Notes on Russian Literature: Tyutchev

by EDMUND WILSON

THE literary career and reputation of the poet F. I. Tyutchev have certain points of resemblance to those, respectively and both together, of A. E. Housman and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Tyutchev was four years older than Pushkin and eleven years older than Lermontov, and he is usually ranked by Russians as one of the three great poets of his period; but, since he wrote no plays or novels or narrative poems as Pushkin and Lermontov did, he has supplied no opera librettos and no translatable stories, and is therefore quite unknown in the West. He was not a professional writer and did not care to be a literary figure. He was a diplomat who lived out of Russia for the better part of twenty-two years and from time to time sent verses to Pushkin, who published them in the quarterly he was editing. It was not till the early fifties that Nekrasov brought Tyutchev’s poetry to the attention of the public and that Turgenev edited a book of his lyrics. The whole work ol Tyutchev consists merely of about three hundred short pieces — lyrics and political verses — which, although they are known by Russians as well as we know A Shropshire Lad, have no way of getting through to other languages.

The comparisons with Housman and Hopkins may, however, serve not only to indicate the position of Tyutchev in Russian poetry, but also to give some idea of his form and of the kind of poet he is. We must banish first of all from our minds the idea that Russian literature is necessarily loose or disorderly. The tendency of Russian poetry is, if anything, in the opposite direction of being too uniformly well-turned. Certainly the three great Russian poets of the early nineteenth century are a good deal more consistently satisfactory from the point of view of form than any of the English Romantic poets except Keats. There are lyrics of Lermontov’s and Pushkin’s so classical in achieving their effects by the mere displacement or change of a word in the pattern of a line or a quatrain that we can hardly find anything of the kind in English till we come to A. E. Housman. And Tyutchev is the great Russian master of the pregnant and pointed and poignant short poem.

But the landscapes and seasons that Tyutchev prefers, — and he largely lives on landscapes and seasons, — with the feelings that these inspire, are quite different from the clear autumn bitterness or the sharp summer irony of Housman. Tyutchev loves the indeterminate moments between fair and rainy weather, when a thunderstorm is looming or passing, or between the night and the dawn or the sunset and the dark, which reflect indeterminate and variable emotions. There is a fine little poem of E. A. Robinson’s which has something in common with Tyutchev: —

Imagine something halfway between this and certain poems of Léonie Adams’s, where the phrases strike out more facets and the whole thing has a livelier psychological interest. There is piece after piece in High Falcon that is amazingly close to Tyutchev (The Moon and Spectator, The Mysterious Thing, Evening Sky, Sundown, Twilit Revelation, Country Summer, and others).

For though the stanza of Tyutchev is epigrammatic — he was in conversation a famous wit — his language is delicious and exquisite. He had brought over from an earlier period certain qualities that were alien to the age of Pushkin. The eighteenth century in Russia was distinguished by literary characteristics — a touch of reckless Aeschylean grandiloquence— quite different from anything we mean when we say “eighteenth century” in English, and closer to our seventeenth century. Even the foreign reader is surprised to come upon such a phrase as “a loud crimson exclamation.” But in Tyutchev this style has been infinitely refined: there are a liquidity and a shifting suggestiveness that anticipate symbolist poetry. The Russian poets of the end of the century claimed him as a precursor of their school, and were impatient with Turgenev for having ironed out, in editing Tyutchev’s poems — rather as Rimsky-Korsakov conventionalized the score of Boris Godunov — the metrical innovations of the poet. In this role of rediscovered “ancestor” of an advanced phase of poetry that did not derive from him, Tyutchev occupies a position not unlike that of Hopkins.

The sensibility of Tyutchev lives between light and shadow among the feelings and impressions and reflections of a region so vibrating and rarefied that it makes most English Romantic poetry seem relatively sensual and downright. One of the best of his poems is Italian Villa, which is certainly all Russian and all Tyutchev in this coincidence of physical with moral awareness. The poet and a woman companion arrive at an Italian villa which has for a long time been uninhabited. You have a charming and lulling description of the old house asleep in the sun, with only the babble of the fountain and the twittering of a swallow rippling the settled silence. But the visitors enter; and in the tranquil darkness where a cypress looks in at the window, they suddenly feel that a change has occurred: the fountain seems to stop; a convulsive shudder runs through the branches of the cypress; there is a queer indistinct whisper like something muttered through sleep. “What was it, friend? Was it that cruel life — that life, alas! then quickening in our veins — that ruthless life, with its rebellious fire, had crossed the threshold with its spell of peace?”

Yet, admirable though Tyutchev is, he is somehow to an Anglo-Saxon a little unsympathetic. He is a little too weepy for our taste. In his poetry is audible, as it is not in Pushkin, that incurable minor key of resignation in grievance and complaint, that may move us when we hear it in an old Russian song but of which we become impatient when we find how habitual and incessant it is in all kinds of connections in Russian life.

In Tyutchev’s case, this key is associated with a humidity of emotional atmosphere that is also rather alien to us. There are moments when the English-speaking reader, in his exploration of Russian literature, seems to come upon something clammy that makes him instinctively withdraw his hand. He is put off by it in certain passages of Herzen’s fascinating memoirs where Herzen and his wife and his friends get themselves into messy mixed-up situations so that everybody languishes and agonizes and nobody will make a decision to straighten the thing out. It is a kind of thing that people objected to in the novels of Dostoevsky when they were first being read in English, though these episodes in Dostoevsky are usually brought to an end by thunderclaps that clear the air; the kind of thing that used to puzzle and exasperate the first foreign audiences of Chekhov’s plays, though Chekhov exploits these situations for pathos and humor both. It is something which can perhaps be shortly described as a tendency of Russians in emotional relationships to “stew in their own juice” — which is a Russian phrase as well as an English one: masticating and gulping and regurgitating their problems, biting on their suffering and doting over their guilt, sweating and freezing for years in the impasses of personal involvements as if they were waiting in Soviet breadlines or the reception rooms of callous officials.

And something of this complaisance in incurable heartbreak, this inveterate helpless quaver, one does find in the poetry of Tyutchev, especially if one reads him in bulk (which perhaps it is unfair to do: Housman, too, is always sounding the same note, and, with him, too, we tend to protest if we read too much at once). Tyutchev is always sighing for Italian suns, and he even thinks nostalgically of the malaria of Rome, by the granite and gray skies of the Neva; he is forever grieving over stricken loves, and he never seems to write when they are flourishing. That lugubrious word rokovóy, which means destined, fateful, fatal, seems to toll on every other page, with its deep recognition of defeat, its certainty that all the affairs of the heart have come out. and must always come out badly.

Tyutchev was twice married, both times to German women; and at fifty-one he fell in love with his daughter’s governess. Says D. S. Mirsky, “Their love was passionate and profound and an infinite source of torture to both. The young woman’s reputation was ruined, and Tyutchev’s own gravely tainted, as well as his family happiness. When, in 1865, Mile. Denisova died, gloom and despair took possession of Tyutchev. The wonderful tact and forbearance of his wife in the whole affair only increased his suffering by a profound feeling of guilt.” Though I am usually interested in the lives of writers, I have not yet been able to bring myself to look this story up. I feel that I have heard enough about it in reading Tyutchev’s poems on the subject.

With all this, there are in Tyutchev’s pessimism a bitter pride and a noble consistency. But it is as far from A. E. Housman as it is from Alfred de Vigny.

says Housman; and,

says Alfred de Vigny’s wolf. But Tyutchev, after Mlle. Denisova’s death, begs God to dispel his dullness of soul so that he may feel his pain more severely, and this somehow disconcerts the Western reader.

So does Tyutchev’s conception of Nature. Nature, for Housman and Vigny, is indifferent to men, and so they defy her.

says Housman; and Vigny:—

For Wordsworth, the natural world holds a kind of divine presence that stands always behind what we see and to feel oneself in touch with which is to be strengthened, instructed, exalted. But the attitude of Tyutchev is quite distinct. Nature, in a sense, is indifferent to man, but man does not need to fight her. She is neither opponent nor friend: she has a life and a soul of her own which are larger than the life of man and which will eventually absorb and oblilcrate him. Tyutchev gives final expression to his fundamental point of view in a poem written not long before his death. Do the oaks, he asks, that grow on ancient barrows, that spread their branches and grow grand and speak with their leaves — do they care into whose dust and memory they are plunging their long roots? “Nature knows nothing of the past: our lives to her are alien and phantoms; and, standing in her presence, we dimly apprehend that we ourselves are but part of her revery. Indiscriminately, one by one, when they are done with their futile exploit, she welcomes all her children into her fathomless depths that swallow and reconcile all.”

Tyutchev’s Nature is Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman: the power that creates and that crushes; and there is a drama of feeling in relation to it in Tyutchev as there is in Pushkin. But Tyutchev, who was a reactionary in politics under Nicholas I and Alexander II and even held a post in the Censorship, is rather on the masochistic side, the side that goes in for being crushed. And one of the elements of the Russian character to which it is most difficult for the Westerner to adjust himself is the passion for self-immolation.