Critics often call Tyutchev a classic in romanticism. Catchphrases from Tyutchev’s poems are still widely heard (“Russia cannot be understood with the mind...”, “Blessed is he who visited this world / In its fatal moments...”, etc.).
The lyrical hero of Tyutchev’s poetry is a doubting, searching person, located on the edge of the “fatal abyss”, aware of the tragic finitude of life. Painfully experiencing a break with the world, he at the same time strives to gain unity with existence.
In the poem “The gray shadows mixed ...” (1835) we hear a melancholic intonation created by lexical repetitions, gradation and the special romantic epithet “quiet”. Pay attention to the details: the lyrical hero feels both the invisible flight of the moth and the incomprehensibility of the huge slumbering world. The microcosm (the inner, spiritual world of a person) and the macrocosm (the external world, the Universe) seem to merge into one.
Tyutchev’s romantic motive is not connected with life circumstances, is not determined by the traditional conflict “personality - society”, it has, as they say, a “metaphysical basis”. Man is alone in the face of eternity, in front of the mystery of existence. He cannot fully express his thoughts and feelings because there is no complete correspondence to them in the language of words. This is where the motif of poetic silence, so significant for Tyutchev’s lyrics, arises.
Be silent, hide and hide
And your feelings and dreams...
"Silentium!"
Tyutchev's favorite technique is antithesis. Most often, night and day, earth and sky, harmony and chaos, nature and man, peace and movement are contrasted. The contrast and paradoxical nature of the images contribute to the depiction of the contradictions with which the world is full. “The world of the soul at night” perceives existence with particular acuteness; under the imaginary peace and light of day, primordial chaos is hidden.
Many of Tyutchev's poems are in the form of a poetic fragment and, as a rule, have a symmetrical structure: two, four, six stanzas. This form not only allows us to emphasize the openness of the artistic world, its incompleteness, fleetingness, but also implies its integrity and completeness. Such fragments are closely adjacent to each other, creating a common poetic concept of the world, a kind of lyrical diary.
The main theme of a poem is usually emphasized by repetition, a rhetorical question, or an exclamation. Sometimes a poem resembles a dialogue between a lyrical hero and himself.
The lexical content of Tyutchev's poems is distinguished by a combination of cliches of elegiac and odic poetry, neutral and archaic vocabulary. To convey a special emotional state, visual, auditory and tactile images are mixed.
When I'm awake, I hear it, but I can't
Imagine such a combination
And I hear the whistle of runners in the snow
And the spring swallows chirp.
From ancient and German poetry, Tyutchev borrowed the tradition of compound epithets: “loud-boiling goblet”, “sad orphaned earth”, etc. Before us is not only a description of a phenomenon or object, but also its emotional assessment.
Tyutchev's poems are very musical: repetitions, assonances and alliterations, anaphors and refrains, especially in love lyrics, create their unique melody. It is not without reason that many romances have been written based on Tyutchev’s poems. In addition, the poet uses different poetic meters within one poem, which also allows him to vary the poetic intonation.
One of the most important features of Tyutchev’s lyrics is the “elusiveness” of the poem’s theme. The poet has little actual landscape poetry: most often the theme of nature is associated with philosophical motives or the theme of love; a poem about love may contain philosophical generalizations.
Source (abbreviated): Lanin B.A. Russian language and literature. Literature: 10th grade / B.A. Lanin, L.Yu. Ustinova, V.M. Shamchikova. - M.: Ventana-Graf, 2016
The main features of the poet's lyrics are the identity of the phenomena of the external world and the states of the human soul, the universal spirituality of nature. This determined not only the philosophical content, but also the artistic features of Tyutchev’s poetry. Involving images of nature for comparison with different periods of human life is one of the main artistic techniques in the poet’s poems. Tyutchev’s favorite technique is personification (“the shadows mixed,” “the sound fell asleep”). L. Ya. Ginzburg wrote: “The details of the picture of nature drawn by the poet are not descriptive details of the landscape, but philosophical symbols of the unity and animation of nature.”
It would be more accurate to call Tyutchev’s landscape lyrics landscape-philosophical. The image of nature and the thought of nature are fused together in it. Nature, according to Tyutchev, led a more “honest” life before and without man than after man appeared in it.
The poet discovers greatness and splendor in the surrounding world, the natural world. She is spiritualized, personifies that very “living life for which a person yearns”: “Not what you imagine, nature, // Not a cast, not a soulless face, // She has a soul, she has freedom, // In it has love, it has language... "Nature in Tyutchev's lyrics has two faces - chaotic and harmonious, and it depends on a person whether he is able to hear, see and understand this world. Striving for harmony, the human soul turns to nature as God’s creation as salvation, for it is eternal, natural, and full of spirituality.
For Tyutchev, the natural world is a living being endowed with a soul. The night wind “in a language understandable to the heart” repeats to the poet about “incomprehensible torment”; the poet has access to the “melody of sea waves” and the harmony of “spontaneous disputes.” But where is the good? In the harmony of nature or in the chaos underlying it? Tyutchev did not find an answer. His “prophetic soul” was forever beating “on the threshold of a kind of double existence.”
The poet strives for wholeness, for unity between the natural world and the human “I”. “Everything is in me, and I am in everything,” exclaims the poet. Tyutchev, like Goethe, was one of the first to raise the banner of the struggle for a holistic sense of the world. Rationalism reduced nature to a dead principle. The mystery has gone from nature, the feeling of kinship between man and elemental forces has gone from the world. Tyutchev passionately desired to merge with nature.
And when the poet manages to understand the language of nature, its soul, he achieves a feeling of connection with the whole world: “Everything is in me, and I am in everything.”
For the poet, in depicting nature, the splendor of southern colors, the magic of mountain ranges, and the “sad places” of central Russia are attractive. But the poet is especially partial to the water element. Almost a third of the poems are about water, sea, ocean, fountain, rain, thunderstorm, fog, rainbow. The restlessness and movement of water jets is akin to the nature of the human soul, living with strong passions and overwhelmed by lofty thoughts:
How good you are, O night sea, -
It’s radiant here, grey-dark there...
In the moonlight, as if alive,
It walks and breathes and shines...
In this excitement, in this radiance,
All as if in a dream, I stand lost -
Oh, how willingly I would be in their charm
I would drown my entire soul...
("How good you are, O night sea...")
Admiring the sea, admiring its splendor, the author emphasizes the closeness of the elemental life of the sea and the incomprehensible depths of the human soul. The comparison “as in a dream” conveys man’s admiration for the greatness of nature, life, and eternity.
Nature and man live by the same laws. As the life of nature fades, human life also fades. The poem “Autumn Evening” depicts not only the “evening of the year,” but also the “meek” and therefore “bright” withering of human life:
...and on everything
That gentle smile of fading,
What in a rational being we call
Divine modesty of suffering!
Composition
Tyutchev is a poet-philosopher, and therefore the main content of his work is thoughts about life, man, and the universe. The poet's philosophical view colors all the themes of his lyrics. In its foundations, Tyutchev’s philosophy is close to the ideas of Schelling, which became widespread in Russia through members of the literary and philosophical circle “Society of the wise” (1823-1825), among whom was the young poet. Schelling perceived the universe as a living and spiritual being that develops and grows, rushing towards the triumph of truth, goodness and beauty, towards world harmony. “There is no dead nature,” Schelling argued, considering all natural phenomena as organs of the World Soul. This teaching was called natural philosophy; it was most fully reflected in Russian poetry by the work of Tyutchev. The originality of the theme of nature in his lyrics is connected with this.
Not what you think, nature:
Not a cast, not a soulless face -
She has a soul, she has freedom,
There is love in it, there is language in it -
the poet asserts after the German philosopher. Nature is alive, Tyutchev believes, but people don’t want to see it have a meaningful, independent life:
They don't see or hear
They live in this world as if in the dark...
The idea of the animation of nature - pantheism - permeates all of Tyutchev’s landscape lyrics. For him, nature is an animated whole, and natural phenomena appear to be “a great drama, conceived and staged according to all the rules of art,” as the poet wrote. In this universal performance, as in a myth, the Sun, Day, Night, Ocean, Earth act, and various natural elements turn into mythological images. The well-known poem “I love a thunderstorm in early May...” ends with an unexpected comparison of a thunderstorm with the goddess of youth Hebe from ancient Greek mythology:
You will say: windy Hebe,
Feeding Zeus's eagle,
A thunderous goblet from the sky,
Laughing, she spilled it on the ground.
Equally mythological are the images of Winter and Spring in the poems “It’s not for nothing that Winter is angry...”, “The Enchantress of Winter”, “Spring Waters” and others. Like an ancient idolater, the poet freezes before the grandeur and beauty of nature. She delights in the diversity of its colors, sounds, and smells. “How good you are, O night sea!” - exclaims the poet. “I love thunderstorms at the beginning of May...” he admits.
Peering intently into the mysterious face of nature, the poet strives to catch the slightest changes in it, to capture fleeting moments. That is why his poems so often depict transitional, intermediate moments in the life of nature. An autumn day reminds him of the recent summer (“There is in the original autumn...”), and an autumn evening carries a premonition of winter (“Autumn Evening”), he strives to capture the first awakening of nature, when spring is just beginning to assert its rights (“ The earth still looks sad, but the air already breathes spring...", "Spring Waters"). He even paints a thunderstorm not in the summer, when it happens often, but “in early May,” when the “first thunder of spring” is heard for the first time after a long winter.
Tyutchev’s nature is changeable, dynamic, knows no rest, it is in a constant struggle of opposing forces: chaos, the elements of rebellion and destruction, and space, the elements of reconciliation and harmony. They embody the eternal struggle between demonic and divine forces, the outcome of which has not yet been decided:
When nature's last hour strikes,
The composition of the parts of the earth will collapse,
Everything visible will be covered by waters again,
And God's face will be depicted in them!
("The Last Cataclysm")
The antithesis of day and night, characteristic of Tyutchev’s lyrics, also correlates with this. The night as an “unsolved mystery”, a “burning abyss”, the embodiment of chaos simultaneously frightens and attracts a person:
ABOUT! Don't sing these scary songs
About ancient chaos, about my dear!
How greedily the world of the soul is at night
He listens to the story of his beloved!..
(“What are you howling about, night wind?..”)
Tyutchev's pictures of nature are always a reason for thinking about man, his relationship with the universe, about the nature of the human personality itself. Parallels of the natural and human world are constantly present in the poet’s poems (“The earth still looks sad…”, “Autumn Evening”, “Fountain”). At the same time, he rethinks the problem of personality, which absorbs the contradictions of the world. After all, according to Tyutchev’s concept, the struggle of the cosmos with chaos is most intense not in nature, but in social life and in the human soul. At the same time, the romantic idea of two worlds organically enters into the poet’s system of ideas about man and his place in the world. Man, according to Tyutchev, has lost his integrity, his soul finds itself involved in two worlds:
O my prophetic soul!
O heart full of anxiety,
Oh, how you beat on the threshold
As if double existence!..
This is why Tyutchev’s man turns out to be infinitely lonely. This is especially felt at night, when chaos manifests itself most strongly in the world. It is then that a person feels himself on the edge of an abyss, listening into the abyss of the world night. The lyrical hero fears her and at the same time longs to touch this secret:
Blessed is he who has visited this world
His moments are fatal!
He was called by the all-good
As a companion to a feast!
Tyutchev’s man is not just dual, he is as much a mystery as nature. The world of the human soul is inherently tragic; it contains the elements of destruction and self-destruction. The personality, being “on the threshold of a kind of double existence,” experiences the insolubility of the contradictions tearing it apart, entering into a hopeless struggle with the surrounding world and itself.
This position of the poet is felt especially clearly in love lyrics. For Tyutchev, love is a “fatal duel” in which destructive and intoxicating forces merge, filling human life with meaning and suffering:
Love, love - says the legend -
Union of the soul with the dear soul -
Their union, combination,
And their fatal merger,
And... the duel is fatal.
"Predestination"
This understanding of love as a destructive force was influenced by the poet’s personal spiritual experience, reflected in the “Denisiev cycle.” This is the name of a cycle of poems created in 1850-1864, which reflects the complex and contradictory relationship of the poet with Elena Alexandrovna Denisyeva. Tyutchev's love brought her both happiness and suffering: her family abandoned her, she was not accepted in the world, her illegitimate children could not inherit Tyutchev's name. That is why the lyrical hero exclaims with bitterness: “Oh, how murderously we love.” The poet turns his attention to the inner world of his beloved, whose image is endowed with vividly individualized psychological traits: she is a suffering, but passionately loving woman, ready for self-denial in the fight for her happiness. Denisyeva’s death cut short this tragic romance, but the poet forever preserved her image in his memory: “My angel, do you see me?” - he asks his beloved who has passed into another world. Thus, the theme of “memory of the heart” becomes the basis of many of the poet’s poems, the most famous of which is the poem “I Met You...” (“K.B”) - a masterpiece of Tyutchev’s late lyrics. Set to music, this poem became one of the most popular romances. It is dedicated to Amalia von Lerchenfeld (married Baroness Krudener), whom Tyutchev met back in 1823. For half a century, they were connected by a romantic relationship, accompanied by dramatic breaks, partings and meetings. One of the last meetings in 1870 served as the impetus for the creation of the poem “I Met You...”. The “golden time” that the poet recalls turns out to be so vivid in his memory that it is no longer just a memory:
There is more than one memory here,
Here life spoke again, -
And you have the same charm,
And that love is in my soul!..
But such harmony and tranquility, which allows us to see parallels with the masterpiece of Pushkin’s lyrics, the poem “I remember a wonderful moment...”, is for Tyutchev only a short moment in the endless struggle of a person with the world and himself. Close and beloved people pass away, leaving only the light of memory in a lonely and suffering person. But this loneliness contains not only tragedy. After all, a person in Tyutchev’s romantic world is a creator creating his own world. “There is a whole world in your soul / Of mysteriously magical thoughts,” the poet claims. But this mysterious world of the soul is inaccessible to anyone, and therefore the theme of loneliness in Tyutchev is inextricably linked with the theme of “inexpressibility” - so characteristic of Russian romantic poetry, starting with Zhukovsky. In Tyutchev, these two themes, when combined, reach their extreme: loneliness is determined by man’s very nature, because it is impossible to know another, just as it is impossible to express oneself, because “a thought expressed is a lie.” “It is not given to us to predict / How our word will respond,” the poet warns. The only way out of this tragically insoluble contradiction, which he sees and points out to others, is to remain silent. It’s not for nothing that one of his most famous poems is called “silence!”:
Be silent, hide and hide
And your feelings and dreams...
The poem ends with a characteristic call: “Just know how to live within yourself.” Thus, in Tyutchev’s lyrics, the theme of inexpressibility, reaching its limit, brings Russian poetry close to its resolution. It is not without reason that the symbolists, who discovered new ways of expressing the inexpressible, especially valued this particular poem by Tyutchev.
And yet Tyutchev’s poetry does not close on itself; the circle of philosophical problems opens up in reflections on the fate of Russia. The theme of Russia is an important component of Tyutchev’s poetic world. With his characteristic global tragic consciousness, the poet covers with his gaze the endless expanses of his country:
These poor villages
This meager nature -
The native land of long-suffering,
You are the edge of the Russian people!
The tragedy of modern man, according to Tyutchev, is aggravated by the fact that he has lost faith, and therefore in the poem “Our Century” the poet states: “It is not the flesh, but the spirit that has become corrupted in our days, / And man desperately yearns...”. “We burn with unbelief,” his contemporary “and thirsts for faith - but does not ask for it.” Where can we find support in this disintegrating world? How to know the unknowable, express the inexpressible? Tyutchev’s answer sounds words of faith - in one’s fatherland, in man, in the power of the word:
You can't understand Russia with your mind,
The general arshin cannot be measured:
She will become special -
You can only believe in Russia.
This is not only Tyutchev’s call to his contemporaries, but also his testament to his descendants.
The artistic features of Tyutchev's lyrics are determined by its philosophical basis. The main feature of his poetry is metaphor in its various forms. Metaphor, which permeates all of Tyutchev’s lyrics, becomes the main means of expressing the poet’s natural philosophy. In his poetry, the barriers between the natural and human worlds literally disappear: nature lives by the sufferings and joys of man, and man is included in all natural phenomena. The line between the emotional unrest of the lyrical hero and nature disappears and images of amazing strength and beauty appear:
Thought after thought, wave after wave -
Two manifestations of one element:
Whether in a cramped heart, or in a boundless sea,
Here - in prison, there - in the open...
Thus, continuing and developing the tradition of identifying pictures of nature with a certain mood or state of the human soul, characteristic of Russian poetry, Tyutchev widely uses the technique of figurative parallelism. For example, behind a hopeless rain curtain one can discern human tears (“Human tears, oh human tears...”), and in the poem “Autumn Evening” the poet compares fading nature with the tormented human soul:
Damage, exhaustion - and everything
That gentle smile of fading,
What in a rational being we call
Divine modesty of suffering.
In an effort to convey the painful beauty of autumn, he uses original emotional epithets: “the ominous shine and variegation of the trees”, “the sad orphaned earth”. Even such a long-standing and well-known device as personification also changes in Tyutchev’s lyrics and acquires unique features: it becomes not a poetic convention, but an expression of the poet’s idea of nature as a living being that thinks, feels, rejoices and suffers. His “trees tremble joyfully” and “sing” because “there is a smile on everything, life in everything,” and Winter begins to get really “angry,” seeing his rival in Spring.
At the same time, images of nature acquire the features of mythological images that fill the universe of Tyutchev’s poetry. The polarity of this universe requires an antithesis for its expression, which is often used in Tyutchev’s lyrics. It is created by contrasting images (Chaos - Space) and antonym words: day - night, gloomy - light, gloomy - cheerful.
Another feature of Tyutchev’s poetry was noticed in his time by Nekrasov, who spoke about the poet’s extraordinary ability to capture “precisely those features by which a given picture can arise in the reader’s imagination and be completed by itself.” Indeed, Tyutchev never clutters his poems with unnecessary details, but chooses a few, the most characteristic features. This achieves a special power of artistic expression. For the poet, just one keenly noticed detail (“a web of fine hair”), an accurately found epithet (“a day “as if it were crystal”) is enough - and the “short but wondrous time” of early autumn appears before his eyes. At the same time, epithets, comparisons and metaphors in Tyutchev’s poetry are always unexpected, unpredictable and give the landscapes a symbolic and philosophical meaning, and give the language expressiveness and living imagery, which is combined with the laconicism and aphorism of poetic speech. Tyutchev's lyrics, thanks to the amazing beauty and harmony of form and content, became one of the highest achievements of Russian poetry.
Pantheistic lyrics, etc. F. Tyutcheva
Tyutchev is a true poet-philosopher, whose works are dominated by polished, aphoristic thought-idea .
In 1836, shortly before his death, A.S. Pushkin prepared a selection of Tyutchev’s poems for publication in the Sovremennik magazine. He became the first benevolent critic of the young poet. Pushkin emphasized: “It is in philosophical lyrics that a new poetic language and shades of metaphysics are revealed.” Tyutchev, a student of Professor Raich, translator and poet, graduated from Moscow University and knew European languages very well. He spent about seventeen years in Germany, where he served as a diplomat. He communicated with the philosopher Schelling and the poet Heine, and was received in the best houses and music salons. This could not but affect his philosophical lyrics. According to Yuri Tynyanov (articles “The Question of Tyutchev” and “Archaists and Innovators”), we have before us pure poetry of thought, which contains answers to the real philosophical questions of the era: the Universe, Earth, space, chaos, the mystery of birth, sleep and death, time, space, human destiny, love. According to his worldview, Tyutchev was pantheist (pantheism - from the Greek words pan, that is, everything, theos, that is, god; literally - god in everything). Tyutchev believed that God is “dissolved” in nature and lives in every stone, flower, cloud, and in all natural elements. This is not a specific god - Christ, Allah or Buddha - but, as it were, the general Soul of the World. Tyutchev’s favorite techniques already in his early works were personification (animation of the inanimate) and alliteration (accumulation of repeated consonants). In the famous poem “Spring Thunderstorm” he wrote:
I love g r Ozu in early May, G r they eat r young ascatas,
When is spring not r vyy g r oh, it's raining r came out, dust flies,
How would r jiggle and ig r oh, hang on r rain lyes,
G r hunts in the blue sky. And the sun gilds the threads.
At the end of the 19th century, the religious philosopher and symbolist poet Vladimir Solovyov argued that Tyutchev saw the Soul of the World in the sunset and splendor of the coming spring, heard it in the noise of the night sea and wind. Solovyov especially liked Tyutchev’s mysterious poem “The gray shadows mixed together...”:
The gray shadows mixed,
The color faded, the sound fell asleep -
Life and movement resolved
In the dusk, an unsteady, distant rumble...
Moth's invisible flight
Heard in the night air...
An hour of unspeakable melancholy!..
The last line is Tyutchev’s poetic motto. He was always interested in the mystery of nature, which he compared to the Sphinx, who personifies the eternal mystery in Egyptian mythology. In the poem “Nature is a Sphinx...” he wrote:
Nature is a sphinx, and the truer it is
His temptation destroys a person,
What may happen, no longer
There is no riddle and she never had one.
Temptation is an eternal temptation. Nature tempts and attracts people with its secrets and beauty. A person not only cannot solve these mysteries, he is not even sure whether they really exist.
In an effort to comprehend the mystery of existence, Tyutchev most often created majestic cosmic images. He was worried about the mysteries of the night, chaos, and the movements of the planets. In his famous poem “Summer Evening,” he described the sunset this way:
Already a hot ball of the sun
The earth rolled off its head,
And peaceful evening fire
The sea wave swallowed me up.
In another poem, “Vision,” we see a series of mythological images:
There is a certain hour in the night of universal silence,
And at that hour of appearances and miracles
Living chariot of the universe
Rolls openly into the sanctuary of heaven.
Night mystery (mystery is a mysterious performance) Tyutchev describes in his famous poem “How the ocean embraces the globe...”
As the ocean envelops the globe,
Earthly life is surrounded by dreams;
Night will come - and with sonorous waves
The element hits its shore.
The vault of heaven, burning with the glory of the stars,
Looks mysteriously from the depths, -
And we float, a burning abyss
Surrounded on all sides.
The poet’s favorite images are night, ocean, and luminaries. This is not only an ocean of water, but also an ocean of stars. The plot basis of Tyutchev’s lyrics is grand mystery, in which all natural elements participate, which are invariably antinomic: fire is the brilliance of the sun, warmth, life, but at the same time death, a world fire; water is a clean, transparent substance, rain, drops, but in another case it is a global flood, destruction, death; the air is clean, light, fresh, but at the same time it is a destructive wind, a storm; the earth is a living, spiritualized, thinking organism or a cracked, displaced crust. In this eternal mystery, man is assigned the role of philosopher and wanderer. That is why his lyrical hero often walks, rides or flies. Sometimes Tyutchev speaks on behalf of all humanity.
Tyutchev was worried about the problem of the end of the world. The famous poem “The Last Cataclysm” is dedicated to her:
When nature's last hour strikes,
The composition of the parts of the earth will collapse,
Everything visible will be covered by waters again,
And God's face will be depicted in them.
Such quatrains are usually called philosophical fragments . Tyutchev - master philosophical fragment . Nekrasov noted: “All these poems are very short, and yet there is absolutely nothing to add to any of them.”
The poet’s poem “Not what you think, nature...” became the programmatic poem:
Not what you think, nature,
Not a cast, not a soulless face -
She has a soul, she has freedom,
It has love, it has language.
For Tyutchev, all natural phenomena are, as it were, signs of a common essence, signs of being. To show the connection of these signs in the mystery of nature, in a grandiose performance that a person witnesses - this is the task of the poet.
Yu. Tynyanov said that Tyutchev developed a special exquisite archaic language; in his poetry the odic traditions of the monumental style of the 18th century are strong, -
Derzhavin's intonations are clearly audible. He loves double epithets (life-giving, peaceful, thunder-boiling, an invisible-fatal hand, something joyfully dear, in those days, bloody-fatal, a lush flowing wave, smoky-light, hazy-lily).
Tyutchev, whose aesthetic views and poetic principles took shape in the 20s and early 30s, of course, was not opposed to the publication of literary works, but he saw their main purpose in self-awareness and self-expression of the individual. It is this feature of Tyutchev’s work that can explain the fact that his conservative Slavophile political views, which he set out in special articles and left their mark on his diplomatic activities, were almost not reflected at all in his philosophical and intimate lyrics. Tyutchev represents a rare phenomenon in Russian literature of a poet, in whose work poems containing a direct expression of the poet’s political ideas are of secondary importance.
His poetry was least of all declarative. It reflected the living existence of the knowing mind, its quests, impulses, passions and suffering, and did not offer ready-made solutions.
Nature has always been a source of inspiration for Tyutchev. His best creations are poems about nature. His landscapes in the poems: “How joyful is the roar of summer storms”, “What are you bending over the waters, willow, the top of your head...”, “Clouds are melting in the sky...” and others - rightfully included in the golden fund of Russian and world literature. But mindless admiration of nature is alien to the poet; he searches in nature for what makes him in common with man. Tyutchev’s nature is alive: it breathes, smiles, frowns, sometimes dozes, and is sad. She has her own language and her own love; it is characteristic of the same thing as the human soul, therefore Tyutchev’s poems about nature are poems about man, about his moods, worries, anxieties: “There is silence in the stuffy air...”, “The stream has thickened and is dimming”, “The appearance of the earth is still sad ..." and others.
The first cycle of poems was published in 1836 in Pushkin’s Sovremennik magazine, which highly praised Tyutchev as a poet, and critics started talking about Tyutchev only 14 years later.
Tyutchev's contribution to literature was not immediately appreciated. But those who were masters of words themselves understood that a new poet, unlike others, had appeared in Russia. Thus, I. S. Turgenev wrote: “A poet can tell himself that Tyutchev created speeches that are not destined to die.” His first collection was small - only 119 poems. But as Fet said,
Muse, observing the truth,
She looks, and on the scales she has
This is a small book
There are many heavier volumes.
F. M. Dostoevsky noticed “the vastness of Tyutchev’s poetry, to whom sultry passion, stern energy, deep thought, morality and the interests of public life are accessible.”
Tyutchev often “went” to the primary sources of the Universe, in this he is “more extensive” than the creativity of, for example, Nekrasov. Tyutchev always has two principles: the world and man. He tried to solve the cosmic “ultimate” questions, and therefore turned out to be interesting not only for the 19th century, but also for the 20th.
Behind every natural phenomenon, the poet senses its mysterious life.
The world of Tyutchev's poetry is revealed (this was noted by Pushkin) only in the complex of many poems. With him, even where there is only a separate landscape, we always find ourselves as if in front of the whole world.
There is in the initial autumn
A short but wonderful time -
The whole day is like crystal
And the evenings are radiant...
In this real picture of autumn there is something from the promised land, from the bright kingdom. Such epithets as “crystal” and “radiant” are not accidental. “Only a web of fine hair” is not only a noticed detail, a real sign, it is something that serves the perception of the entire vast world, right down to the thin web.
Tyutchev's lyrics are one-hero. But what is noteworthy is that there is a person in it, but there is no hero in the usual sense of the word. The personality in his poetry is represented as the entire human race, but not as a race as a whole, but as everyone in this race.
Hence the second feature of Tyutchev - dialogicity. There is a constant debate going on in the poems.
Not what you think, nature -
Not a cast, not a soulless face.
She has a soul, she has freedom,
It has love, it has language...
The poet's love lyrics are also remarkable. Tyutchev, as noted by Z. Gippius, was one of the first to shift the main attention to the woman when depicting love. It is difficult to name another poet other than Tyutchev, in whose lyrics an individual female image is clearly outlined.
Tyutchev was no stranger to social themes, although very often he was ranked among the “Parnassians,” champions of “pure art.” Indeed, the problem of the people, as such, in the 50-40s. Tyutchev does not occupy the 19th century, but by the end of the 50s. Radical changes are planned in the poet's worldview. He writes about the rotten imperial power and likens the fate of Russia to a ship that has run aground. And only “the wave of people’s life is able to lift it and put it into motion.”
These poor villages
This meager nature -
The native land of long-suffering,
You are the land of the Russian people.
The principle of faith was and forever remained alive for Tyutchev:
Above this dark crowd
Of the unawakened people
Will you ever rise, freedom,
Will your golden ray shine?..
In the 50s, Tyutchev moved closer to Nekrasov in his depiction of nature.
Thus, in the poem “There is in the primordial autumn...” Tyutchev’s harmony of surrounding existence is associated with the laboring peasant field, with the sickle and furrow:
And pure and warm azure flows
To a resting field.
Tyutchev does not penetrate into the most popular peasant life, like Nekrasov in “The Uncompressed Strip,” but this is no longer an abstract allegory.
Tyutchev forever remains a poet of tragic spiritual quest. But he believes in the true values of life:
You can't understand Russia with your mind,
The general arshin cannot be measured:
She will become special -
You can only believe in Russia.
For him, the spirit goes further than thought, so “thought” cannot understand Russia, but “spirit” helps to believe in it.
For him, his homeland is not an abstract homeland. This is a country that he sincerely loved, although he lived away from it for a long time. It is here, in the sense of the mystery of people's life, that two such different Russian poets - Tyutchev and Nekrasov - are most close.
So, Tyutchev’s poetry is extremely broad both in subject matter and in the scope of the problems raised in it. Not shying away from social themes, Tyutchev at the same time created a deeply lyrical, intimate world. In his poems, he spoke about the beauty of the world, the greatness of the Creator, and also about the need to restore harmony between the natural world and man. He called for intuitive knowledge of the world, for “listening” to nature, for man to again feel like an organic part of the universe.
Tyutchev's work was a major stage in the development of Russian literature. It opened a new page in it, became a prologue to the work of such poets as A. Blok, A. Bely, V. Bryusov, and predetermined the great breakthrough that was made in the era of the “Silver Age” of Russian poetry.
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