Fyodor Tyutchev

Fyodor Tyutchev wrote his poems for the drawer, in no hurry to publish. It was Pushkin who printed him, in The Contemporary, in 1836. Then came twenty years of silence. His first collection did not appear until 1854, when Tyutchev was past fifty.

He was born in Ovstug, in Oryol province, in 1803. Moscow University, then the diplomatic service in Munich — twenty-two years in Germany, where he steeped himself in the philosophy of German idealism, in Heine, in Schelling.

"Russia cannot be understood with the mind"; "Silentium!" — "Be silent, hide yourself, conceal"; "I Met You"; "Oh, how murderously we love" — poems people know by heart.

The "Denisyeva cycle" — poems of his late love for Elena Denisyeva. She died before him. He died in 1873.