The outstanding Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev was born on November 23 (December 5), 1803 in the village of Ovstug, Orel province (now the Bryansk region).
His parents belonged to an old, but not very rich noble family (according to legend, the Tyutchevs came to Russia from Italy in the XIV century).
Since 1804, the Tyutchev family lived in Moscow, in the house of Tyutchev's mother's aunt, Countess A.V. Osterman, and at the end of 1810, the mother of the future poet, E. L. Tyutchev, bought an estate in Armenian Lane, built at the end of the XVIII century.
Childhood and youth of F.Tyutchev was held in Moscow.
He received an excellent home education; his literature teacher from the end of 1812 was a young poet and literary critic S. E. Raich (1792-1850), who encouraged his first poetic experiments.
Under the influence of the teacher, the boy begins to translate Horace at the age of 12, composes his own poems, and at the age of 14 (March 30, 1818) is elected an employee of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.
By that time, Tyutchev (since 1816) had already attended the lectures of the poet and translator A. F. Merzlyakov at Moscow University as a free listener, and in November 1819 he was enrolled in the verbal department as a student, and graduated in 1821, in two years instead of the required three.
Tyutchev received a Candidate of verbal sciences degree in November 1821, and in February 1822 his mother arranged for his son to join the prestigious State College of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg, although for a modest position as a supernumerary official in the Russian diplomatic mission at the Bavarian Royal Court in Munich.
On June 11, 1822, Tyutchev left for Munich.
Since that time, his connection with Russian literary life has been interrupted for a long time.
Tyutchev devoted himself entirely to diplomacy, treated poems as a hobby and did not show them to anyone.
In 1825, he spent a vacation in Russia, witnessed an uprising on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg.
Despite the fact that in his student years Tyutchev was influenced by freedom loving political ideas, he did not support the uprising, with pity and bitterness he called the Decembrists "victims of reckless thought".
Returning to Munich, Fyodor Tyutchev married Eleonora Peterson (nee Countess Botmer) on February 21, 1826.
After marrying her, Fyodor took custody of Eleanor's three children from her first marriage.
And then Eleonora gave birth to three more girls to Tyutchev: Anya, Dasha and Katenka.
In 1828, Tyutchev was appointed second secretary of the mission in Munich.
In the same year in Munich, he met the philosopher F. Schelling and the poet G. Heine, becoming a friend and the first translator of the latter's poems into Russian.
Of course, Tyutchev continues to write his own poems, so in the spring of 1836, through his colleague Prince I. S. Gagarin and the Bavarian Baroness Amalia Kryudener, Tyutchev sent several of his works to St. Petersburg.
They came to Pushkin, aroused his delight with the depth of thought, the brightness of colors, the novelty and power of poetic language and were published (in October December 1836) in the magazine "Sovremennik" under the characteristic title "Poems sent from Germany" with the signature "F. T.".
In May 1837, he received a three month vacation, which he spent in St. Petersburg, and on August 3 he was appointed first secretary and charge d'affaires of the Russian mission in Turin.
Soon in Italy, the poet also experienced the first heavy loss - on August 28, 1838, his wife, Eleonora Peterson Tyutcheva, died in Turin.
A year later, on July 7, 1839, the poet entered into a second marriage with Ernestine Dernberg, nee Pfeffel.
Tyutchev's official misconduct (unauthorized departure to Switzerland for a wedding with E. Dernberg) put an end to his diplomatic service.
On October 1, 1839, Tyutchev was dismissed from the post of first secretary of the mission in Turin, leaving him in the department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
For two years, he persistently searched for ways to return to service, but everything was useless, on June 30, 1841, Tyutchev was excluded from the number of officials of the Ministry "for long term non arrival from vacation".
The poet retired and settled in Munich, where he spent five years without having any official position.
In the summer of 1843, Tyutchev came to Russia, was in Moscow with his parents and in St. Petersburg, and a year later, in the summer of 1844, he finally returned to Russia, moving his entire family to St. Petersburg.
In March 1845, Tyutchev was again enrolled in the department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, received the court title of chamberlain, and for some time led a secular and court life.
Continuing his career growth, on February 15, 1846, Tyutchev was appointed an official of special assignments to the state Chancellor.
On February 1, 1848, Tyutchev was appointed senior censor at the special office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on behalf of the government, he wrote several journalistic articles in French against anti Russian sentiments in the West.
He regarded the revolutionary events in Europe as the beginning of the death of European civilization.
Tyutchev shared Slavophile ideas and was one of the zealous preachers of pan Slavism.
The poet assigned a special place to Moscow, which, along with Rome and Constantinople, he considered one of the three "cherished capitals" of the future world empire.
In 1843-1850, Tyutchev made political articles "Russia and Germany", "Russia and the Revolution", "The Papacy and the Roman Question", concluding that a clash between Russia and the West was inevitable and the final triumph of "Russia of the Future", which he imagined to be an "All Slavic" empire.
Tyutchev devotes a lot of effort to his career and journalism, but as a poet, readers in Russia have already forgotten about him.
In 1848-1849, captured by the events of political life, he created many beautiful poems ("Reluctantly and timidly...", " When in the circle of murderous worries...", "Russian woman" , etc.), but did not seek to publish them.
The beginning of Tyutchev's poetic fame, the impetus for his active work was Nekrasov's article "Russian minor poets" in the magazine "Sovremennik" in January 1850, which spoke about the talent of this poet, not noticed by criticism, and 24 poems of Tyutchev were also published.
A real recognition came to the poet.
In March 1854, in St. Petersburg, the first collection of Tyutchev's poems was published in an appendix to the magazine Sovremennik, which was published in a separate book in the same year.
To prepare the first poetry collection of Tyutchev, a prominent Moscow writer N. V. Sushkov (the husband of Tyutchev's sister), who kept a literary salon, made a lot of efforts.
Tyutchev himself took practically no part in the literary life of both Moscow and St. Petersburg and cared little about the publication of his poems.
This was the second opening of Tyutchev's lyrics in his homeland, and this time the success was great.
The collection of poems, published in 1854, was dedicated to Elena Denisyeva.
"Lawless" in the eyes of the world, the relationship of an elderly poet with a girl of the same age as his daughter lasted for 14 years and was very dramatic, because Tyutchev was married.
These relations began in July 1850 and ended on August 4, 1864 with the untimely death of E. A. Denisyeva in St. Petersburg.
The fatal and tragic" last love "of Tyutchev gave birth to beautiful lyrical poems of the "Denisiev cycle".
But it was hard not only for Tyutchev and Denisyeva…
After all, in the same way, Tyutchev's first wife Eleonora suffered, tried to commit suicide and, in the end, died, who could not bear his beautiful and fascinating novel in Genoa with the young charming widow Ernestina Dernberg and almost ended with her and three young daughters dying from a sea fire on the steamer "Nicholas I", and in the same way the poet was tormented by remorse, turned gray all over, cried, expressed in disturbing images of his lyrics the inescapable tragedy of loss.
His poem "Oh, how murderously we love" (1851) became the story of such a painful, sinful, condemned by society love.
In the autumn of 1857, Tyutchev was elected a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in the department of Russian language and literature.
In April 1858, Tyutchev was appointed chairman of the Committee of Foreign Censorship, more than once acting as an advocate for the persecuted publications.
This position, which did not tire him very much, the poet held until his death.
In March 1868, the second and last lifetime edition of Tyutchev's poems was published, prepared by I. S. Aksakov (1823-1886, who married Tyutchev's eldest daughter Anna in 1866) and the poet's youngest son Ivan.
Not all of Tyutchev's lyrical heritage has come down to us, some of his poems were burned by an unfortunate mistake or negligence when parsing papers or lost.
The poems that make up the poet's actual lyrics are, in fact, few.
Turgenev spoke about a hundred works, Goncharov counted several dozen of them.
Tyutchev himself asked not to publish his poems "in case", he also has a lot of political poems and translations from foreign poets.
Many of Tyutchev's lines belong to the masterpieces of Russian poetry: "Insomnia," "Summer night," "Vision," "the Last cataclysm", "Like the ocean encompasses the globe", "Autumn evening", "Spring water", "the Melody is in the sea waves", "These poor villages", It's famous, included in all anthologies, learned by heart, and pre revolutionary and Soviet students students with the poem "Spring storm" (1828).
Each of us is well aware of turchesca line, his brilliant aphorisms, perhaps the most famous line in the Russian poetry - "blessed are those who visited this world In his fateful minutes..." ("Cicero"), "a Thought expressed is a lie..." ("Silentium!") and many others.
Many of Tyutchev's poems are set to music ("Spring Waters" by S. V. Rachmaninov, etc.), translated into foreign languages.
The best works of Tyutchev's love lyrics certainly include the poem "I met you - and everything that was" (1870), a love memory of great power, a great Russian romance about an unexpectedly returned love, written at the end of life by a small gray haired old man.
Instead of the title the mysterious letters "K. B.".
According to one version, Tyutchev, hiding the name of the addressee, deliberately rearranged the initials - "Kryudener to the Baroness", the same one who once brought Tyutchev's poems to Pushkin from Germany.
Amalia von Lerchenfeld, married Baroness Kruedener, the bastard daughter of the Prussian king, a European famous beauty, flashed three times in Tyutchev's life: as a young creature who fascinated him in the first year of his work in Munich, as a majestic and very influential socialite in St. Petersburg (she was courted by Emperor Nicholas I, Benckendorf and Pushkin).
The third time it happened, when the dying poet suddenly saw the still attractive Amalia at his bed, who unexpectedly visited Tyutchev to give him a farewell kiss.
Another, less touching, but perhaps more plausible version says that the poem "K. B." is dedicated not to Amalia, but to his sister in law Clotilde Botmer (sister of Tyutchev's wife Eleanor Peterson), whom he was infatuated with even before his marriage to Eleanor.
The last years of Tyutchev's life are overshadowed by heavy losses.
He suffers one loss after another: Denisyev dies of consumption (1864), their two children - the eldest son and daughter Maria (1865), his mother, brother (1870).
The poet's life is fading.
In January 1873, a serious illness begins.
In May, he was transported to Tsarskoye Selo, broken by paralysis.
There, in Tsarskoye Selo, on July 15 (27), 1873, Tyutchev died.
The poet's funeral took place on July 18 (30) at the Novodevichy Cemetery in St. Petersburg.
To mark the 200th anniversary of the poet's birth in 2003, the graves of Fyodor Tyutchev and his relatives were restored.
You canot understand Russia with your mind,
You canot measure it with a common yard:
She has a special personality -
You can only believe in Russia.
Russian Russian poet, who had formed apart from the main schools and trends of Russian lyrics, not only did not read his fellow poets, but also thought and spoke more often in French, because this was the generally accepted language of the diplomacy of that time, the Russian poet, who had never actually lived among Russians, was a loyal patriot of his homeland.
In one of the letters to his mother, excited by memories, Tyutchev admitted that Amalia is perhaps his second greatest love.
He did not put his wife in the first place, but Russia.
And his faith in his country, which had revealed great moral truths to him, never left him:
