;
Schon stand im Nebelkleid die Eiche,
Ein aufgeturmter Riese, da,
Wo Finsternis aus dem Gestrauche
Mit hundert schwarzen Augen sah.
***
My heart beat, the horse sped me on,
it was done faster than thought.
Already evening weighed down upon the earth
and night hung in the mountains;
the oak already stood dressed in cloud,
a towering giant standing there,
where darkness looked from the bushes
looked out with a hundred black eyes.
Describing such a ride, involving several dark, eerie elements of a
nocturnal landscape, Goethe wrote, "what fortune it is to have a light, free
heart!" (Letter of June 27th. 1770). (B:13v, vol.1/14) Tyutchev's attitude
to the dark side of nature, especially when associated with Russia, was
quite the opposite.
77. 1830. The beneficent gods of this deceptively simple poem and of
Tsitseron/Cicero [72] offer man a share in nature and history. They do not
always act so, as in Dva golosa/Two Voices [179].
78. 1830. N. Berkovsky considers the poem to be aimed at Schelling and
his followers, for whom dowsers were "sacred people, entrusted by nature
herself". (A:3/37-39)
79. 1830. The imagery reflects that of the lyric on the Decembrists
[30], its slightly
singsong rhythm setting it apart as a political poem under the guise of
a nonetheless accurate description of dawn breaking over the Alps.
80. 1830. Influenced by the description of the environs of Rome in Mme.
de Stael's novel, Corinne, ou l'Italie/Corinna, or Italy (B:38,
pt.V,ch.3/124). She writes, "In a manner of speaking, this bad air lays
siege to Rome; each year it advances by a few steps and people are forced to
abandon the most charming places to its empire; undoubtedly the absence of
trees in the countryside surrounding the town is one of the causes of the
pollution of the air, and it may be due to that that the ancient Romans had
dedicated the woods to goddesses, so that the people should be made to
respect them. The bad air is a scourge of Rome's inhabitants, threatening
the town with complete depopulation... The maleficent influence is not
observable through any external sign; you breath an air which appears very
pleasant; the land laughs in its fertility; during evenings, a sweet
freshness offers you repose from the burning day, and all of this is death!"
Mme. de Stael was the influential Swiss writer credited with coining
the term "Romanticism".
81. NL 1830. Creusa, the wife of Aeneas, was not destined to leave
Troy. Falling ever farther behind her husband, she was taken back by
Aphrodite, Aeneas's mother. When Aeneas returned to find her, he was met by
her ghost.
- ? - ? - ? - - ?
- ? - ? -
?
?
?
?
?
?
? - ? - ?
? - ? - ?
?
- ? - - ?
?
spared the daughter and took her away to be a priestess in the land of the
Taurians (present-day Crimea).
The janissaries were elite Turkish soldiers, originally renegade slaves
and Christian children taken in tribute.
87. Date unknown. Tyutchev undertook a sea voyage in the second half of
1833 when he was despatched from Munich to Greece on diplomatic business.
This very effective poem, one of several which are never anthologised with
more famous works yet which show his talents as a master of metre, rhyme and
humour (see [346, 350]), may reflect his impressions of an enforced stop on
the Dalmatian coast. Son na more/A Dream at Sea [92] deals with a similar
subject, sharing the storm setting and unexpected metrical changes, the
latter in [87] first noted by Lane (A:18viii). Tyutchev was conventional
when it came to a poem's layout and generally narrow in his choice of
themes, so these similarities are too much of a coincidence. Could he have
made this up, or did he have an old story in his mind during the storm?
Perhaps he heard or half-heard a tale. He was, after all, forever dozing off
or daydreaming and waking to half-hear something. Lane feels instinctively
that it is a translation or a poem on a theme of another poet and I tend to
agree.
A:18x/275 is a discussion of this mission to Greece which, while it
produced one of the most famous poems, [92], did his career no good at all.
Indeed, Tyutchev the diplomat "acquired and retained the reputation of being
a failure - a judgement with which he heartily agreed".
The Bavarian Prince Otto was the first king of the newly independent
Greece (reigned 1833-62). Persistently inept, he was finally ejected after
an insurrection in 1862.
88. NL early 1832. TR Uhland: Fruhlingsruhe/Peace in Springtime, [3] of
the Lieder/Songs (1812)
O legt mich nicht ins dunkle Grab,
Nicht unter die grune Erd' hinab!
Soll ich begraben sein,
Leig ich ins tiefe Gras hinein.
..........
In Gras und Blumen lieg ich gern,
Wenn eine Flote tont von fern,
Und wenn hoch obenhin
Die hellin Fruhlingswolken ziehn.
***
Oh do not lay me in a dark coffin,
nor under the green earth!
When I must be buried,
lie me in the dense grass.
..........
I'd rather lie among the grass and flowers,
a flute playing from far away,
above me floating
the light clouds of spring.
Uhland's work shares some affinities with folk poetry.
89. 1832. Undoubtedly written on the death of Goethe (Mar. 22nd. 1832).
90. Early May, 1836. This octet formed part of the later poem, Napoleon
[162]. In its early form, it is imbued with impressions gleaned from Heine's
characterisation of the emperor in the second article of Franzosische
Zustande/French Affairs in which Heine wrote: "Lafayette ... is not a genius
as Napoleon was, in whose head the eagles of inspiration had nested, while
in his heart the snakes of calculation writhed". (B:15iii, vol.3/95).
Considering Napoleon a monstrous child of the French revolution,
Chateaubriand (1768-1848) went further and played on the non-Frenchness of
the emperor: "Each nation has its vices. Those of the French are not
treason, blackheartedness, ingratitude. The murder of the Duke of Enghien...
the war in Spain... reveal in Buonaparte a nature foreign to that of
France". (B:8/70)
The French author, secretary of the French embassy in Rome under
Napoleon resigned on the execution of the Duke of Enghien. This "father of
Romanticism" in French literature served the cause of the Bourbons in De
Buonaparte, des Bourbons/About Bonaparte and the Bourbons (B:8) just one
year before Napoleon's final defeat.
Pushkin failed to have the poem published in Sovremennik/The
Contemporary. Banning it, the censor concluded that "the author's thought
was unclear and might well lead to a rather vague understanding". In 1849,
Tyutchev included another part of the poem, On sam na rubezhe Rossii/And
there you stood, and Russia stood before you [162], in the synopsis of
Chapter 7 (Rossiya i Napoleon/Russia and Napoleon) of a treatise he would
have entitled Rossiya i Zapad/Russia and the West, had he completed it.
Akskov believes this section of the poem to have been written in 1840. The
finished version can be dated NL March, 1850. Napoleon's influence as a
symbol of change, of a titan bestriding two ages, cannot be underestimated
in the works of more than one major author of the time. Tyutchev's final
version owes more than a little to Manzoni [60].
Chateaubriand wrote of Napoleon: "Child of our revolution, he is
strikingly similar to its mother ... Born largely in order to destroy,
Buonaparte carries evil in his breast as a mother bears her fruit with joy
and a kind of pride". (ibid./88-89)
In the notes to Russia and the West, Tyutchev wrote: "All the rhetoric
concerning Napoleon has pushed into the background what actually happened,
the meaning of which has not been comprehended by poetry. It is a centaur,
one half of whose body is Revolution". (A:1/220) The last words are
interesting in that Tyutchev names poetic perception and not historical
study as the means of comprehending the significance of Napoleon. In his
Dnevnik pisatelya/Diary of a Writer (B:11iii,vol.24/312), Dostoevsky echoed
Tyutchev's belief that politics is too important to be left to politicians:
"Faithfulness to poetic truth can communicate incomparably more about our
history than faithfulness to history alone".
What fate has in store for her, let it come to pass: a quotation from
Napoleon's command to his army at the crossing of the river Neman, June
22nd. 1812: "Russia is obsessed by fate: so, let it come to pass".
another riddle: Tyutchev has in mind words uttered by Napoleon on St.
Helena: "In fifty years, Europe will be either in the grip of revolution, or
in the hands of the cossacks".
at the East: by "East", Tyutchev means Russia.
The Contemporary was for some time the favoured outlet of the radical
intelligentsia, eventually losing many of its subscribers as more left-wing
people, such as Chernyshevsky (1828-89) and Dobrolyubov (1836-61), became
involved. After 1862 it became increasingly intolerant of anyone not
representing extreme radical views. After Karakozov's attempt on the tsar's
life in 1862, it was suspended.
91. Mid-January, 1833. This mildly ironic piece may have been inspired
by the statement of a thinker for whom Tyutchev had scant respect. The
italicised words support this. The notion of man eternally wondering how a
stone falls down a mountain side would have amused Tyutchev, as the idea of
the young man questioning the waves entertained Heine [32]. Before long
Tyutchev was to state that spring "obeys her own laws" and is utterly
unaware of man's thoughts or actions: Spring does not know us/us, our grief,
our malice... Vesna/Spring [132]).
92. 1833. In this incredible lyric, the poet is lifted above reality
and allowed a vision, divine or otherwise, but whatever the hallucinatory
vision represents, reality fights back. Tyutchev was not a good
sea-traveller and might well have had recourse to drugs to ease the
discomfort he must have experienced during the storm, although as late as
July 1847, on arriving in Berlin, he wrote to Ernestine: "... I was ... prey
for the first time in my life to the distress of sea-sickness".
95. September, 1834. In this elegaic poem, the Tyutchev who would
perhaps like to believe describes the trappings of belief sceptically. Like
the scene it describes, the poem is simple, almost bleak.
96. NE 1834, NL April, 1836. TR Heine from New Poems. In der Fremde/In
Foreign Lands.
In welche soll ich mich verlieben,
Da beide liebenswurdig sind?
Ein schones Weib ist noch die Mutter,
Die Tochter ist ein schones Kind.
..........
Die wei?en, unerfahrnen Glieder,
Sie so ruhrend anzusehn!
Doch reizend sind geniale Augen,
Die unsre Zartlichkeit verstehn.
..........
Es gleicht mein Herz dem grauen Freunde,
Der zwischen zwei Gebundel Heu
Nachsinnlich grubelt, welch von beiden
Das allerbeste Futter sei.
***
Which one should I fall in love with?
They're both very fanciable.
The mother is still a pretty woman
and the daughter is a lovely girl.
..........
These white inexperienced limbs
which look so touching!
Charming, brilliant eyes
comprehend affection!
..........
My heart is like our grey friend
which, standing between two bundles of hay,
ponders deeply about which of the two
will make the best meal.
The French philosopher and scientist, Jean Buridan (1300-58), decided
that, quantities and distances being equal, a dog placed between two bowls
of meat would choose which to eat at random. In later years, the dog became
"Buridan's ass". It is unlikely that Tyutchev would have copied the dog. The
younger, fresher Klothilde would most assuredly have exerted a stronger pull
on him than his wife.
97. NE 1834, NL April 1836. A variation on a theme from Heine from New
Poems: In der Fremde): In Foreign Lands).
Es treibt dich fort von Ort zu Ort,
Du wei?t nicht mal warum;
Im Winde klingt ein sanftes Wort,
Schaust dich verwundert um.
..........
Die Liebe, die dahinten blieb,
Sie ruft dich sanft zuruck:
O komm zuruck, ich hab dich lieb,
Du bist mein einz'ges Gluck!
..........
Doch weiter, weiter, sonder Rast,
Du darfst nicht stille stehn.
Was du so sehr geliebet hast
Sollst du nicht wiedersehn.
***
From place to place you're rushed away,
not knowing the reason why;
a gentle word rings out in the wind
the moon still supreme during those minutes before sunrise. In this
rhythmic, hypnotic masterpiece, he holds night in place, as if in a
freeze-frame, allowing the lark's song to reverberate like the voice of a
lost soul, threatening madness to him who hears it at this time.
105. 1830s. As in [104] bird song represents Nature, here indifferent
to the negatively described man-made scene below. Formal religion is
depicted in terms of a body being lowered into one abyss (a hole in the
ground) while the religion of nature, if religion it can be called, is seen
in terms of the endless "abyss" (bezdna) of the sky.
106. 1830s. Tyutchev demonstrates his superb ability to employ
repetition and assonance in this lyric in which one of this favourite
devices comes into play, that of a woman's and the sky's changing moods in
terms of each other.
107. 1830s. The ageing Tolstoy could not read this without tears,
considering that it was one of the few true works of art which is of such
quality that there is no yardstick with which to measure it. This wondrously
muted, musical poem does, indeed, deserve such high praise.
108. 1830s. A similar, less inspired poem by A. Illichevsky
(1798-1837), Oryol i
chelovek/The Eagle and the Man, 1827) suggests a common source.
109. 1830s. The fast stream hurrying off to a house-warming conjures up
noise below the observer while the latter climbs ever upward to seek the
solitude of the peaks. In a later poem [234], the poet sits "above" roots
and, even though he is at ground level, the same up-down movement is sensed.
There is a similar sense of being alone, looking down on the world as water
pours towards it in sweltering heat.
110. 1830s. Young as he was, Tyutchev was already becoming obsessed
with ageing and being left behind. His personal tragedy was that as he aged,
his demon would not let him enjoy the emotional and intellectual peace which
old age is said to bring. In a letter to Ernestine (Aug. 14th. 1846), he
wrote: "Alas, is it really worth the trouble ageing if, with increasingly
debilitating forces, you remain a prey to the same agitations".
Writing to Nikolay Sushkov (1796-1871) with best wishes for the future
with his new wife, Tyutchev's sister, Darya, the poet could not, it seems,
resist the temptation to broach this subject: "For myself especially this
thought would be a torment, as tormenting as a reproach". (July 3rd. 1836)
He is referring to the fact that, the two brothers having left their
parents, the latter would now have to see out their last years without any
of their children. Such comments abound in Tyutchev's letters.
111. 1830s. A light-hearted comparison of an increasingly busy Danube
with the river from times gone by, when mythical creatures reigned, is
interestingly done from the vantage point of an observer far above it,
although the narrator's position is not described as such. As in Utro v
gorakh/Morning in the Mountains [48], the poet is almost airborne while the
river snakes away below him, an interesting counterpoint to Po ravnine vod
lazurnoi/Across a blue plain of water [157] in which he is on the deck of
the ship being observed from above.
112. 1830s. The poem could be seen as a microcosm of Heine's Travel
Scenes, the German describing his short escape from the unimaginative
academic life of Gottingen to wander through the Harz mountains in a lengthy
piece of prose, Tyutchev encapsulating the entire travel motif in two
stanzas. As in Tyutchev, in stanza 3 of the introductory poem to the
Harzreise/Harz Journey, Heine depicts the mountains as allowing the human
spirit to breathe more easily:
Auf die Berge will ich steigen,
Wo die frommen Hutten stehen,
Wo die Brust sich frei erschlie?et,
Und die freien Lufte wehen.
***
I want to climb the mountains
Bohemia) and Russia and went a long way to acquainting his compatriots with
Russian literature. In 1819 he published the so-called Kraledvorsky
manuscript, presenting it as a collection of the epic and lyrical songs of
the Czech people. It turned out that he had written them himself, having
studied legends and chronicles. Nonetheless, the book played its part in the
development of Czech national consciousness.
In 1867, Tyutchev wrote a postscript to the poem [323].
137. July 7th. 1842. Dedicated to the German writer and pamphleteer
Karl-August Varnhagen von Ense (1775-1858). Von Ense served in the Russian
army during the Napoleonic wars. He contributed through his translations to
a greater awareness of Russian literature in Germany. Tyutchev visited him
in Berlin en route to Munich. He had known the German since the late 1820s.
Von Ense was probably the most knowledgeable German of the time when it came
to Russian culture.
138. September, 1842. The Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), was
the first professor of Slavic literature at the College de France, where he
gave a series of lectures on the history and literature of the Slav peoples.
On receiving copies of extracts of the lectures from Turgenev, Tyutchev
wrote and sent this poem to him. Mickiewicz meant as much to Poles as
Pushkin did to Russians. Exiled to Russia in 1824 for Polish patriotic
agitation, he reached poetic maturity there, later becoming a Catholic
mystic and spending much of his life in Paris. It is ironic that Tyutchev
should have sent his poem to a man who believed that among all nations
Poland had a messianic role to play, and who wished to lead a Polish legion
against Russia during the Crimean war.
139. October, 1842. In letters to Ernestine, Tyutchev returns
constantly to the theme of separation. Images of absence and space abound,
whether as references to his separation from those close to him, something
he always found hard to cope with, or as images of the geographical vastness
and emptiness of his native land. In 1843 he wrote to her of "the tremendous
plain, the Scythian plain, which so often shocked you on my relief map,
where it forms an enormous sheet, no nicer there than it is in reality".
In July 1847 he had technology to thank for protecting him in some
measure from the emptiness of Russia's plains: "Ah, let's not curse the
railway, especially now that the network is joining up and closing in on all
sides. What is particularly beneficent for me is that it reassures my
imagination against my most terrible enemy - space - this odious space
which, on ordinary roads, drowns and annihilates you, body and soul".
Absence is geographical emptiness and distance between him and loved
ones. He begins and ends one virulent letter of 1851 thus: "To be sure, I
protest against your absence. I neither want to nor can tolerate it ... With
your company there disappears all... continuity in my life ..."
Is there anything in the world more ridiculous, more irritating and
less satisfying than writing? It's of use only to people who get used to
absence and resign themselves to this abyss. Ah, I just can't put up with
any of that!"
140. Late September, 1844, when Tyutchev resettled in St. Petersburg.
There is undoubtedly a culture shock here. Still, the first two stanzas show
the poet of Russia malgre lui beginning to produce some of his most
brilliant work. The remainder of the poem is as insipid as his feeble
hearkening back to the west in the superb Na vozvratnom puti/The Return
Journey [241].
141. 1844. A variation on the concluding lines of Schiller's
Kolumbus/Columbus (probably 1795) from Poems (1804).
Steure mutiger Segler! Es mag der Witz dich verhohnen,
Und der Schiffer am Steu'r senken die lassige Hand.
Immer, immer nach West! Dort mu? die Kuste sich zeigen,
Liegt sie doch deutlich und liegt schimmernd vor deinem Verstand.
Traue dem leitenden Gott und folge dem schweigenden Weltmeer,
War' sie noch nicht, sie stieg jetzt aus den Fluten empor.
than I. Opposite me is that old relic of a house which we once lived in and
of which there remains the body of the dwelling which my father had
maintained religiously so that one day, on returning to the country, there
would be some trace, some scrap of our former existence for me to find...
Indeed, that first moment I arrived, I had a very vivid memory as if it were
a revelation of that enchanted world of childhood, destroyed and annihilated
for such a long time now. The former garden, 4 large limes, very well known
in those parts, a fairly puny alley about a hundred paces long which to me
seemed immeasurable, all this magnificent universe of my childhood, so full
of life, so varied - all of that is enclosed within an area of several
square feet".
Lamartine was born in Savoy.
161. Possibly 1849. In such an insignificant poem written in French,
the Tyutchevian idea of something significant being poured into the air
comes across.
162. Final version NL early 1850. See note [90].
163. Late 1840s-early 1850s. Lane was the first to deal in detail with
the Pascalian character of some of Tyutchev's French poems, (A:18vii/321),
mentioning in particular [130, 139, 163, 176]. He begins his treatment of
these poems with [130], pointing out that "the first seven lines of the
following piece communicate anxiety and terror of the abyss of time".
164. NL early 1850. this rather stilted poem is reminiscent of parts of
Uraniya [7].
165. NL early 1850. The coldness of the moonlight, the desertedness of
the scene, the absolute sense of man's being alone and in an unwelcoming
environment all come across forcefully in this "western" poem.
166. NL early 1850.
The first two stanzas refer to the annual symbolic betrothal of the
doges of Venice with the Adriatic sea, a tradition lasting up till the late
eighteenth century.
Three centuries, perhaps four: the republic of Venice blossomed between
the 12th. and 15th. centuries.
The shadow of the lion's wing: a reference to the emblem of St. Mark,
the protector of Venice.
The links of heavy chains: From 1814 up to 1866 Venice was under
Austrian rule.
167. NL early 1850. This is untypical of Tyutchev. Nonetheless, it
shares with Vous, dont on voit briller, dans les nuits azurees/Unsullied
gods of light [176] a sense of warmth, even security. Night, in so many of
Tyutchev's spontaneous poems, is a comforting thing. Only in the more
formal, so-called "Holy Night" lyrics is night perceived to be a fearsome
entity.
168. March 1st. 1850. The tsar considered this poem, unpublished until
the Crimean War had broken out, "untimely" and censored it himself.
the fourth age: a reference to the 400th. anniversary of the fall of
the Byzantine empire (1453-1853).
The ancient vaults of Sofia: Aia-Sofia is now a mosque in Istanbul.
169. March 1st.-6th. 1850. The words in italics are taken from an
imperial manifesto of March 14th. 1848, on the revolutionary events in
Austria and Prussia.
170. May, 1850. Addressed to the Austrophil chancellor, Karl Nesselrode
(1780-1862). Nesselrode was of the old Holy Alliance school.
171. July, 1850. This comfortingly warm poem, dealing with the same
theme as his translation of Beranger's cynical work [93], shows, perhaps, a
Tyutchev pining for security, despite being in Russia with his family, and
equally expressing a conservative attitude to the beggar, asking god to help
him through life while accepting from the outsider's point of view that his
unenviable lot is a holy one.
172. July, 1850. The up-down movement of the river and apparent
sky-movement is typical of Tyutchev's poetic refusal to separate phenomena.
173. July, 1850. This is the first poem about his mistress, Elena
Deniseva. Elena inspired some of the sharpest, most touching love poetry in
nineteenth-century Russian literature.
174. July, 1850. His epigrammatic style comes across yet again. As in
[16] and [122], there are times when Tyutchev seems to sit back and simply
let God get on with it, provided he, the poet, is not pestered.
175. August, 1850. In this incredible poem, as in [118], nature is an
entity in which space and time merge.
176. August 23rd. 1850. A nocturnal walk with Ernestine is the subject.
This excellent work is yet another example of the warmth of a Russian
night-poem. (See [177].)
177. September 15th. 1850. Concerning death, as did the earlier [80],
hidden among luxuriant, colourful images.
178. 1850. St. Petersburg. A polite compliment to his sister-in-law,
the poetess, Evdokiya Rostopchina (nee Sushkova, 1811-1858), some of whose
popular love lyrics were set to music. She also wrote about the emptiness of
upper-class life. Tyutchev is said to have had a low opinion of her work.
179. 1850. One of the favourites of the poet Alexander Blok
(1880-1921), with what he referred to as its "Hellenic, pre-Christian sense
of Fate", this enigmatic poem seems relatively mediocre, far from possessing
any of the pre-Christian, Hellenic freshness Blok and his peers were often
looking out for in the poetry of previous years. It is untypical and
difficult to date. It could well have been written considerably earlier than
the fifties, though there is no hard evidence. Any reference to the Greeks
immediately suggests political undertones. The theme of Fate and the
indifference of the gods to man is Tyutchevian, but the general layout of
the poem most certainly is not. It could well be a translation or
adaptation.
Indeed,
Kozyrev
(A:20,vol.1/88) considers
Goethe's
Symbolum/Symbol to be the undisputed source although, despite his claim, he
was not the first to notice the link. (ibid., vol. 2, 47/129) The relevant
lines from Goethe (taken from stanza 3) are as follows:
....................Stille
Ruhn oben die Sterne
Und unten die Graber.
***
....................Peacefully
the stars rest above
and the graves below.
There are other references in Goethe's poem to the basic theme of
toiling man and carefree gods.
No self-respecting Soviet commentator could have resisted the
temptation to deal with this poem. Tvardovskaya (ibid., vol. 1/163) writes
as follows about the first stanza: "The lines... seem to have been written
about those and for those who, at a time when there was no widespread,
national movement, began single-handed their struggle with autocracy".
Atheistic existentialism is brought into the picture by Kozyrev. I
cannot agree with his finding that there are two creative periods in
Tyutchev's work, a point he makes more than once forcefully, any more than I
accept his philosophical links with Sartre and Heidegger in his discussion
of Two Voices: "The crucial moment between Tyutchev's two creative periods
and, from a certain point of view, perhaps, the height of his poetry, is
represented by 'Two Voices'. Here you have the break with the 'beneficent'
gods of nature, there - a majestic attempt to confirm man's dignity in
himself, as in the highest being in the Universe, but in a solitary being
thrown into the Universe, where Fate conquers, where everything is
subservient to death. The spirit of this poem is akin, in all likelihood,
not only - and not so much - to the tragic feel of the ancients, as much as
to the ethical concepts of the atheistic existentialism of Sartre or
Heidegger". (ibid., vol. 1/92)
An echo of like minds (pereklichka golosov/an exchange of voices) is
is suffering mankind
blindly from one
hour to the next,
like water from one ledge
to another ledge drops,
year after year into uncertainty.
Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843) merged Christian and Classical themes
in German verse which attempted to naturalise Classical Greek poetry. He saw
the gods of Greece as real, living forces in natural manifestations. The
novel Hyperion is the story of a disillusioned Greek freedom-fighter. In his
poem Die Heimat/Home, Holderlin wrote: "For they who lend us the heavenly
fire, the Gods, give us sacred sorrow too. Let it be so. A son of earth I
seem; born to love and to suffer".
Fundamentally, Tyutchev's poem is probably another example of his
eclecticism. All great literature owes much to what has gone before and the
truly great writer is capable of using, borrowing as opposed to stealing, in
T.S. Elliot's words, other people's work to his own original ends. As with
his choice of Schiller's Das Siegesfest/The Victory Celebration [181], a
connection with the Eastern Question can never be ruled out.
180. 1850. The two major political problems facing Tyutchev tended to
be the relationship between the Slavonic world friendly to Russia and
Poland, and the age-old question of the position of Constantinople, occupied
by the Turks.
181. Probably 1850-early 1851. TR Schiller: Das Siegesfest/The Victory
Celebration (1803) from Poems.
Priams Feste war gesunken,
Troja lag in Schutt und Staub,
Und die Griechen, siegestrunken,
Reich beladen mit dem Raub,
Sa?en auf den hohen Schiffen
Langs des Hellespontos Strand,
Auf der frohen Fahrt begriffen
Nach dem schonen Griechenland.
Stimmet an die frohen Lieder,
Denn dem vaterlichen Herd
Sind die Schiffe zugekehrt,
Und zur Heimat geht es wieder.
..........
Und in lagen Reihen, klagend,
Sa? der Trojerinnen Schar,
Schmerzvoll an die Bruste schlagend,
Bleich mit aufgelostem Haar.
In das wilde Fest der Freuden
Mischten sie den Wehgesang,
Weinend um das eigne Leiden
In des Reiches Untergang.
Lebe wohl geliebter Boden!
Von der su?en Heimat fern
Folgen wir dem fremden Herrn,
Ach wie glucklich sind die Toten!
..........
Und den hohen Gottern zundet
Kalchas jetzt das Opfer an.
Pallas, die die Stadte grundet
Und zertrummert, ruft er an,
Und Neptun, der um die Lander
Seinen Wogengurtel schlingt,
182. NL Spring, 1851. From the point of view of man's thought being a
transient insignificance, as expressed in Vesna/Spring [132], this is one of
several very un-Pascalian poems.
183. NL first months of 1851. Tyutchev ironically compares a woman's
beauty with the brief northern summer, clearly borrowed from Pushkin's lines
from Evgeny Onegin (chap. 4, canto XL):
No nashe severnoe leto,
Karikatura yuzhnykh zim,
Mel'knyot it net ....
***
But our northern summer,
a caricature of southern winters,
flashes and is gone already.
The poem begins in deadly earnest, the poet exclaiming that as we age,
we love "more murderously", more surely "ruining" what is dear to us, yet
already in the second stanza, then rapidly as the poem progresses, a
lighter, no less regretful tone appears, reminiscent of some of the earlier
poems with their "cheeks'...roses", "magical voice" and "youthfully lively
laughter".
184. April 12th. 1851. Addressed to Ernestine. Less inspired than the
previous poem, in these lines Tyutchev allows himself to float as it were on
the memory of childhood as recounted by his wife. (See A:20, vol.2/99-103.)
185. 1851. Addressed to Ernestine. Written during the second year of
his love for Elena (she had been pregnant since September 1850), the poem
stayed in a herbarium album, undiscovered by his wife until May 1875. On
first reading this poem, Aksakov wrote to Tyutchev's daughter, Ekaterina, in
1875: "These verses are remarkable not so much as poetry, as for the fact
that they throw some light on the most treasured, intimate ferment his heart
sensed for his wife... But what is especially striking and what grips the
heart so is the circumstance... that she had not the faintest idea that
these Russian verses existed... In 1851... she did not know enough Russian
to be able to understand Russian verse nor to decipher the Russian writing
of F.(yodor) I. (vanovich)... What must have been her surprise, her joy and
her grief on reading this greeting from beyond the grave, such a greeting,
such an act of gratitude for her work as a wife, her acts of love!" (See
A:33ii/149-150)
186. May, 1851. Trees dream, even hallucinate about spring in an image
which recurs throughout the poetry.
187. 1851. Addressed to Elena shortly after the birth of their eldest
daughter, Elena (May 20th. 1851-May 2nd. 1865).
Your unnamed cherub: could refer either to the fact that the poem was
written before the child's christening (the opinion of E. Kazanovich) or
that the baby was illegitimate (G. Chulkov), a fact that the poem was writen
before the child's christening (the opinion of E. Kazanovich) or that the
baby was illegitimate (G. Chulkov), a fact weighing heavily on the mother.
188. June 30th. 1851.
Let me in....! A paraphrase of Mark IX, 24.
189. July 14th. 1851. The image of ebb and flow is common in Tyutchev,
whether it be the literal forward-retreating movement of the sea ([143]) or
the figurative incursion-exiting movement of different levels of reality
constructed around a sea-image [92].
190. July 14th. 1851. En route from Moscow to St. Petersburg. This poem
is cleverly constructed to allow a superb image of a Jly, star-filled sky to
merge with a sense of threat, hinting back at a poem about a woman's eyes as
she is kissed ([123]).
191. August 6th. 1851. In this cynical comparison of love with a brief
dream, Tyutchev employs his epigrammatic style to great effect. There is, of
course, more to any poem employing any form or interpretation of the nodal
son/sleep, dream, as the opening of a letter to his wife (1852)
demonstrates: "... I had expected a letter from you today to give myself
just a tiny bit of a sense of reality. For it often happens that I perceive
my real life as a dream".
192. NL October 27th. 1851. TR Goethe: Mignon from Wilhelm Meister's
Apprenticeship (bk.3). First edition 1795, published separately in Ballads
and Romances (1800).
Mignon
Kennst du das Land? wo die Zitronen bluhn,
Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen gluhn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht,
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! Dahin
Mocht' ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter ziehn.
..........
Kennst du das Haus? Auf Saulen ruht sein Dach,
Es glanzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach,
Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?
Kennst du es wohl?
Dahin! Dahin
Mocht' ich mit dir, o mein Beschutzer, ziehn.
..........
Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?
Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg,
In Hohlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut,
Es sturzt der Fels und uber ihn die Flut.
Kennst du ihn wohl?
Dahin! Dahin
Geht unser Weg! O Vater, la? uns ziehn!
***
Do you know that land were the lemons bloom,
Gold-orange glows in dark leaves,
a gentle wind wafts from a blue sky,
The myrtle stands quietly, the laurel stands high!
Perhaps you know it?
There, there
would I go with you, my darling.
..........
Do you know that house? Its roof rests on
columns,
its hall gleams, its chamber shimmers
and mosaics look down upon me:
poor child, what have they done to you?
Perhaps you know it?
There, there
would I go with you, my protector.
..........
Do you know the mountain and its high footbridge?
The mule seeks its way in the clouds;
in caves a brood of serpents lives,
rocks fall and over them pour waters!
Perhaps you know it?
There, there
lies our path! Oh father, let us go!
Has the good lord really abolished bad weather just for our sakes?"
212. September 11th. 1854. An epigrammatic profundity, the simple act
of saying good bye becomes an "abyss" (bezdna).
213. December, 1854. The poem fell foul of censor for its "vague
thought" and "a certain sharpness of tone". Addressed to G. Popova, one of
Tyutchev's acquaintances.
214. 1855-59. Late 1850s. The Jeu de secretaire/Secretary's Game was
fashionable in the St. Petersburg salons. This quatrain was written in a
book of questions and answers used in the game and might be a quotation from
something else. It seems to be a reply to the question put to Tyutchev: A
quoi bon un crayon?/What's a pencil for?
215. March 1st. 1855. The Austrian archduke was in St. Petersburg on
February 27th. 1855. Austria had refused to declare its neutrality during
the Crimean War.
216. July 10th. 1855. Addressed to Elena. There are echoes of many
poems here: billow after billow flow on as do thoughts and waves in Volna i
duma/The Wave and the Thought [189]; in Teni sizye smesilis'/Blue-grey
mingling [107], sounds, shapes, colours and aromas merge synaesthetically to
produce a dreamlike existence in which the poet can pour himself, as happens
when smoke from the fire engulfs him and his mistress; more ominously, in
Gus na kostre/Hus at the Stake [356], flame crackles and spreads like an
animal through the kindling.
217. Probably July, 1855. Tyutchev forgets himself and whatever
problems life has created for him, or that he has created for himself, the
exhortation to time to wait containing a hint of pathos made all the more
powerful by the reference to that which is vile and false, for the less
pleasant aspects of life in St. Petersburg high society were Elena's daily
social lot and, while after this moment Tyutchev must return to them, he was
never shunned for his part in the illicit romance. Unlike Elena he could
escape the vile and false at any time.
218. August 13th. 1855. Roslavl in the Smolensk province. One of
Tyutchev's most oft-quoted poems, it lends itself to easy interpretation by
commentators of various persuasions. From being a spontaneous reaction to
the sight of the down-trodden serfs, observed by Tyutchev more than once on
his own estate, to a reflection on the courage of the ordinary privates of
the serf-army defending Sevastopol, it was notably quoted by Dostoevsky in
The Brothers Karamazov, the section called The Legend of the Grand
Inquisitor. (B:11iii, vol.14/226).
Ivan Karamazov's strange prose poem concerns the re-appearance of
Christ during the Inquisition, a Christ who had finally heeded man's prayers
and in his immeasurable compassion once more come down to offer succour to
suffering humankind. The inquisitor informs Christ that he is to be burned
the next day, although after a lengthy justification of his decision,
relents and finally releases him, warning him that he must never return. The
contradiction inherent in the existence of a Church which is Christian but
which, like any ruling political party, needs to stay in power to survive,
is one of many aspects of the problem of faith and religion brilliantly
exploited by Dostoevsky. Tyutchev's meaning may be more ambiguous.
219. August 13th. 1855. Roslavl. Inspired by the poet's gloomy
presentiments during the siege of Sevastopol. The fall of the town
overwhelmed and stunned Tyutchev. In her diary Anna wrote: "My father had
just returned from the country, not suspecting anything of the fall of
Sevastopol. Knowing his passionate patriotic feelings, I was very much
afraid of the first explosion of his anger, and it was a great relief to see
him not irritated; only, from his eyes, quietly, great tears rolled; he was
deeply moved, when I told him that only the second day after receiving the
dreadful news of this blow which had befallen us, the tsar and the tsarina
had wanted to go out to the people to raise their spirits". (C:19/49-50)
The Crimean defeat had more than the straightforward effect of wounded
national pride on Tyutchev. "The deafening collapse of the imaginary granite
structure made the poet glance around him, look at Russia not only from the
window of the high-society salon". (A:20, vol.1,fn.9/166) While it did not,
as Soviet commentators have sometimes tried to demonstrate, make him in any
way anti-monarchist, it reinforced that contempt he had always felt for
inefficiency among those whose role was to rule.
220. October 16th. 1855. The poetess Rostopchina, about whose return to
Petersburg the poem is written, published her ballad Nasil'nyi brak/The
Forced Marriage, a portrayal of Russo-Polish relations. It incurred the
displeasure of Nicholas, who forbade her to appear in St. Petersburg. She
returned to the city only after the tsar's death. Tyutchev was constantly
involved in the works of other poets. Two days after writing this verse, he
was appointed to a committee whose brief was an examination of those of
Zhukovsky's works unpublished during his lifetime.
221. December 31st. 1855. St. Petersburg. Concerning the war and the
then
fashionable
spiritualism,
ironically
referred
to
as
Stoloverchenie/table-turning, Anna wrote (ibid./147-8): "July 10. Yum the
table-turner has arrived. Seance in the great hall in the company of twelve
of the emperor's entourage.... We were all sitting around a large table,
hands on the table; the magician sat between the empress and Grand Duke
Konstantin. Suddenly from various corners of the room there came knocks,
produced by spirits and corresponding to the letters of the alphabet".
The spirits decided they did not like Anna and asked for her to be
banished to the neighbouring room, from which she heard all the goings on,
including the table being raised into the air.
222. 1855. Tyutchev being the literary magpie he was, line 1 is taken
straight from Hamlet (1,v).
223. 1855. TR Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).
Caro m'e 'l sonno, e piu l'esser di sasso,
mentre che'l danno e la vergogna dura;
non veder, non sentir m'e gran ventura;
Pero non mi destar, deh, parla basso. (B:27i)
***
Sleep is dear to me and being of stone is dearer,
as long as injury and shame endure;
not to see or hear is a great boon to me;
therefore, do not wake me - pray, speak softly.
Michelangelo's destiny, that of a brilliant artist dependent on
powerful masters, might well have struck sympathetic chords in Tyutchev. In
writing this quatrain, the Italian probably had in mind the loss of freedom
of Florence, in the designing of whose defences he played a part. In a
letter of 1870, Tyutchev, incensed at the stupidity of Russia's rulers,
quoted lines 2-3 of Michelangelo's poem.
The quatrain is a reply to some verses by Strozzi, inspired by the
famous sculpture of Night on the sarcophagus of Julian de Medici in
Florence. Enraptured by Michelangelo's work of genius, Strozzi wrote that if
Night could be awoken she would begin to speak:
La Note che tu vedi in si dolci atti
dormir, fu da un Angelo scolpita
in questo sasso e, perche dorme, ha vita:
destala, se nol credi, e parleratti.
***
The Night that you see sleeping in such a
graceful attitude, was sculpted by an Angel
in this stone, and since she sleeps, she must have life;
wake her, if you don't believe it, and she'll speak to you.
(B:27ii/419)
Filippo Strozzi (1489-1538) was a merchant banker and speculator who
basked in the glow of the favours abounding at the court of the De Medicis.
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev from Grand Prince the Admiral-General for the
coming ball". Puzzled, Tyutchev finally assumed that this was by way of a
reproach for not having paid his compliments to Grand Prince Konstantin
Nikolaevich at the Annenkovs' ball two days previously. Irritated, he sent
the verses to the prince, his daughter Maria hoping nothing would come of
this. Tyutchev discovered that at a forthcoming fancy-dress ball in the
Mikhailovsky Palace, he and the prince were to appear in identical costumes,
a domino (a long cloak of silk with a hood). Being short-sighted and not
wanting to be immediately recognised by his spectacles, the prince had sent
a whole variety of guests spectacles to wear at the ball. The poem was
interpreted positively by the prince, clearly considering that stanza 1 did
not refer to him, but that lines 18-19 were obviously directed at him.
243. Late 1850s. Addressed to the wife of Alexander II, the Empress
Maria Alexandrovna (1824-80). Aksakov wrote, "It is hard to imagine any
courtier smacking less of the court than Tyutchev". (A:1/261) As a
chamberlain, it fell within Tyutchev's duties to attend court and other
social gatherings. As a result of his dreadful writing, something to which
he referred frequently, he was once mistaken by "some stupid Englishmen" who
saw his entry in a hotel register as the tsar himself, on the strength of
"Emperor of Russia" being written after the word "chamberlain" and his name,
the latter indecipherable. (LET. DAR. 1862) This and the following quatrain,
composed on the occasion of "living pictures" at the Winter and Mikhailovsky
palaces, are characterised by the refined courtesy and courtly gallantry of
the French madrigal. "Living pictures" (Zhivye kartiny) were minor amateur
theatricals. (See [255].)
244. Late 1850s. See previous note. Addressed to Grand Duchess Elena
Pavlovna (1806-73), wife of Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, the uncle of
Alexander II. Elena Pavlovna, nee Princess Frederika-Charlotta-Maria von
Wurttemberg, was one of the founders of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
community of the Sisters of Mercy and the Russian Musical Society. She was
patron of a variety of educational and medical institutions, used great
initiative to put into practice the Reforms on her own estate and extended
her patronage to many liberal thinkers and writers.
In a letter to his wife (July 25th. 1851), Tyutchev describes spending
"a good hour tete-a-tete with her on her balcony on Stone Island". He refers
to her as a woman of grace and "imperishable charm" with an open, flexible
nature and inner joy and serenity. He dined with her more than once on this
"poetic balcony" and the two clearly had a good, friendly relationship.
245. December, 1859. A note on the manuscript reads: "December. 8
a.m.". The image of the moon, unaware of the early sun, and the spider-like,
timid groping over the horizon of the sun's first rays impart a hint of
apprehension to this lyric before the joy of sunrise.
246. 1859. Dedicated to Elizaveta Annenkova.
247. 1860-64. TR Jakob Bohme (1575-1624).
Wem Zeit ist wie Ewigkeit
Und Ewigkeit wie Zeit,
Der ist befreit
Von allem Streit.
***
He for whom Time is like Eternity
and Eternity like Time
is free
of all conflict.
Tyutchev finishes a letter to D. Bludov (written between 1860 and 1864)
with this poem. Bludov had asked Tyutchev, as a master of the short poem, to
translate this verse of the great, self-taught German philosopher. Tyutchev
held Bohme in high esteem, considering him "one of the greatest minds ever
to cross our world ... standing at an intersection point between the two
opposed doctrines of Christianity and Pantheism. You could call him the
Christian Pantheist, if these two words did not shriek at being put
Gorchakov was inordinately proud of his prose style. His vanity even came to
the attention of Bismarck, who once remarked that Gorchakov was "incapable
of stepping over a puddle without examining his own reflection in it".
(C:7/43)
There is an allusion here to Gorchakov's diplomatic activity during the
Polish uprising and to the rebuff thrown him by the foreign powers.
Aksakov points to the veiled suggestion that "new constraints are
threatening the Russian press". (A:1/281)
281. January, 1865. The poem was distorted when Darya copied it and it
appeared in print in such a manner that Tyutchev was extremely annoyed,
claiming they had published without informing him and presented the poem "in
its ugliest form". He further complained to the editorial board in February:
"God knows, I place very little value on my verses, even less now than ever
before, but I see no reason to take responsibility for poetry which does not
belong to me".
282. January 12th. 1865. Dedicated to Darya. The text ends with the
following words: "My dear daughter, keep this in memory of yesterday's
stroll and our conversation, but don't show it to anyone. Let it be
meaningful only to us two.... I embrace and bless you with all my heart.
F.T."
We do not know what they talked about, although the first stanza does
appear to have something in common with the following lines from a letter he
wrote to Darya in September, 1864: " .... if there were anything which could
lift my spirits, could create at least an outward appearance of life, then
it is to preserve myself for you, to dedicate myself to you, my poor, sweet
child, you, so loving and so alone, outwardly so apparently lacking in sense
and so deeply sincere, to you I have, perhaps, bequeathed this frightful
capacity which has no name, which destroys all equilibrium in life, this
thirst for love which in you, my poor child, has remained unassuaged".
283. January, 1865. Written on account of the address to Alexander II
by the Moscow nobility concerning the convocation of the Zemskaya duma (a
representative district council in Russia in the last half of the century up
till the Revolution). Tyutchev's frequent reactionary outbursts must have
irritated many less capable of expressing their feelings than he. However,
on this occasion, he appears to have got almost as good as he gave, as the
following anonymous reply to his epigram demonstrates:
Vy oshibaetesya grubo,
I v vashei Nitstse dorogoi
Slozhili, vidno, vmeste s shuboi
Vy pamyat' o zemle rodnoi.
V rayu terpenie umestno,
Politike tam mesta net;
Tam vsyo umno, soglasno, chestno,
Tam net zimy, tam vechnyi svet.
No kak zhe byt' v strane unyloi,
Gde nyne pravit Konstantin
I gdye slilis' v odno svetilo,
Valuev, Reitern, Golovnin?
Net, nam parlamenta ne nuzhno,
No pochemu zh nas proklinat'
Za to, chto my derznuli druzhno
I gromko karaul krichat'?
***
You made a coarse mistake,
and in your dear Nice
you've buried, together with your fur coat,
the very memory of your native land.
Patience is appropriate in paradise,
there's no place for politics there.
306. June 3rd. 1866. When Samuil Greig (1827-87), who had once served
in the horse guards, was moved from the Admiralty to become deputy finance
minister, Tyutchev pointed that that if they had given Reitern, the finance
minister, command of a regiment of horse guards, Russia would be shaken to
its foundations by the howls of protest, despite the fact that administering
the finances of the Russian Empire was somewhat more difficult than
commanding a regiment.
307. July 1866. Tsarskoe Selo. Time and the physical presence of swan
voices are joined as reflections in water.
308. September 2nd. 1866. Count Mikhail Muravyov died on August 31st.
309. September 1st.-3rd. 1866. Vyazemsky's satirical poems,
Vospominaniya iz Bualo/Recollections from Boileau and Khlestakov/Khlestakov,
were directed at the editor of the Russkii vestnik/The Russian Herald and
The Moscow News. The openly nationalistic editor, M. Katkov believed in
lecturing the authorities, a trait Vyazemsky hated. Tyutchev's poem appears
to be a defence of Kakov. It is also an oblique attack on Vyazemsky's
dislike of anything new. Tyutchev once compared Vyazemsky's attitude to the
younger generation to that of the "prejudiced, hostile explorer first
stepping foot on foreign soil of which he has no knowledge. (LET. ERN., Jan.
3rd. 1869). In order to maintain an old friendship intact, Tyutchev asked
for the poem not to be published.
310. September 17th. 1866. Petersburg. On the occasion of the arrival
in St. Petersburg of the Danish Princess Dagmar (1847-1928), bride of the
heir to the throne, the future Alexander III. Dagmar, later Maria
Fyodorovna, had, in fact, been the fiancee of Alexander's elder brother,
Nikolay Alexandrovich. (See [286].)
311. November 28th. 1866. The poem encapsulates the idea of many
Slavists (indeed, of many Russians through the ages up till the present)
that Russia was a land with a way of life all its own, significantly
different to European states.
314. Late December, 1866. TR of a French poem which I have yet to
locate.
315. July 1867. Connected with the Cretan rebellion of 1866. Marya
mentions Lady Georgina Eliza Buchanan, wife of the British Ambassador, Sir
Andrew Buchanan (1807-82, Ambassador Extraordinary to Russia), making a quip
about un bal pour les cretins/a ball for cretins, instead of for
chretiens/Christians. Such British aristocratic arrogance cannot have failed
to anger Tyutchev. On the other hand, Lady Buchanan's father, 11th. baron of
Blantyre, had been killed by a stray bullet during an insurrection in
Brussels in September 1830, so her attitude towards revolutionary movements
would have been somewhat coloured. She was the third daughter of Robert
Walter Stuart and the second wife of the ambassador. Andrew Buchanan had
been a paid attache in St. Petersburg in the late 1830s and Tyutchev might
have met him. Buchanan's first diplomatic duties took him to Constantinople.
(See [326].)
Ironically, some years earlier, Tyutchev himself had played with the
French word cretins, as Anna mentions in a letter to Vyazemsky (1854): "Dad
is now like an animal throwing itself around its cage. He is extremely
disheartened at the way events have turned and finds that people are pretty
stupid and the world is absurd. He says that this is a war of scoundrels
against cretins (c'est la guerre des gredins contre les cretins - FJ)".
316. Summer, 1867. In 1897, a book was published entitled Bratskaya
pomoshch' postradavshim v Turtsii/armyanam Armenii/Fraternal Aid to the
Armenians Suffering in Turkey. Tyutchev's poem appeared on p.128 (A:20,
vol.1/179-181).
317. 1866-67. Directed at Prince Pyotr Shuvalov (1827-1889). Chief of
police and head of the Third Section (the political police), Shuvalov was
nicknamed "Alexander IV" and "Arakcheev II". Arakcheev was a petty noble who
rose to high rank under Paul I (reigned 1796-1801), finding favour with the
tsar by relentless drilling of his troops and various ruthless measures
327. October 14th. 1867. During a session of the Chief Council of the
Management of Press Affairs, Count P. Kapnist (1830-98) noticed that
Tyutchev "was extremely vacant-looking and was scribbling or drawing
something on a sheet of paper on the table in front of him". (A:33/ii,
vol.1/430) After the meeting he left, looking very thoughtful, leaving the
paper. Kapnist retrieved the paper "with which to remember a favourite
poet".
328. October 27th. 1867. On the struggle between Garibaldi's patriots
and the papal forces, the result being the unification of Italy in 1870.
... and whoever.... a reference to the assistance the French gave the
Pope.
Lines 9-12 are addressed to Pius IX (1792-1878).
329. December 5th. 1867. In connection with Russia's refusal to agree
to the guaranteed integrity of the Turkish Empire. Tyutchev's hope that the
Slav peoples would rise against the Turks came to nothing. The Journal de
St. Petersbourg was the organ of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
330. June, 1868.
... with you: a reference to Elena.
331. July 16th. 1868. During that summer there were forest fires in the
St. Petersburg vicinity. Writing to Ekaterina, Tyutchev describes with some
humour the situation in which "... I'm choking not only from the suffocating
heat of the town (Staraya Russa - FJ), but as well from the smoke of the
fire which, for several miles all around, envelops all of Petersburg, thanks
to the burning peat which is being allowed to burn quite quietly.... They
tell us it will make excellent soil. Well, let's suffer for the sake of the
future".
332. August 2nd.1868. On a farmstead at Gostilovka, near Ovstug.
333. Late August, 1868. Pogodin was an undergraduate friend of Tyutchev
and the two remained close throughout their lives.
334. September 21st. 1868. Egor Kovalevsky was a student of the Middle
East.
335. Mid-April, 1868. Tyutchev expressed a similar view in a letter to
his brother, Nikolay (April 13th. 1868), claiming that all the officials of
the Ministry of Internal Affairs were "more or less a set of rogues and
looking at them is enough to make you feel sick, though our trouble is that
this nausea never actually comes to throwing up".
336. 1868-early 1869. A variation on a theme from Heine's The
Homecoming [87].
Der Tod, das is die kuhle Nacht,
Das Leben ist der schwule Tag.
Es dunkelt schon, mich schlafert,
Der Tag hat mich mud' gemacht.
..........
Uber mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum,
Drin singt die junge Nachtigall;
Sie singt von lauter Liebe,
Ich hor' es sogar im Traum.
***
Death is the cool night,
Life is the hot day.
It's dark already. I'm tired.
Day has exhausted me.
..........
A tree rises up above my bed
and the young nightingale sings in it,
singing about honourable love,
I hear it as if in a dream.
337. Mid-January,
1869. Aimed at Vladimir Skaryatin, the
ultra-reactionary, anti-Slavophile editor of the aristocratic, short-lived
newspaper Vest'/The News. Line 8 is a reference to the closure of Aksakov's
346. August 16th. 1869. Written on one his last visits to the village
of Ovstug. The dog is Romp, the family pet, who, true to his breed, swam
backwards and forwards chasing fowl during a walk.
347. August, 1869. Ovstug. The absence of a riddle is, perhaps, the
absence of any kind of faith.
348. August, 1869. On the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of
the reforming Czech preacher and martyr, Jan Hus (1369-1415), a patriot and
religious leader who led his people in a revolt against Papal and German
domination. Some considered Hus to have been put to death by anti-Slavic,
anti-Greek elements. The verses accompanied a golden cup sent to Prague.
Lines 13-16 refer to Hus's execution. See [356].
349. October 14th. 1869.
350. First half of October, 1869. On the celebrations in Egypt
following the opening of the Suez Canal. The shrewd Khedive Ismail succeeded
in staging a major public relations exercise by touring Europe and inviting
as many countries as possible to attend the opening. From General Ignatiev
of Russia (ambassador to The Porte) to Henrik Ibsen of Norway,
representatives flocked to Egypt. The festival described by Tyutchev took
place over several weeks, including trips up the Nile to Assuan for selected
celebrities. While Tyutchev attacks the "pasha" for spilling Christian
blood, the Khedive, technically a vassal of The Porte, was exploiting the
waning influence of Turkey in Egypt and, aiming at eventual Egyptian
independence, was somewhat more in charge of events than Tyutchev gives him
credit for.
The poem is remarkable for the final two stanzas, a favourite formula
Tol'ko tam, gde.../Only there, where ...., contrasting two locations, one of
riotous happiness, the other of horror and fear. In [111] Tyutchev employs
the same structure to refer to mountains disappearing into the distance in a
light-hearted poem with a fairytale feel to it. The same structure used here
imparts an eerie, nocturnal atmosphere of dread.
351. December 17th. 1869. Addressed to the renowned Jewish Slavist
philologist, ethnographer and compiler of legends from the Onega region,
Alexander Hilferding (1831-1871). Chosen as a junior member of the second
section of the Academy of Sciences, a meeting of the conference failed to
elect him a full member. It was said that the German members of the academy
considered him a renegade, having renounced his German roots to become a
Russian. His family had moved from Germany in the early eighteenth century.
Hilferding and Tyutchev were good friends.
352. December 22nd. 1869. Dedicated to the musician and singer Yulia
Abaza, nee Stubbe. She was friendly with Gounod and Liszt and participated
in the foundation of the Russian Musical Society.
353. The 1860s. Nothing is known about the theme nor the addressee.
354. Possibly November 27th. 1869. Although Ernestine has written
"Hilferding" on the manuscript, Pigaryov has his doubts in view of the high
esteem in which Tyutchev held this scholar.
355. February, 1870. TR Goethe: Clarchen's song from Egmont (III,2).
Freudvoll
Und leidvoll,
Gedankenvoll sein,
Langen
Und bangen
In schwebender Pein,
Himmelhoch jauchzend,
Zum Tode betrubt;
Glucklich allein
Ist die Seele, die Liebt.
***
To be full of joy
and full of sorrow
and of thought,
to get by
and to fear
in hovering agony,
rejoicing to the skies,
depressed to death;
happily alone
is the soul which loves.
Egmont was written over about seven years during the 1780s and is a
drama of revolutionary nationalism set in the Netherlands in 1566-8 on the
eve of the country's rebellion against Phillip II of Spain. Egmont is a
charismatic count.
356. March, 1870. Composed to be read at an evening with "living
pictures" in aid of the Slavonic Charitable Committee.
The perfidious kaisar was the German Emperor, Sigismund. When Hus was
summoned to the church council in Constanz, Sigismund gave him a
safe-conduct pass but, under pressure from the council, declared it null and
void.
According to legend, one old lady threw a handful of brushwood onto the
pyre, calling forth the words, Sancta simplicitas!/Holy simplicity! from
Hus.
357. Early July, 1870. Written as he was travelling to take the baths
at Karlsbad via Vilnius, just south east of Kaunas on the Neman. In a letter
written from the spa, he complained bitterly to Elena Bogdanova that the
waters were only making him feel worse. Bogdanova (1823-1900) was a widow
(nee Baroness Uslar, Frolova by her first marriage) with whom Tyutchev
engaged in a affair of some sort during the last six years of his life, much
to the annoyance of his patient family and long-suffering wife.
The Polish uprising of 1863 is referred to here.
358. July 26th. 1870. According to Polonsky, the reversed initials
("K.B.") stand for "Baroness Krudner", whom Tyutchev met in Karlsbad with
her second husband, Count N. Adlerberg. More recently, however, Lane and
Nikolaev have established that the addressee is more probably Tyutchev's
sister-in-law, Klothilde. (A:24)
359. A telegram sent to Ernestine on September 14th. 1870, en route
from Ovstug to Moscow.
360. Late September, 1870. This poem deals with the Franco-Prussian
War. While Tyutchev believed that Germany had right on her side, he could
not help but experience "a pang of anguish" (Letter to Bogdanova, August) at
the "final collapse of this great and beautiful France, whose name has been
so glorious in the history of the world".
Unity....: Bismarck's words.
361. October 27th. 1870. Written into the album of Platon Vakar
(1820-99), a member of the Foreign Censorship Committee.
362. NL early November, 1870. Dedicated to Alexandra Pletnyova (nee
Shchetinina, 1826-1901). Her husband, the minor poet and critic, P. Pletnyov
(1792-1865), had been a friend of Pushkin and was an editor of the latter's
magazine, The Contemporary. Nekrasov and Panaev (1812-62), both men of
Belinsky's party, bought the magazine in 1864. Princess Shchetinina,
Pletnyov's second wife, was "a woman of rare spiritual qualities. She is
somewhat like Tyutchev's poetry, in which there is depth and original
charm". (C:20, vol.1/77)
363. November, 1870. Provoked by the promulgation of State Chancellor
Prince N. Gorchakov's declaration that the 13th. been abrogated. Following
Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, Article XIII of the Peace Treaty of
Paris (March 30th. 1856), stated: "The Black Sea being neutralised according
to the terms of Article XI, the maintenance or establishment upon its Coast
of Military-Maritime Arsenals becomes unnecessary and purposeless; in
consequence, His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russia's, and His Imperial
Majesty the Sultan, engage not to establish or to maintain upon that Coast
any Military-Maritime Arsenal..." (C:5, vol./606)
388. March 19th. 1873. On Darya's name-day. Gregg (A:14/205) points out
that this poem, one of several he refers to as senilia, demonstrates a
return to the childhood style of Lyubeznomu papen'ke/Dear Dad! [1].
389. April 17th. 1873. On the 55th. anniversary of the birth of
Alexander II. Tyutchev recalls how he and his father were visiting Zhukovsky
in Moscow at the time.
390. April, 1873. Alexander II intended visiting the Tyutchevs, never
having been to their house before, and, on hearing of it, Tyutchev
characteristically noted that it would be extremely indelicate if, the very
day after such a visit, he did not make a point of dying. It is not certain
whether or not the visit actually took place.
391. April, 1873. Despite an inevitable looseness of structure as a
result of Tyutchev's illness, this poem retains much power.
392. May 5th. 1873. Dedicated to the memory of A. Hilferding.
393. 1873. The last verses known to have been written by Tyutchev and
sent to Alexander Nikitenko, professor of Russian literature at the
University of St. Petersburg and a member of the censorship committee.
Written after the text are the words: "When shall I see you, my friend, I'm
frightfully depressed and sad".
341
* SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY *
TYUTCHEV'S LETTERS
No complete edition of Tyutchev's letters has yet appeared, although
before his death Pigaryov was working on such a project. To date, in the
region of 1,330 letters written have been located. When referring to them I
give only dates and addressees.
ABBREVIATIONS
AN SSSR Akademiya nauk SSSR
KL
Khudozhestvennaya literature
L
Leningrad
M
Moscow
ML
Moscow-Leningrad
RAN
Rossiiskaya akademiya nauk
RL
Russkaya literatura
PS
Polnoe sobranie
SS
Sobranie sochinenii
SSt.
Sobranie stikhotvorenii
SP
TR
UP
Sovetskii pisatel'
Translated by
University Press
In the case of anthologies and collections, the first name after the
title is that of the editor-in-chief or principal contributor. Titles not
given in English are of works which, to the best of my knowledge, have not
been translated into English.
A. WORKS BY AND WHOLLY OR SUBSTANTIALLY ABOUT TYUTCHEV
Most works about Tyutchev are in the form of the thesis, article or
essay. Far from being exhaustive, Section A contains materials I have either
quoted from or consulted for this book.
1. Aksakov, I.
Biografiya Fyodora Ivanovicha Tyutcheva. M, 1886.
2. Barabtarlo, G.
Tjutcev's Poem "Zdes', nekogda, moguchii I prekrasnyi": Textology and
Exegesis of the Bogatyrev Manuscript. SEEJ, No.3, 1986. (pp.420-430)
3. Berkovsky, L.
Stikhotvoreniya. BP, ML, 1962.
4. Bilokur, D.
A Concordance to the Russian Poetry of Fedor I. Tiutchev. Providence,
1975.
5. Bryusov, V.
F.I. Tyutchev: Letopis' ego zhizni. Russkii arkhiv 3 (1903, 1906).
6. Bukhshtab, B.
Russkie poety: Tyutchev, Fet, Kozma Prutkov, Dobrolyubov. KL, L, 1970
(pp.9-75)
7. Chulkov, G.
Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva F. I. Tyutcheva. ML, 1933.
8. Coates, W.
Tiutchev and Germany: the Relationship of his Poetry to German
Literature and Culture. Ph.D. Harvard, 1950.
9. Conant, R.
The Political Poetry and Ideology of F.I. Tiutchev. Ardis Essay Series,
No. 6. Adis. Ann. Arbor, 1983.
10. Elzon, M.
i. "My molodoi vesny gontsy". RL, 3, 1997. (p.198)
ii F. I. Tyutchev v komitete tsensury inostrannoi: novye materialy. RL,
1, 1997. (pp.239-243)
11. Eikhenbaum, B.
i. O poezii. SP, L, 1969.
ii. Russkaya poeziya XIX v. "Academia", L, 1929. (With Yu. Tynyanov).
12. F. Wigzell
Fet on Tiutchev in Russian Writers on Russian Writers, Berg, 1994.
13. Ginzburg, L.
O lirike. SP, ML, 1964.
14. Gregg, R.
Fedor Tiutchev: The Evolution of a Poet. Columbia University Press,
1965.
15. Grekhnyov, V.
Vremya v kompozitsii stikhotvorenii Tyutcheva. AN SSSR, Seriya
literatury i yazyka, t.32, vyp.6, M, 1973. (p.487)
16. Kozlik, I.
17. Kozhinov, V.
Tyutchev. M, "Molodaya gvardiya". 1988.
18. Lane, R.
i. An index and synopsis of diplomatic documents relating to Tyutchev's
period in Turin (October 1837 - October 1839). New Zealand Slavonic Journal,
1989- 90.
ii. Bibliography of works by and about F.I. Tyutchev to 1985. Astra
Press, 1987.
iii. Diplomatic Documents Concerning F.I. Tyutchev in Turin, 1838-1839.
Oxford Slavonic Papers. New Series. Vol. XX, 1987. (pp.94-100).
iv. F.L. Tyutchev's Diplomatic Career in Munich (1822-37). Irish
Slavonic Studies, 15, 1994. (pp.17-43).
v. F.I. Tyutchev's Service Absenteeism and Second Marriage in the Light
of Unpublished Documents (1839). Irish Slavonic Studies, No. 8, 1987. (pp.613).
vi. Hunting Tyutchev's Literary Sources in Poetry, Prose and Public
Opinion. In Memory of Nikolay Andreyev. Ed. W. Harrison. Avebury Publishing
Company, 1984. (pp.43-68).
vii. Pascalian and Christian Existential Elements in Tyutchev's Letters
and Poems. Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. XVIII, No.4, October
1982.
viii. The Life and Work of F.I. Tyutchev. Ph.D. Cambridge, 1970.
ix. Tyutchev in the 1820s-1840s. An Unpublished Correspondence of
1874-5. Irish Slavonic Studies, No.3, 1982. (pp.2-13).
x. Tjutcev's Mission to Greece (1833) According to Diplomatic
Documents. Russian Literature XXIII. North-Holland, 1988. (pp.265-280).
xi. Zagranichnaya poezdka Tyutcheva v 1853 g. LN, vol.97: Fyodor
Ivanovich Tyutchev, bk.2, "Nauka", 1988. (pp.464-470)
19. Liberman, A.
On the Heights of Creation: The Lyrics of Fedor Tyutchev. JAI Inc.
Russian & European Studies, vol. 2, 1991.
20. Literaturnoe nasledstvo. T.97: Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, "Nauka",
1988.
21. Maimin, E.
Russkaya filosofskaya poeziya: poety-lyubomudry, A.S. Pushkin, F.I.
Tyutchev. AN SSSR, "Nauka", 1976. (pp.143-184)
22. Matlaw, R.
The Polyphony of Tyutchev's "Son na more". Slavic Review, 1957, 36 (pp.
198-204)
23. Murtagh, F.
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev: Translations and Adaptations, Durham, 1983.
Self-publication.
24. Nikolaev, A.
Zagadka "K.B.". "Neva", No.5. 1985. This article was actually
co-written by R. Lane.
25. Ozerov, L.
Poeziya Tyutcheva. M, 1975.
26. Pigaryov, K.
Zhizn' i tvorchestva F. I. Tyutcheva. AN SSSR, M, 1962, republished in
1978 as F. I Tyutchev i ego vremya..
27. Pratt, S.
Russian Metaphysical Romanticism: The Poetry of Tiutchev and
Boratynskii. Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University, Stanford
University Press, 1984.
28. Sagner, O.
The Semantics of Chaos in Tjutcev. Slavistische Beitrage, 171, Munich,
1983.
29. Savodnik, V.
Chuvstvo prirody v poezii Pushkina, Lermontova i Tyutcheva. M, 1911.
30. Slavica Hierosolymitana. Slavic Studies of the Hebrew University.
1. Ausonius
Decimi Magni Ausonii Burdigalensis Opuscula. Ed. Sextus Prete. BSB BG.
Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft, 1978.
2. Batyushkov
PSSt. N. Fridman, ML, 1964.
3. Baudelaire
Oeuvres Completes. Bibliotheque de la Pleiade. Texte etabli et annote
par Y.- G. le Dantec. Librairie Gallimard, 1954.
4. Beranger
One Hundred Songs of Pierre-Jean de Beranger with Translations by
William Young. Chapman & Hall. London, 1847.
5. Bohme
Jacob Bohme (1575-1624): Studies in his Life and Teaching. H.
Martensen. Translated by T. Rhys Evans. Notes and Appendices by S. Hobhouse.
Rockliff, London, 1949.
6. Byron
Lord Byron. The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. J.J. McGann. Oxford, 1980.
7. Chaadaev, 1989.
8. Chateaubriand
Grands ecrits politiques. T.I. Presentation et notes par Jean-Paul
Clement. Imprimerie nationale Editions, 1993.
9. Derzhavin
Stikhotvoreniya. SP, L, 1957.
10. Dobrolyubov
SS. v 9 tomakh. M, 1952.
11. Dostoevsky
i. Dostoevskii o Tyutcheve (k atributsii odnoi stat'i v "Grazhdanine".
RL, 1975, No. 1. (pp.172-6)
ii. Dostoevskii - chelovek, pisatel' i mify: Dostoevskii i ego "Dnevnik
pisatelya". D. Grishin, Melbourne University, 1971.
iii. F.M. Dostoevsky. PSS v 30 tomakh. Brat'ya Karamazovy (t.14),
"Nauka", L, 1976.
12. , 1963.
13. Goethe
i. Essays on Goethe. Ed. W. Rose. Cassell & Co. Ltd. 1949.
ii. Goethe: A Critical Introduction. R. Gray. Cambridge University
Press, 1967.
iii. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Vol. 1 The Poetry of Desire
(1749-1790). N. Boyle. Clarendon Press. Oxford, 1991.
iv. Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Samtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebucher and
Gesprache. Vierzig Bande. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Heraus von Hendrik
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