Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73) is included in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry but his landscape poems are given rather faint praise: ‘the themes of his nature poems are conventional – blazing sunsets, snow mountain peaks, etc. – but he presents these scenes from an unexpected point of view.’ His greatest work according to the editors was his love poetry, although their selection is too small to give a good sense of these (and they miss out the one quoted at the end of Stalker, then turned into a song by Björk, ‘The Dull Flame of Desire’). Charles Tomlinson, as you might expect, was keener to highlight the side of Tyutchev I’m interested in here. In his Translations (1983) he says ‘Tyutchev’s poetry, with its evocation of summer storms, sea, light, silence, is true to the quality of the present moment as it reveals itself in the landscape of the mind.’
As usual I won’t quote whole poems, but here are some lines that illustrate what Tomlinson says, taken from the translations he made with linguistic help from Henry Gifford.
Summer Storm: ‘Bursts out of ravaged clouds / To smear the blue, to charge / Impetuous on the wood’
Sea: ‘Winds / Called to one another and the waves / Sang me to deafness’
Light: ‘Beneath the sun-gold / Lake currents glint’
Silence: ‘Entering autumn, there ensues / (Its beauty is in brevity) / A season of crystalline repose’
Although Tyutchev has been overlooked so far by the publishers of literary classics, you can find an online PDF of translations by John Dewey (not the philosopher). There is a section covering early poems on ‘Nature’ and another one of late ‘Russian Landscapes’. Back in the day, when people still wrote blogs, there was a good one called Poetry in Translation that had a long post about this book, providing a summary of Tyutchev’s life and work. Here’s a section of it – Ovstug was the poet’s family estate.
Ovstug and the surrounding countryside inspired some of the finest of Tyutchev’s later nature poems, including the following:
There comes with autumn’s first appearance
A brief spell full of wonder and delight:
Whole days of crystalline transparence
And evenings luminously bright…Where once the sickle strode through wheat-ears tumbling
An air of space and emptiness reigns now;
Only a wisp of cobweb, trembling,
Gleams on the idle furrow’s brow.The empty skies fall still as birds forsake us,
Yet distant still is winter’s first unruly storm,
And, seeping from above, a blueness pure and warm
Is added to the drowsing acres…This was another of Leo Tolstoy’s favourites. He particularly admired lines 7 – 8, where a few deft strokes (Tolstoy singles out the evocative use of ‘idle’) are sufficient to create a whole picture of rural tranquillity and repose following the hectic activity of the harvest. ‘The art of writing poetry lies in the ability to find such images, and Tyutchev was a great master of that,’ Tolstoy commented.
Charles Tomlinson translated this poem, written on 22 August 1857, as ‘Entering Autumn.’ He rendered Tolstoy’s favourite lines thus: ‘Cobweb on idle furrow / Stretches its gleam of subtle hair.’ Another version by Anatoly Liberman makes it into the Penguin anthology, although the word ‘idle’ doesn’t feature in it. You can still visit Tyutchev’s estate in Ovstug, although of course I never will. Russia is off limits now, but some English-speaking traveller gave it a five star TripAdvisor review back in 2015 and said it is ‘open from early morning (9 a.m.) even off season, pleasant staff, well-kept both house and grounds and you can buy the most poetic leaflet I’ve ever stumbled across.’
