Fyodor Tyutchev
Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, Tyutchev also
spelled Tiutchev (b. Dec. 5 [Nov. 23,
Old Style], 1803, Ovstug, Russia—d. July
27 [July 15], 1873, St. Petersburg),
Russian writer who was remarkable both
as a highly original philosophic poet
and as a militant Slavophile, and whose
whole literary output constitutes a
struggle to fuse political passion with
poetic imagination.
The son of a wealthy landowner, educated
at home and at Moscow University,
Tyutchev served his country as a
diplomat in Munich and Turin. In Germany
he developed a friendship with the poet
Heinrich Heine and met frequently with
the idealist philosopher Friedrich W.J.
von Schelling. His protracted expatriate
life, however, only made Tyutchev more
Russian at heart. Though the bare and
poverty-stricken Russian countryside
depressed him, he voiced a proud,
intimate, and tragic vision of the
motherland in his poetry. He also wrote
political articles and political verses,
both of which reflect his reactionary
nationalist and Pan-Slavist views, as
well as his deep love of Russia. He once
wrote, “I love poetry and my country
above all else in the world.”
Tyutchev’s love poems, most of them
inspired by his liaison with his
daughter’s governess, are among the most
passionate and poignant in the Russian
language. He is regarded as one of the
three greatest Russian poets of the 19th
century, making a trinity with Aleksandr
Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.
