Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 74- 24,425 WEHRLE, Albert James, 1945- TENSIONS in the POETRY of F

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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 74- 24,425 WEHRLE, Albert James, 1945- TENSIONS IN THE POETRY OF F. I. TJUT&V. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1974 Language and Literature, general

{ University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan

0 1974

ALBERT JAMES WEHRLE

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. TENSIONS IN THE POETRY OF F. I. TJUT^EV

DISSERTATION

Presented In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

Albert J. Wehrle, B.A., A.M.

The Ohio State University

1974

Reading Committee: Approved By

Professor Frank R. Silbajoris

Professor Hongor Oulanoff

Professor Jerzy R. Krzyzanowski

Adviser

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Professor Frank R. Silbajoris V.

VITA

November 7, 1945 Born — Cleveland, Ohio

1968...... B.A. The College of Wooster (Ohio)

1970...... A.M. (Slavic Languages and Liter atures), The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

Spring 1969, Fall 1969 and 1970.... Teaching Assistant (Russian), The Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio

1969-1974, NDEA and NDFL Fellowships in Russian, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Russian Literature

Studies in Old Russian Literature. Professor Frank R. Silbajoris. Professor Mateja Matejic.

Studies in Eighteenth Century Russian Literature. Professor Frank R. Silbajoris.

Studies in Nineteenth Century Russian Literature. Professor Frank R. Silbajoris. Professor Mateja Matejic.

Studies in Twentieth Century Russian and Soviet Lit erature. Professor Frank R. Silbajoris. Pro fessor Hongor Oulanoff. Professor Leon Twarog.

Minor Field: Polish Literature

Studies in Polish Literature. Professor Jerzy R. Krzyzanowski.

i* n* * TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

DEDICATION...... ii

VITA...... iii

LIST OF FIGURES...... v

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION...... vi

CHAPTER

I. THE TEXTURE OF TJUTCEV'S POETRY...... 1

II. TRANSITION AND CLOSURE IN TJUTCEV'S POETRY...... 32

III. PARALLELISM...... 63

IV. THOUGHT AND EMOTION...... 107

V. LOGIC AND STRUCTURE...... 137

VI. ABSTRACTION AND EMPATHY...... 162

VII. TJUTCEV AND HIS POETRY...... 192

APPENDIX: A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF TJUTCEV'S LIFE.. 220

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 222 LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE PAGE

w V ^ 1. Rhythmic Graph of "Esce sumel Veselyj den,u ("The lively day was still making noise") — Definitive Version...... 17

2. Rhythmic Graph of "Esce sumel veselyj den,u ("The lively day was still making noise") — Earlier Version...... 22

3. Stress^Norm and Deviations in "Du^a moja— Elizium tenej" ("My soul is an Elysium of shades")...... 45

4. Syllabic Norm and Deviations in "Dusa moja— fel izium tenej" ("My soul is an Elysium of shades")...... 47

5. Structural Contours of "Predopredelenie" ("Predestination")...... 54

6. Phonetic Diagram of "Silentium!" (Stressed Voviels)...... 103

v N.

A Note on Transliteration

The Cyrillic alphabet is not used in this dis

sertation. The Russian alphabet is transliterated ac

cording to the system used in The Slavic and East Euro

pean Journal. The purpose of using transliteration is

to make it possible for the reader who knows no Russian

to have as much an idea as possible of the sounds pre

sent in a particular word, line, or poem. There are

descrepancies between orthography and sound. These will

be discussed in relation to particular points of analy

sis. In addition, it should not be assumed that, say,

Russian Crj is the same as English • But at least

transliteration makes it evident that an C r} is involved,

something that the Cyrillic letter "p" £r] would obscure.

Certain phonemes are present in Russian that are

not found in English. This makes it necessary to ex

plain some of the transliterated letters. A groups of

these letters are made by using the "hachek," (*).

Thus:

c — "cheese" s — "sham" z — "azure" sc — "danish cheese"

Other consonants that need explanation are the trans

literations "x" and "c." "X" is like English "h," or vi better, like the "ch" in Scottish "loch.11 "C" is like

the "ts" in "cats."

The letter "j" comes up often in this transliter

ation system. It might be compared to the "y" in "boy_."

After consonants, as in "Tjutcev," "j" indicates that

the preceding consonant is "soft." Most Russian con-

’sonants come in pairs, one "soft" or "palatalized," and

one "hard," or "non-palatalized." This difference can

involve meaning, as in frat3 ("glad") vs. £ r ’at3 ("row").

In this particular phonetic transcription the apostrophe

indicates that the preceding consonant is soft. Rus

sian also has a special letter to show that the pre

ceding consonant is soft, and this letter is also trans

literated as an apostrophe. The "hard sign" is much

rarer, and is transliterated as (").

The English letter "j" appears in vowels "ju" and

"ja." This "j" is an indication that the preceding

consonant is,soft. Thus £r’atj is transliterated to

"rjad," while (j^&tJ ("glad") is transliterated as "rad."

Going on to the transliteration of other vowels, the

transliterated letter "y" is an allophone of /i/ and

% follows hard consonants. "E" also follows hard con

sonants, while "e" follows soft consonants.

vii CHAPTER I

The Texture of Tjutcev's Poetry

When we speak of the "texture" of poetry, we are

attempting to describe the impression produced by the

interrelationship of the various poetic elements. By way of analogy with textiles, poetic texture may be

"smooth" or "even," or it may be "coarse" or "uneven."

The poetic fabric may be composed of fine and tightly- woven threads, or the weave may be heavier, its various

threads more sharply defined and differentiated.

The texture of Tjutcev's poetry is uneven. Defin ition is sharp. Elements are generally sharply differ entiated. This means that foregrounding is generally sharp. The poet will go to considerable, even "extreme" lengths to make certain elements and interrelationships of the various hierarchical levels of the poetic text stand out. This chapter is devoted to showing the more

V important elements that make the texture of Tjutcev's poetry what it is. v Tjutcev's poems often begin abruptly. Frequently they begin with an imperative gesture, such as "Smotri" or "Vot" ("Look!"), or with a demonstrative, such as

"Tam" ("There") or "Zdes'" ("Here"). This abruptness 1 produces the impression of present time; the reader finds himself in medias res. Abruptness is heightened by the fact that Tjutcev is not usually lavish with the information he gives the reader. The situation is usu ally tantalizingly vague. Various devices are used to make this vagueness take the form of tension between a context slightly beyond the poem and the lyric itself.

One of these devices is the beginning with "And," which makes the reader wonder what has happened before: v I rasprostjas' s trevogoju zitejskoj, I kiparisnoj ros-scej zaslonjas', —

And, bidding farewell to the anxieties of the world, And having screened itself with a cypress grove, —

Another device, with the same effect of making the reader feel he has missed something, is the use of pro nouns with undefined antecedents. Not rarely this occurs in opening lines:

Ona sidela na polu I grudu pisem razbirala,

She was sitting on the floor And looking through a pile of letters,

The speaker places himself in the scene at the beginning of the fourth and last stanza: "I stood silently to one side." This placement appears to presuppose an understanding of the situation as clear as that of the \

speaker himself, making precise description and infor- v mation unnecessary. The Soviet scholar Boris Buxstab y states that more than one half of Tjutcev’s poems are

seemingly addressed, not to the reader, but to some

listener the reader must imagine as being situated with

in the context of the poem.'*' The reader sometimes feels

that he is intruding on a conversation, as in

0, ne trevoz’ menja ukoroj spravedlivoj! Pover', iz nas iz dvux zavidnej cast' tvoja:

C, do not trouble me with a just reproach! Believe me: of us, of us two, the more enviable lot is yours:

Note the emphatic repetition: "iz nas iz dvux" ("of

us, of us two"). Emotionally charged speech is char-

V acteristic of Tjutcev. Often in the form of verbal

repetition, it becomes exclamatory often enough for s v 2 Boris Ejxenbaum to call Tjutcev a "poet of exclamations.*

These are often found in the opening line, as "Kak

xorosoV ty, o more nocnoe!" V ("How beautiful you are,

o night sea!"). Exclamations also play an important

role in the closing lines of his poetry, as an aspect v 3 of Tjutcev*s "oratorical style:"

V V Iz casi ix bessmert'e pill

From their cup he has drunk of immortality! \

Da utait ot nix prixod uzasnyj svoj!

Yea he hides from them his terrible arrival!

\ 4 Since the important work of Ejxenbaum and Tynjanov,

it has become a commonplace of criticism that Tjutcev's

style represents a combination of elements from the

tradition of the oratorical and classical (or baroque)

Gavriil Derzavin (1743-1816) and the mellifluous and

romantic Vasilij Zukovskij (1783-1852). An interesting

combination of the declamatory and the musical may be

seen in what might be called the "muted exclamation." An

example of the declamatory is:

0, etot Jug! o, eta Nicca!... 0, kak ix blesk menja trevozit!

0, this South! o, this Nica! 0, how their glitter agitates me!

The first line of the following poem, entitled "Vecer"

("Evening"), provides an example of the "muted excla

mation. "

Kak tixo veet nad dolinoj Dalekij kolokol'nyj zvon, Kak sorox stai zuravlinoj, — I v sume list'ev zamer on.

Kak more vesnee v razlive, Svetleja, ne kolyxnet den', — I toroplivej, molcalivej Lozitsja po doline ten'. X

How quietly wafts over the valley The distant bell's tolling, Like the rustling of a flock of cranes, — And in the rustle of leaves it has died away.

Like a spring sea in high tide, Brightening, the day is motionless, — And with more haste, more silently The shadow settles across the valley.

The exclamation is softened in keeping with the sense

of the lines, in particular the adjective "tixo,"

("quietly") and the verb "veet," ("wafts"). The soft

ening of the initial "Kak" is also subsequently motivated

by the fact that the other incidences of the word, in

lines 3 and 5, are non-exclamatory, having the meaning

"like" and introducing similes, v Ejxenbaum considers some of the prose elements

V ("prozaizmy"— "prosaisms") present in Tjutcev's lyrics

to be aspects of his "oratorical style." Tjutcev uses

terms from debate, such as the verb "mnit'" ("to think,

imagine") in poetic "arguments" like the following

(opening stanza)

Ne to, cto mnite vy, priroda: Ne slepok, ne bezduSnyj lik — V nej est' duSa, v nej est' svoboda, V nej est' ljubov', v nej est' jazyk...

Nature is not what you imagine: Not a blind, not a soulless image — In her is a soul, in her is freedom, In her is love, in her is language...

Note the rhetorical figure in the third and fourth lines

(anaphora). The use of rhetorical figures is quite characteristic of Tjutcev.

The present tense of the verb "to be," '’est',1'

is not ordinarily used in Russian. In the last stanza

quoted, it is used insistently. The effect can best

be explained to the reader who does not know Russian by

mentioning the tv/o main areas of writing in which it is

used most, scientific and philosophical prose. "Est‘"

is also used in colloquial speech and in certain set

expressions. Used outside of these areas, the form

carries a tinge of the archaic since the form was used

at an earlier stage in the language's history. Ejxenbaum

sees "est’" as a "prosaism." It must be noted that this

does not mean the form is "prosaic" in the sense of

"plain" or "pedestrian." Tjutcev often uses the form in

opening lines, for instance: "V razluke est' vysokoe

znacen'e" ("In separation there is a lofty meaning"),

"Pevucest' est' v morskix volnax" ("There is melody in

the sea waves"). The prose quality is especially strong,

says Ejxenbaum, in combination with numbers: "Est*

bliznecy — dlja zemnorodnyx/ Dva bozestva" ("There are

twins — for earthdwellers/ Two divinities").

In the last title line quoted the "prosaism"

"est'" is found in close proximity to the highly poetic compound "zemnorodnyx" ("earthdwellers" or "earthborn").

A tension between different types of language results. As for the tension that in general results from the presence of ’'est'1' in Tjutcev's lyric poetry, it might best be characterized as a tension of poetic traditions.

The philosophical ’'est'" clashes with the emotional tradition of the lyric. In the opening line "Est' V v svetlosti osennix vecerov" ("There is in the bright ness of autumn evenings") the philosophical component is in tension with the emotional theme of nature des cription. The presence of "est'" is a key to the sub text of this particular poem, which is overtly stated in the last four lines.

Uscerb, iznemozen'e i na vsem Ta krotkaja ulybka uvjadan'ja, Cto v suscestve razumnom my zovem Vozvysennoj sbydlivost'ju stradan'ja.

Decline, exhaustion, and on all That meek smile of fading That in a creature of reason we call The elevated diffidence of suffering. % Ejxenbaum describes the effect of this pointe as being

"almost too ponderous for a lyric poem." Perhaps, to a certain degree, the heaviness of these lines, tinged with what may be termed a "high style of prose," comes through in translation. Next to it may be cited the excerpt that is the locus classicus of the high poetic style in Tjutcev, lines 5-8 of "Den' i noc'" floay and

Night"). \

Den' — sej blistatel'nyj pokrov — Den', zemnorodnyx ozivlen'e, DuSi boljascej iscelen'e, Drug celovekov i bogovl

Day is this resplendent veil — Day, the reanimation of earthdwellers, The ailing soul's healing, Friend of men and gods I

The translation does not reproduce the effect of the

original, although, perhaps, something of the poetic

"deformation” of language can be guessed from the English

of the second and third lines of the excerpt.

Besides using archaic and Slavonic forms, as in the

previous lines from "Day and Night," Tjutcev uses con

versational forms, as he does in the following poem:

Ne govori: menja on, kak i prezde, ljubit, Mnoj, kak i prezde, dorozit... 0, net! on zizn' moju bescelovecno gubit, Xot', vizu, noz v ruke ego drozit.

To v gneve, to v slezax, toskuja, negoduja, Uvlecena, v duse ujazvlena, Ja strazdu, ne zivu... im, im odnim zivu ja — No eta zizn'!... o, kak gor'ka ona!

On merit vozdux mne tak berezno i skudno... Ne merjat tak i ljutomu vragu... Ox, ja dysu esce boleznenno i trudno, Mogu dysat', no zit' uz ne mogu. (1851 or 1852)

Do not say: he, as before, loves me, That, as before, he cares for me... 0, no! my life he is inhumanly destroying, Though, I see — the knife in his hand trembles. N

Now in anger, now in tears, pining, complaining, Carried away, wounded in the soul, I suffer, not live... by him, him alone do I live— But this life!... o, how bitter it is!

He measures air for me so carefully and stingily... They do not measure it thus for even the bitterest enemy... Och, I still breathe, painfully and laboriously, I can breathe, but I can no longer live.

The inversions of the elevated poetic style here give

way to a fragmented syntax dominated by emotion. This

emotion reaches its highest pitch in the exclamations:

”0, net!", "O, kak gor'ka ona!", and "Ox" ("Och!").

The dashes and ellipses reveal the nervous tension of

the speaker. It might be added that Tjutcev is fond of

ellipses, knowing the expressive value of these gaps in

poetic texture. These spaces are, of course, a great

factor in the rhythmic organization of the poem. Note,

for instance, how the dash in line 4, by coming after

the third syllable, "deforms" the progress of the iambs.

If the dashes and ellipses act to slow the lines, word

and phrase repetitions generally act to accelerate

their movement. In line 7, owing to the emotional

charge of the repetitions, one finds that they have

deformed the fourth iamb, turning it into a spondee: ( ^ ^ I I f y t Ja strazdu, ne zivu... im. im odnim zivu ja — i i i t i i X X X XXX X XXX XXX \

The resistance to speech movement produced by the spon

dees slov/s the line and augments the pressure of the i i emotion. The repetition "by him, him alone" is a way

of making "hirm" a dominant element in the texture of

the poem. "He" is foregrounded; the female persona,

on the other hand, is de-emphasized, the first-person

pronoun coming in a weak position, unstressed, at the

V ® end of the line: "zivu ja" ("ja" is the first-person

pronoun "I").

The "realistic," psychologically convincing style

of this poem, which has been compared to the style of the

realistic novel that was developing in Russia in the g same years, does not contain the poetic archaisms

characteristic of the "high style." But there is one

® V word that stands out, the older verb form "strazdu,"

"I suffer," which begins line 7. The usual form is

» "stradaju." Since the personal pronoun can be ommitted

in Russian because the conjugated verb form contains

the necessary information as to person, the usual form

could have been used without even changing the scansion

of the line: I V • Ja strazdu Stradaju t t XXX XXX v The question then arises: Why does Tjutcev use the

unusual form here? Why does he foreground the word? 11

Phonological comparison of the two forms suggests an answer. The unusual form, "strazdu," contains the sound

[S], a sound that connects the word with another verb containing the sound, "zivu," "I live." The tension between "I suffer" and "I live," the paradoxical and tragic relationship between the two states, is the crux of the poem. This is overtly stated in the last line:

"I can breathe, but I can no longer live." If, in line 7, the poet had used "stradaju," the poem would have lost an important thematic connection. The usual form would have made the texture of the poem more even and less expressive. Also not that "stradaju" is "easier" to articulate than "strazdu," the difference being the velar /z/ in the latter word. The extra effort required to articulate /z/ (as compared to the dental /d/) slows the line. The resistance.to speech movement increases the emotional charge of the line. The emotional pres sure is increased by by the fact that there is, in

"zivu," another [z] in close proximity. There is, in addition, a third occurence of [z] at the end of the line. These sound repetitions cause /z/ to become infused with a special emotional meaning which is trans mitted to the subsequent occurrences of the sound.

If we think of poetic texture in terms of a top ographical map, a map charting the high and low points of the land surface, one of the high points of "Do not say..." is the highly charged interjection "Ox” (Och!").

"Och!" is much less usual in poetry than the interjection

"Ach!" "Och!" belongs to a lower stratum of language than does the more psychological and, in a sense,

"spiritual" "Ach!" On first glance, Tjutcev's use here of the colloquial "Och!", even onomatopoeic in its con nection with the speaker's difficult breathing, is com pletely different than the use of elements belonging to the high style. While it is true that the styles just mentioned are at opposite poles from one another, the structural effect of the use of one or the other in a given poem, the effect on the given poetic texture, is essentially the same. Whether it belongs to the high or to the low style, in each case the element is fore grounded. The extent of the foregrounding depends, of course, on the environment as well as on the nature of the extreme element. That is, besides ascertaining how extreme the foregrounded element is, the reader needs to know the relation of its "elevation" to the "poetic topography" surrounding it. In "Do not say..." the texture of the third stanza, the stanza in which "Och!" appears, is more even than that of the previous stanzas.

The rhythm and syntax of the preceding stanzas is more fragmented and emotional. Word, phrase, and structural 13

repetitions are more prominent in these stanzas than

in the last stanza. The last stanza's image of the

measuring of air is intellectualized, in contrast to

the concrete and highly emotional image of the trembling

knife that is found in line 4. Against the relatively

even background of lines 9-10, the exclamation "Och!"

stands out with added sharpness. The exclamation, of

course, takes the stress, again at the expense of the Y v ' • personal pronoun "1^" "Ox, j_a dysu..." (x x x x).

This, again, is in keeping with the speaker's predica- t i ment: "by him, him alone do I live."

We have seen some instances of "rhythmic defor- V mation" in Tjutcev's poetry, examples which demonstrate one of the rhythmic facets of the uneven texture of his verse. Tjutcev*s more famous devia'cxons from the

syllabo-tonic metric canon are examined in the chapter of this study devoted to parallelism. The remainder of the present chapter is concerned with some of the struc tural and thematic possibilities of poetic texture. We have seen examples of various foregrounded elements.

We will now see how larger units of the poetic text, the focus of the subsequent discussion, are differen tiated. Other elements of the poems discussed will be brought into the picture as they relate to this focus.

Two poems are analyzed. The examination of the first 14 stresses the rhythmic aspect of texture. The main point in the discussion of the second is the poem's syntactic and phonetic organization. Here is the first poem: v v v Esce sumel veselyj den', Tolpami ulica blistala, I oblakov vec£ernix ten' Po svetlym krovljam proletala.

I donosilisja poroj Vse zvuki s£izni blagodatnoj — I vse v odin slivalos' stroj, Stozvu£nyj, sumnyj i nevnjatnyj.

Vesennej negoj utomlen, Ja vpal v nevol'noe zabven'e; Ne znaju, dolog li byl son, No stranno bylo probuzden'e...

Zatix povsjudu sum i gam, I vocarilosja molcan'e — Xodili teni po stenam I polusonnoe mercan'e...

Ukradkoju v moe okno Gljadelo blednoe svetilo, I mne kazalos', cto ono Moju dremotu storo^ilo.

I mne kazalos', £to menja Kakoj—to mirotvornyj genij Iz pysno-zolotogo dnja Uvlek, nezrimyj, v carstvo tenej. (1829), (1851)

The lively day was still making noise, The street v/as glittering with crowds, And the shadow of the evening clouds Flew past over the bright roofs.

And from time to time were heard All the sounds of abundant life — And all flowed into one harmony Of a hundred sounds, noisy and indistinct. V

Wearied by the langour of spring, I fell into involuntary oblivion; I do not know if my sleep was long, But the awakening was strange...

The noise and racket had quieted everywhere, And silence ruled — Shadows moved along the walls And somnolent shimmering...

Furtively into my window Gazed the pale luminary, And it seemed to me that it Was guarding my slumber.

And it seemed to me that I, By some peacemaking spirit, From the magnificently-golden day Had been carried away, by the invisible spirit, into the kingdom of shades.

Before studying the rhythmic texture of the poem,

it is necessary to be aware of the basic oppositions

according to which the poem is organized. The first

stanza contains these oppositions. The rhyme words of

lines 1 and 3 are inseparable from their adjectives; all

four of these words contrast: "den'" (''day1') vs. ''ten'11

("shadow1*) and the adjectives, "veselyj" ("lively")

vs. "vecernij" (’’evening"). The noise of the day be

comes associated with the crowds, while the shadow is

that of the clouds passing by. The crowds make the

street glitter. On the basis of this glitter, a rela

tionship arises between the crowds and the bright roofs.

The importance of this relationship is that it adds

another term to the contrast between the crowds and the \

clouds that pass by above the roofs. In the fourth

stanza the place of the clouds is taken by the shadows

that move along the walls. In the last line the equa

tion is spelled out: the shadows have become the in

habitants of the "kingdom of shades.” The speaker

feels himself to be one of these invisible spirits.

Rhythmically the poem may be divided into three

parts. This division is easiest to demonstrate by

means of a graph of the sort devised by Andrej Belyj

in his book, Simvolizm, 1910.

The poem is written in iambic tetrameter. The

dots on the graph represent pyrrhic feet. Since a

fourth stress is obligatory in each line, there can be

no dots in the fourth column. The lines connecting the

dots are the basis of Belyj’s method for determining

the rhythmic profile of a poet. The quality of a poet’s

rhythm is judged by the variety of "figures" made by

the lines connecting the dots. Belyj finds that Tjut'cev's

rhythm is the "richest" of the nineteenth-century Russian

poets.^

The poem being discussed was divided into just

two stanzas for its first printing (in Moskvitjanin,

1851). The definitive, stanzaic version still shows

a two-part division in that line 13 is a four-stress

line, as are the opening and closing lines of the work. 17

Figure 1 The graph shows clearly the transitional function of lines 9-12. This is the stanza that describes the persona falling into oblivion, tired by the langour of the spring day. Because this section is so clearly transitional, the line with a pyrrhic third foot takes on a neutral quality here. With the exception of line 5, the lines in the first section of the poem, the first two stanzas, alternate between a pyrrhic on the first foot and a pyrrhic third foot. These alternations may be viewed as paralleling the oppositions mentioned at the beginning of the discussion of this poem. That is, the opposition between day and night can be seen to be paralleled by the opposition between two types of line, one type with a stressless initial foot, and the other with a. pyrrhic third foot.

After the transitional passage, lines 14, 16, 19-21 resolve the opposition between line types by having pyrrhics on both their first and third feet. This is in keeping with the sense of the poem. It is interesting in this connection that a variant of the poem bears the title "Probuzdenie" ("The Awakening"). The awakening takes place in line 12: "But the awakening was strange."

The strangeness is in the fact that, while "awake," the speaker is still not sure that he is not dreaming.

Line 16 speaks of "somnolent" shimmering; a literal 19

translation of the Russian "polusonnoe" is ’’half-

dreaming." This condition of being half-awake and half-

asleep is echoed in the rhythm of the line. The first

part of the poem separated lines with a stressless first

foot from those with a stressless third foot. Line 16 has no stress in both the first and the third feet.

In line 20, the speaker again gives the impression that he is not awake. But we remember that he "awoke" in

line 12. It seems to him that the pale moon is guarding his slumber. This (line 20) is another line featuring pyrrhics in its first and third foot.

What is this mixed sensation of being awake and asleep meant to convey? The conclusion is reached in the final lines. "The awakening" is suggestive of death. This "baroque" semantic reversal of "awakening," the word's new meaning, finds a structural parallel in the introduction of a new rhythmic element into the third section of the poem, a line with a stressless second foot (lines 17, 22, and 23). Two of these lines, then, are in the concluding stanza. The lines with a stressless second foot represent a resolution of the opposition/combination of pyrrhic second and third feet.

This interpretation draws support from the fact that the major differences between the definitive ver sion we have seen and the variant entitled "The Awakening"

I are changes designed to draw the rhythm into the con figuration that has been sketched here. This can be ascertained by contrasting the versions and their rhythmic structures.

The definitive version consists of six stanzas; the variant has five. The one missing in the variant is the definitive stanza two.

The Awakening (Variant)

1 Same as stanza one of definitive version.

2 Wearied by the langour of spring, I surrendered to sweet oblivion: [.the rest is the same as the definitive: I do not know if my sleep was long, But the awakening was strange...3

3 Silently in the dusky night Moved the moon's radiance And the night's shifting silence Was scarcely streaming as a breeze.

4 Same as stanza five of definitive version.

5 And meanwhile some Spirit Out of the realm of blossoming Day By the secret path of dream-visions Had taken me into the land of shades.

Probuzdenie

1 Same as stanza one of definitive version.

2 Vesennej negoj utomlen, Vdalsja ja v sladkoe zabven'e: Ne znaju, dolog li gyl son, No stranno bylo probufcden'e. N»

3 Bezmolvno v sumrake nocnom Xodilo lunnoe sijan*e I no£i zybkoe molcan'e Edva struilos' veterkom.

4 Same as definitive stanza five.

5 I mezdu tem kakoj-to Genij Iz oblasti cvetus£ej Dnja Stezeju tajnoj snovidenij V stranu tenej uvel menja.

The star on the first foot of line 6 stands for a

trochaic substitution (a ,,xorijamb,, in Russian term

inology). If this graph is contrasted to that of the

definitive version, the crucial role of the definitive

stanza two, missing here, stands out in sharp relief

in the first graph. Without the rhythms of that stanza,

no opposition between lines with a pyrrhic first foot

and line with a pyrrhic third foot can be sustained.

This destroys the possibility of setting up a semantic

rhythmic pattern. The rhythm falls into uniformity

stretching from line 4 to line 12. The exception is

the trochaic opening in line 6. This foot, however,

does not enter into a semantic relationship with any

other element, and is therefore dropped from the defini

tive version. Since no rhythmic oppositions are set up

in the first part of the variant, the pyrrhic combinations

of lines 15 and 16 lose their semantic content. The

two lines having stressless second feet lose, in their 12 3 4

Figure 2 \

turn, most of their synthesizing connotation. The

pyrrhic third foot in line 19 further weakens the

variant's conclusion. An important difference between

the versions is, then, the shift of that pyrrhic onto

the second foot of the penultimate line.

Turning our consideration from specific contrasts

between the versions to the major general difference,

we see that in revising the poem Tjutcev made its rhy

thmic texture more uneven. In doing so he increased

the expressive possibilities of the poem. Another

general point that arises from the contrast between the

versions has to do with Tjutcev's famous attitude of

carelessness toward his verse. The legend is that his

poems "created themselves," sprang full-blown onto

scraps of paper, only to be forgotten by the poet.

Clearly the final version of the work at hand is the

product of work and calculiation. As for the next poem

to be discussed, neither was it written and discarded

by its author. This can be seen in the fact that it

lacks a fourth stanza in the text based on the manu- g script dated 11 May 1865. The final stanza must have

been added within four months after that date, since it

is found in the first printing of the poem in Russkij

vestnik, Volumn 58 (August, 1865), page 432. The first

part of the discussion focuses on the syntactic texture of the poem. Then the texture of the fourth stanza will be studied with a view toward establishing its relationship to the stanzas written earlier and its relationship to the theme of the poem as a whole.

Est in arundineis modulation ripis. — Ausonius V Pevucest1 est' v morskix volnax, Garmonija v stixijnyx sporax, I strojnyj musikijskij sorox Struitsja v zybkix kamysax.

Nevozmutimyj stroj vo vsem, Sozvu£’e polnoe v prirode, — Lis' v nasej prizracnoj svobode Razlad my s neju soznaem.

Otkuda, kak razlad voznik? I otSego ze v obscem xore Dusa ne to poet, cto more, I ropScet mysljascij trostnik?

I ot zemli do krajnix zvezd Vse bezotveten i ponyne Glas vooijuscego v pustyne, Dusi ot^ajannoj protest?

There is a musical rhythm in the reeds by the shore. ~ Ausonius

Melody is in the sea waves, Harmony in the elemental clashes, And a harmonious musical rustle Runs through the swaying reeds.

There is an imperturbable order in everything, A full consonance in nature, — Only in our illusory freedom Are we conscious of (our} discord with it. From where, how did this discord arise? And why is it, in the general chorus The soul does not sing what the sea does, And the thinking reed complains?

CAnd why^ From the earth to the farthest stars Still unanswered even now Is the voice of the one crying in the desert, The despairing soul’s protest?

The poem turns about the contrast between harmony

and discord. The texture of the poem's syntax expresses

this contrast, as does the design of its other compo

sitional elements.

The composition of the first stanza is harmonious.

The lines all end with the phoneme /x/, which also

appears in three of the four adjectives that are the penultimate words in the lines. The stressed vowel in

the third foot of the first three lines is the same, /i/,

and the third foot of the fourth line is pyrrhic. There

is a harmony of unstressed vowels that does not show up

orthographically because unstressed vowels in Russian are reduced. There is an easy-to-articulate arrangement of consonants as well. The syntax is "easy." That is,

there are no inversions or ellipses. The syntax is

flowing; there are no breaks in the lines. In addition to the pyrrhic third foot in line 4, the second foot in lines 2 and 3 is without stress, factors which impart an easy movement to the lines. In short, eve-ything is \

contrived to give the impression of harmony and to

correspond to the melody the stanza describes.

In contrast to that harmonious organization is the

compositional texture of the stanzas dealing with man,

in particular line 8 and stanza three. Line 8 is struc

tured rather clumsily. In the terminology of the Rus V •sian formalist Viktor Sklovskij, the line is "made

difficult." That line, and the intonational/syntactic

structures of line 9 and 10, contrasts sharply with the

sonorous and flowing lines of the first stanza. Stanza

three has the fewest pyrrhic feet of any stanza. Lines

9 and 11 have no stressless feet, and feature consonants

that do not go together easily. In particular, line 9

contains four instances of /k/. Thus the contrast

between the formal composition of the first part of the

poem and that of its second part parallels the contrast

between the musical harmony of the reeds and the com

plaining of the "thinking reed."

Let us now take a look at the fourth stanza. The

first thing that draws our attention is the masculine

rhyme words: "zvezd"/"protest" ("stars"/"protest").

The stressed vowels are fo} and M . the orthographic

"e" in "zvedz" being pronounced as fo] because it is

stressed and is in a position following a soft consonant

and preceding a hard consonant. This is not the only occurrence of an [o]/ £e] rhyme in Tjutcev. The poem

"K.N." ("To X"), which is analyzed in the chapter on

Parallelism (pp. 63-103), also contains a rhyme in these

vowels. This is how Ivan Aksakov reacted to that par

ticular instance of C°"]/Cel rhyme: *' This excellent piece

is disfigured by the incorrect rhyme in the manner of 9 our ’classicists' of that time." He would say the

same thing about the instance of the rhyme in "There is

melody in the sea waves." And, in fact, Aksakov did

have something to say about the rhyme "zvezd"/"protest."

In a letter dated 2 October 1865 and addressed to his

fiancee, Tjutcev's daughter, Anna Fedorovna, Aksakov

tells of his dislike for the poem's last word, "protest."

The word is a non-Russian, foreign word, a word which 10 therefore jangles on his Slavophile sensibilities.

In "To X." and in the poem under consideration now, the IX)/[<0 rhyme is a factor of Tjutcev's uneven

poetic texture. The phonetic deviation functions as a means of foregrounding the semantically important word.

The deviation of "protest" from "zvezd" has a thematic value. The "stars" belong to the harmonious system of nature. The jangling "protest" is another signification of man's discord, of his alienation from this harmonious system. The foregrounded "protest" also clashes with

the first word of the poem, "Pevucest'" ("Melody"). The clash this time is one of consonants, in the oppo

sition between the soft /tf/ of "Pevucest'" and the

hard final consonant in "protest." Again, the contrast

expresses the poem's theme of discord between man and

nature. Finally, we can assume that, like Aksakov,

Tjutcev felt the "foreignness" of the word "protest,"

and deliberately made use of this quality of the word

to add another dimension to man's estrangement.

Earlier in the chapter it was mentioned that the use of the present form of "to be," "est'," represents

a "prosaism" introduced into the lyric context. The use of "est'" in this particular poem, via its scien

tific, definitive quality, indicates that the lyrical phenomenon of "melody" will be given a philosophical interpretation. On the other hand, the degree to which the "non-lyrical" "est*" is foregrounded here is less ened because the form also seems to echo the Latin

"est in" plus, ablative case. In this sense, rather than being a "prosaism," the form is poetic, following the line from the fourth century B.C. Latin poet Ausonius

"Est in arundineis modulatio ripis." The harmonious

Latin line supports the sonorous effect of the first stanza most obviously, even without the clue of this grammatical connection. 29

In addition to the epigraph, there are two other references to outside material found in the poem, the references to Pascal and to the bible. These obvious references are another aspect of the uneven texture of the second part of the poem, the part describing man as the "mysljascij trostnik" ("thinking reed"), and as the "glas vopijuscego v pustyne" ("voice of the one crying in the desert"). The famous pharses are gram matically linked, both containing present active par ticiples. In general it can be observed that there is a grammatical differentiation operative in the poem, paralleling the theme of the separation of man from nature. Nature has a monopoly on long-form adjectives; man is referred to using the participles just noted, short-form adjectives, and nouns abstracted from the whole (synecdoche): "glas" ("voice"), "du¥a" ("soul").

While the outside references are further evidence of the uneven texture of the poem, this grammatical differ entiation is further evidence of the uneven texture of the poem, this grammatical differentiation is further evidence of the complex interrelationships such a texture facilitates. N

FOOTNOTES— CHAPTER I

1 V V Boris Buxstab, Introduction to F.I. Tjutcev, Polnoe sobranie stixotvorenij. K.V. Pigarev, ed” [Len ingrad: Bibiioteka poeta, Bol'saja serija, 1957), 45. All texts of Tjutcev’s poetry are based on this edition unless specific exceptions are cited in the text of the paper. 2 V v Boris Ejxenbaum, "Melodika russkogo liriceskogo stixa” in 0 Poezii, (Leningrad, 1969), 401. The essay on Tjutcev is 395-408.

3Ibid., 396.

^Ejxenbaum, op. cit. Jurij Tynjanov, "Puskin i Tjutcev,” “Vopros o Tjut^eve," ‘'Tjutcev i Geine," Arxaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929).

5 \ v L.V. Pumpjanskij, "Poezija F.I. Tjutceva," Urania (Leningrad, 1928), 26, calls this poem an “invective.11 g The observations of G.A. Gukovskij, B.O. Korman, and . Buxstab are summaried by K.V. Pigarev in fizn1 i tvorcestvo Tjutceva (Moscow, 1962), 240. 7 v For a short discussion of the graphs see V. Zirmunskij, Introduction to Metrics, trans. C .F. Brown, ed. E. Stankiewicz"and W.N. Vickery (The Hague, 1966) 40-48. The original work is Andrej Belyj (Bugaev), “Lirika i eksperiment, “ Simvol izm (Moscow, 193.0), 231-285; see also the chapters "Opyt1 xarakteristiki russkogo 2etyrexstopnogo jamba“ (286-330) and "Sravnitel'naja morfologija ritma russkix lirikov v jambi&eskom dimetre" (331-395). P y F.I. Tjutcev, Polnoe sobranie stixotvorenii, ed. K.V. Pigarev (Leningrad: Biblioteka polta, Bol'Saja serija, 1957). \

^ I. S. Aksakov, Bioarafija Fedora Ivanovica Tjutceva (Moscow, 1886), 320-321.

10 v v Quoted in Georgij Culkov, "Ljubov1 v zizni i v lirike F.I. Tjutceva," Tjutcevskij sbornik 1873—1923 (Petrograd, 1923T, 23*. CHAPTER II

Transition and Closure in Tjutcev's Poetry

The previous discussion has, among other things,

provided some examples of opening lines from Tjutcev's

'lyrics. A subsequent problem is one of transition, of

hooking the various elements of the poem together into

a progression moving toward the conclusion, the poem's "closure." "There is a distinction C-..] between con cluding and merely stopping or ceasing," writes the

author of a recent book devoted to poetic closure,

Barbara Herrnstein Smith.'*' She shows that this dif

ference is essentially in the fact that to conclude,

to exhibit the "stable conclusiveness, finality, or

'clinch'" that is experienced as "closure," a thing must

have a relatively high degree of structure. Moreover,

it is primarily by means of closure that this structure

is perceived. "Closure C- 3 gives ultimate unity and

coherence to the reader's experience of the poem by

providing a point from which the preceding elements

. may be viewed comprehensively and their relations grasped 2 as part of a significant design." Perhaps what goes

on might be viewed this way: there are two progressions 32 33 in a poem, one toward the end and one toward the be ginning. The tension between them holds the poem to gether. The purpose of the present chapter is to clarify these conceptual cimplifications with illus- V trations from Tjutcev's poetry.

The relationship between the beginning and the end is most clearly seen in poems whose structure is sometimes referred to as the "ring structure." The most extreme development of the ring structure takes the form of what is known as complete "epanalepsis." v An example from Tjutcev is the poem that begins and ends with this same stanza:

0, kak ubijstvenno my ljubim, Kak v bujnoj slepote strastej My to vsego vernee gubim, Cto serdcu na^emu milej!

0, how murderously we love, How, in the stormy blindness of passions, Most certain we are to destroy That which is dearest to our hearts! (1851)

This is the only case of complete epanalepsis in the lyrics. An example of partial epanalepsis is provided by the following work. The parts underlined in the opening stanza are replaced in the closing by the phrases that appear to the right. The whole poem con sists of seven stanzas. Iz kraja v kraj, iz grada v grad v Sud'ba, kak vixr1, ljudej metet, Moqucii vixr' I rad li'ty, ili ne rad, Cto nuzdy e)?.. vpered, vpered! Ne sprosit on...

From land to land, from city to city Fate, like a whirlwind, sweeps people, A mighty whirlwind And whether you like it, or whether you don't, What does it care?.. It does not ask...

The value of such extensive repetition as a means of marking the poem's end should be clear. Something less obvious can be illustrated by means of the Soviet structuralist Jurij Lotman's concept of "to i ne to"

("it and not it").^ That is, in the poetic structure neither the original occurrence, nor its repetition, even if complete, can remain alone and unchanged.

Things interact. Each occurrence becomes both what it was ("to") and also something else ("ne to"). The complete repetition of "0, how murderously we love" shows this especially clearly because of the paradox the stanza seems to present. At the outset of the poem it is unclear what it means to "love murderously."

"Love" and "murder" are not ordinarily yoked together.

But, after the speaker spends the interior eight stanzas detailing the destructive effect of his passion on the object of his love, the final, framing stanza stands forth in a new light, ceases to be a paradox, rather taking the form of a cruel truth. And the opening stanza partakes of this new viewpoint, becoming some thing more than what it was.

As for partial epanalepsis, partial repetition,

Lotman shows that the more similar things are, the more they have in common, the more significant are their 4 differences. In the case of "From land to land," the significant differences are located in the first hemistich of the second line of the framing stanzas.

"Fate, like a whirlwind" becomes, in the last stanza,

"A mighty whirlwind." The simile of the first stanza is, in the conclusion, "realized," to use the formalist term. This change seems to be in keeping with the course of dehumanization depicted by the poem. In the second stanza the wind brings the speaker the last farewell of the love that has remained behind him. This love is remembered as bliss, but not for long. There is no time:

Ne vremja vyklikat' tenej: I tak uz 4tot mracen Jfas, Usop^ix obraz tem strasnej, Cem v zizni byl milej dlja nas.

This is not the time to call the names of shades And already the hour is so dark. The image of the departed is the more terrible, The dearer it was to us in life. Caught in a rising tide of terror and hopelessness, the

speaker no longer speaks metaphorically. He no longer

tries to make sense of what is happening around him, which is what metaphor tries to do. He is no longer able to intellectualize That is, he is unable to trans fer meanings. The statement: "Fate is like a whirl-, wind" takes an abstract concept as primary. In the changed statement of the final stanza the physical is not only the primary term, but the only one. Transfer requires a difference of meaning between terms. In the first stanza transfer is possible because there is, at that point, still a difference between "fate" and the whirlwind. But by the last stanza the metaphor has been realized to "whirlwind”— "whirlwind."

At the opposite developmental remove from complete repetition is the use of a key word from the opening in v the closing. This is much more common in Tjutcev than either kind of epanalepsis. The same would be true of virtually all poets. It is especially true of Tjutcev because his peotry is remarkable for its conciseness of expression. Tjutcev is a master of the "small form."

Some of his complete poems consist of just one stanza, v and, as Turgenev once remarked, "Tjutcev*s shortest 5 poems are almost always the most successful ones."

The two poems featuring epanalepsis and discussed above are among his longest. ”0, how murderously we love"

has ten stanzas, the other poem seven. Poems of this

length can accomodate such extensive repetition; the

problem of balance becomes progressively more difficult

as the length of the work decreases. A poem of three

quatrains, for instance, would have balance problems if

two of its stanzas were the same or nearly the same.

Consequently, the instances of epanalepsis are few.

The relevance of the previous discussion is that epana

lepsis illustrates on a larger scale the same principle upon which the structure of "framing key words" is based

When the reader finds a word from the opening repeated in the later parts of the poem, this recurrence sends his thought toward the first occurrence. In reversing the progression of the thought in this way, the recur rence plays a structural role, helping to close the poem

Two poems will be used to show how this is done. The first one is still rather long, having twenty lines.

It is a good poem to start with, however, because the framing elements are still quite clear. As the length of a poem decreases, the subtlety of the framing re petitions generally increases.

Neoxotno i nesmelo Solnce smotrit na polja. fiu, za tu£ej progremelo, Prinaxmurilas1 zemlja. Vetra teplogo poryvy, Dal'nyj grom i dozd* poroj... Zelenejus^ie nivy Zelenee pod grozoj.

Vot probilas* iz-za tuci Sinej mol'nii struja — Plamen' be'lyj i letucij Okajmil ee kraja. V y Casce kapli dozdevye, Vixrem pyl* letit a polej, I raskaty gromovye Vse serditej i smelej.

Solnce raz esce vzgljanulo Ispodlob'ja na polja, I v sijan*e potonula Vsja smjatennaja zemlja. (6 June 1849)

Unwillingly and timidly The sun looks on the fields, Hark! behind the cloud it thunders, The earth frowns.

Gusts of warm wind, Distant thunder and rain now and then... The greening fields of corn Are greener in the storm.

There the cloud is pierced By streaks of blue lightening — A white and shifting flame Has outlined its edges.

Faster are the drops of rain, In a whirlwind dust flies from the fields, And the claps of thunder are Still more angry and audacious.

Once again the sun peers Mistrustfully at the fields, And the whole confused earth Sinks into radiance. \

The repeated key words are "sun," "fields," and "earth"

("solnce," "polja," and "zemlja"). These appear in

the first and last stanzas. The translation does not

show the fact that the framing stanzas share the rhyme i i scheme (a B a B) and are close ("—ela" — "ula") to

identical ("-ja") in sound. In addition to word repe-

‘titions, there are conceptual pairs linking the framing

stanzas. These are "smotret"' ("to look at") of the

first stanza, and "vzgljanut'" ("to peer at") of the

last. "Unwillingly and timidly" is recalled by the

last stanza's "mistrustfully." All these elements

work together to provide a frame for this picture of

a thunderstorm.

That was a poem of twenty lines. As the poem

decreases in size, we expect a less evident corres

pondence between framing elements. The following poem,

in this connection, somewhat exceeds expectations:

Slezy ljudskie, o slezy ljudskie, L'etes' vy rannej i pozdnej poroj... L'etes* bezvestnye, l'etes' nezrimye, Neistoscimye, neiscislimye, — L'etes', kak l'jutsja strui dozdevye

V osen' gluxuju, poroju no£noj. CD oi o O CJ cu (1849 ?) Human tears, o human tears, You flow at times both early and late... You flow secretly, you flow invisibly, Inexhaustibly, uncountably, — You flow as flow the streams of rain In deep autumn, in the night time. \

The framed structure of this poem is especially clear

because of the dactylic rhymes in lines 3 and 4 (x x x).

Line 4 contains only four stressed syllables, as against

the usual four stresses per line: » » XX XXX XXX XXX X

vs. I I I I XX XXX XXX x xCx)

The four negative adjectives in lines 3 and 4 also

divide the lines from the framing ones; ("bezvestnye,"

translated as "secretly," literally means "without

news"). But perhaps this description seems "inside

out." So let us look at the outer lines. Lines 2 and

6, besides rhyming, share references to time, and the

word "time" itself, "pora.” Line 2 has "pozdnej poroj"

(adjective-noun) and line 6 reverses the order to noun

adjective. The fact that the nouns "late" (line 2)

and "night" (line 6) modify the same noun serves to

connect them. When the reader finds, in line 2, that

the tears are given a protracted temporal dimension,

he naturally thinks of rain, and his expectation is

realized in line 5. A certain framing effect by means

of the repetitions of "lutes'" ("you flow") is evident.

More important, perhaps, are the framing sounds in "ju,"

"ljudskie" twice in line 1, and "ju" in "11 jutsja" of i » line 5 and "qluxuju and "poroju" of line 6. V

The analysis of the next poem shows some less-

obvious variations of the "framing-key-words" structure.

The scope of the discussion is widened to include

transitional elements.

0 cemV ty voes', V vetr nocnoj? V Q cem tak setues' bezumno?.. Cto znacit strannyj golos tvoj, 4 To gluxo ^alobnyj, to sumno? Ponjatnym serdcu jazykom TverdiS' o neponjatnoj muke — 1 roes' i vzryvaes' v nem 8 Poroj neistovye zvukit..

0, strasnyx pesen six ne poj Pro drevnij xaos, pro rodimyjJ Kak zadno mir dusi no&ioj 12 Vnimaet povesti ljubimoj! Iz smertnoj rvetsja on grudi, On s bespredel*nym zazdet slitsja!.. O, bur' zasnuvsix ne budi — 16 Pod nimi xaos sevelitsjai.. (1836)

About what are you wailing, night wind? About what are you complaining so madly?.. What does your strange voice mean, 4 Now muffled and plaintive, now loudly {plaintive) ? In a language intelligible to the heart You tell of unintelligible suffering — And you are digging and stirring up in it 8 At times furious sounds!..

0, these terrifying songs do not sing About ancient chaos, about native ^chaos]1 How avidly the night world of the soul 12 Listens to the beloved story! From the mortal breast it longs to burst, It with the unbounded longs to merge!.. 0, sleeping storms do not wake — 16 Under them chaos stirs!.. 42

Each stanza has its own type of framing elements. The first stanza contains two second-person verbs with unstressed -es'V ("voes1" V* and "setues*") V in the opening lines, which are linked by form and sound to the two verbs of line 7 ("roes'" and "vzryvaes"1). "Tverdi^*" of line 6 does not fit into this group because it is an i-stem verb, and is stressed on its ending: "tverdi^'."

By chance it happens that the English translation almost shows this: line 1, "wailing," line 2, "complaining;" line 7, "digging and stirring."

The second stanza takes advantage of grammatical forms in a similar way. The imperatives "ne poj" and

"ne budi" ("do not sing," do not awake"), initially link lines 9 and 15. Depending on these negations are

V V . the genitive plurals "strasnyx pesen" and "bur' usnuvsix"

("terrifying songs," "sleeping storms"). The adjectives are linked by the sound similarity of their endings in

-ix. Most clear is the repetition, in lines 10 and 16, of the key word "chaos," and the recurrence of line nine's exclamatory "O" in line 15.

The main thing uniting these two stanzas is the theme: the wailing of the night wind and chaos. There are also structural linking elements. In the reading of the poem these are perceived as transitional elements. N

The shared rhyme sound, including the repetition

"nocnoj" ("night"), shared by the first and third lines

in the stanzas is such an element. Also, these partic

ular lines contain four iambic feet; generally there is

a stressless third foot in the line. Another transi

tional element is the syntactic parallelism between lines

'4 and 10. Both lines end eliptically, as is indicated

by the brackets used in the translation. Line 4 has

"To... to...," which is parallel to the construction

"Pro... pro..." in line 10. The paradox stated in

lines 5-6, based on the opposition between "intelligible"

and "unintelligible," structurally finds its counter

part in lines 13-14, in the opposition between the

"mortal" and the "unbounded." Both these are amplified

in the vital lines 9-12, where the poet reveals his

insight: chaos is both terrifying and beloved.

The question to which the remainder of this

chapter is addressed is : how is closure attained in

the absense of the "ring" or "key word" construction?

Smith's book surveys the most widespread answers to

the question. She distinguishes between formal and

thematic answers. The following examination of closure v in Tjutcev's poetry is limited to formal aspects of the

subject. This still-large subject requires further

restriction. Closure will be examined in terms of N

tension. Discovery of tension involves discovering the

relevant formal norm of the piece being analyzed, and

then pointing out the deviations from that norm that

have to do v/ith affecting closure. The discussion dis

tinguishes, when it is possible, two ways in which de

viation is related to closure. These are: (1) closure

primarily following a deviation from the norm, and (2)

closure resulting from a return to the norm after de-

y viation. The purpose is to discover how Tjutcev makes

use of these two principles of poetic structure. This

purpose allows us to pass by theoretical discussion to

immediate consideration of the principles in action in

the poetry.

%/ ^ Dusa moja — Elizium tenej, Tenej bezmolvnyx, svetlyx i prekrasnyx, Ni pomyslam godiny bujnoj sej, Ni radostjam, ni gorju ne pricastnyx.

5 Dusa moia, Elizium tenej, Cto obscego mez zizn'ju i toboju! 7 Me# vami, prizraki minuvsix, luscix dnej, I sej bes£uvstvennoj tolpoju?.. (1836)

My soul is an Elysium of shades, Of shades silent, pure and beautiful, Neither in the designs of these turbulent times, In neither joys, nor sorrows a participant.

5 My soul, Elysium of shades, What is there in common between life and you! 7 Between you, phantoms of past, better days, And this callous crowd?.. \

The syllable count is uniform in the lines of the

first stanza: 10, 11, 10, 11. The first three lines

each have four stresses, while the fourth line has three

iambic and two pyrrhic feet. The fifth line again

features four stresses and ten syllables. The syllable

count for the second stanza is 10, 11, 12, and 9 syl

lables. Line 6 drops one stressed foot, having two

pyrrhic feet in the same places (second and fourth foot)

as line 4 has them. But line 7 could be said to counter

balance the loss of one stress in line 6 by adding one

foot, boosting its syllable count to twelve, and in

creasing its stresses to five. These relationships can

be shown graphically. The first figure shows the stress

norm and the deviations from it.

Line . 1.2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 6

5 ...... m • Stress 4 ...... I I • • • • • • • • • • O^ ••«««•• * • ••••«•«• • ••••••• •

^ Stress norm: 4

FIGURE 3 Transition between stanzas is accomplished by the return to the norm in line 5 following the deviation in line 4. Line 7 marks a deviation from all previous stress patterns; therefore the return, in line 8, to the

•'adjusted norm" of three stresses has the effect of

•'signaling the closure."

Figure 4 shows what happens in the poem in terms of syllables. It shows a regular alternation of syl lable count until the deviation of line 7. The final line is composed of nine syllables. This does not represent a return to the norm, but rather a new de viation. A judgement as to which formal element is dominant in closure finds that the shortness of the final line plays the primary role. This judgement is supported by the semantic connotations of the lines abrupt shortness, which might signify the "turbulence" of the outside world, its crudeness and hostile oppo sition to the. peaceful world of the soul. The nearly identical wording of lines 1 and 5 sets up a pattern of regularity for line referring to the "Elysium of shades," a regularity that contrasts to the abruptness of the irregular last line. Line 2 a 3 a 4 a 5 a 6 aaa7< 8

10 .,

9 8 Syllables Syllabic norm: 10-11 syllables

FIGURE 4

Similarly, in the following poem return to the norm after deviation is the most important in transition, and closure is primarily caused by a deviation in the final line. To be more exact, the deviation is the final, eleventh line itself.

1-e dekabrja 1837

Tak zdes'-to suzdeno nam bylo a 2 Skazat* poslednee prosti... B v Prosti vsemu, cem serdce zilo, a 4 Cto, zizn' tvoju ubiv, ee ispepelilo a V tvoej izmuXennoj grudii B v 6 Prosti...Crez mnogo, mnogo let C Ty budel' pomnit' s sodrogan'em d 8 Sej kraj, sej breg s ego poludennym sijan'em, d Gde ve&nyj blesk i dolgij cvet, C 10 Gde pozdnix, blednyx roz dyxan'em d Dekabr'skij vozdux razogret. C 48

1 December 1837

Thus right here it was fated for us 2 To say a last farewell... Farewell to all, by which the heart lived, 4 Which, having killed your life, turned it to ashes In your tortured breast!..

6 Farewell...In many, many years You will remember with a shudder 8 This land, this shore with its southern radiance, Where there is eternal brilliance and long- lasting color, 10 Where by the late, pale roses* breath The December air is warmed.

The meter is basically iambic tetrameter. The

two lines that deviate from this eight/nine syllable

pattern are easily seen in the latest editions of the

poem, being set out to the left. These lines each have

thirteen syllables. By virtue of this extra length,

line 4 represents a deviation similar to that of line 7

of "My soul is an Elysium of shades." That is, it is

a turning point in the progress of the poem, preceding

a return to the norm. Line 5 is a return to the metric

and rhythmic norm of the first stanza. That norm is

an iambic line with a pyrrhic third foot, lines 1, 2,

and 5. It is therefore interesting that line 3 is t i t i purely iambic; xx x x xx xx x. This four-stress

line becomes the norm in the next stanza. Thus, even

as line 3 leads up to the stanza's most deviant line, it also provides a transitional element able to counter act the closural force of the return to the norm in 49 line 5. This rhythmic transitional element is sup ported by a lexical factor for continuation which unites lines 3 and 6, the word "Prosti" ("Farewell"), which is the first word in line 3 and in the second stanza. Line

6 is purely iambic.

The logic by which the most deviant line of the second stanza, line 8, is preceded by a line with a pyrrhic third foot is that, in signaling the approaching deviation, the line adds to the cohesion of the whole poem by recalling the dominant line of the preceding stanza. Lines 9 and 10 are purely iambic. Together with line 6, they make the four-stress line the rhythmic norm of the concluding stanza. Thus the "extra," ele venth line, because it has a pyrrhic third foot, repre sents a deviation from the rhythmic norm.

The extra line is a force for closure by virtue of its very presence. But just as important as the purely "physical" aspect of form is the conceptual as pect of the line, its paradoxical, one might say re cherche7. nature. The roses' breath warms the air, not the usual, other way around. This closing beautifully sums up the crucial points of the poem. It relates to the image of life being burned "to ashes" in the first stanza. That stanza too, we should mention, possesses its own paradox: "Farewell to all, by which the heart V

lived,/Which having killed your life....11 This is the

paradoxical nature of passion that would later be de

scribed by the poet in such poems as "0, how murderously

we love." Other aspects of passion are developed in the

second stanza: its-endurance, • the longevity of its

effect, causing a shudder even after "many, many tears."

This enduring power is emphasized by the fact that the

roses are "late" and "pale," and yet still have the

potency to warm the "December air."

The over-all structure of "Thus right here it

was fated for us" is similar to that of "My soul is an

Elysium of shades," a fact that the contours of the

stress deviation graph for the latter poem suggest.

Studying these contours, one is tempted to see, in v analogy with them, a clue to Tjutcev's liking for the

five-line stanza (pentastich). This stanza appears in

about six percent of the original lyric poetry (that is,

non-translations and non-political poems). The analogy

is this: in a stanza A b A A b, for instance, the first

feminine rhyme represents the first "turn," and is

analogous to the "turn" that takes place in lines 3 and

4 of "Thus right here....". The other feminine rhyme

in the pentastich subsumes pre-closural deviation from

the norm and closual return to the norm. In terms of

theme, the first line necessarily represents the \

introduction and the exposition. The second line

presents the problem or complication. The paired

rhymes bring in ramifications of the problem, including

a heightening of tension. The fifth line returns to

and perhaps resolves the problem raised in the line

with which it rhymes.

The first stanza of ’’Th u s right here..." might

serve as an illustration of these generalizations.

Referring to the text of the poem, a question-and-answer

paraphrase would go something like this:

Line 1: Setting: "Here" ("Zdes*"), Introduction:

"It was fated for us."

Line 2: Answers the question "To what were we fated?"

States the problem: We were fated to say goodby.

Lines 3 and 4: Ramifications of the problem, showing

what this farewell entails.

Line 5: return/resolution: the statement that this

farewell is torment for her.

The second stanza, in spite of its being somewhat dif

ferent in form from the first stanza, adheres to this

scheme. The ramifications of the problem in the second

stanza, its modifiers, one might, say, are especially

visible due to their parallelistic structures: "Sej

kraj , sej breg £.. .J , " Gde £• • •] Gde ..][ . "

The same stanzaic structure can be demonstrated in V

an analysis of the following poem, entitled "Predo-

predelenie" ( "Predestination").

Ljubov', ljubov' — glasit predan'e Sojuz dusi s du^oj rodnoj — Ix s"edinen’e, socetan'e, I rokovoe ix slijan'e, I... poedinok rokovoj...

I cem odno iz nix ne^nee V bor'be neravnoj dvux serdec, Tem neizbeznej i vernee, Ljubja, stradaja, grustno mleja,

Ono iznoet, nakonec... o o o o o ooo>n>03f»> (1S51 ?)

Love, love — says the legend — Is the joining of a soul with a kindred soul - Their union, conjunction, And their fatal fusion, And... fatal duel.

And the more one of them is the more tender In the unequal battle of two hearts, The more inescapably and surely, Loving, suffering, sadly languishing, Will it pine away at last...

The four divisions of the pentastich stand out quite

clearly in each stanza here. The lines with the mas

culine rhymes represent the problem and resolution/

return in each of the stanzas. The enclosed feminine

lines in the first stanza develop the ramifications,

which stand out clearly because they are embodied in

neuter nouns of great phonetic and semantic similarity: "s"edinen,e," "socetan'e," "slijan'e" ("union," "con

junction," "fusion"). These words are linked by the

parallelism (anaphora): "Ix ix , with which

the conjunction i^ ("and") blends easily because of its X

sound. The cohesive background thus established makes

the different element in these lines, "rokovoe," stand

out, become "foregrounded." The "fatefulness" of love

is, of course, the key idea of the poem. Here the ad

jective "rokovoj" is translated as "fatal" because this

word, while retaining the meaning of "foreordained,"

"predestined," also expresses the connection with death.

In relation to the linking words of lines 3, 4, and

5, ("Ix, I, ix, I"), it should be mentioned that they

are connected to the words "I, iz," and "nix" of line 6

to provide one of the means by which transition is

accomplished. It is also interesting to note that

stanza one is the stanza of "union." Stanza two, on

the other hand, focuses on separation. The transition

from the one to the other is embodied in the word for t "duel," "poedinok." The meaning of the event, the

coming together of two participants to fight, is bal

anced by the element "edin," which brings to mind the

Russian word for number one, "odin," and its connota

tions: "alone, etc." Notice, then the connection be- • i tween "poedinok" in line 5 and "odno," line 6. The t phrase "odno iz nix," besides looking back to stanza

one, looks ahead to the concluding line. This it does t i by means of its phonetic similarity to "Ono iznoet"

in line 10. 54

Looking at the contour of the poem as a whole, we find that it begins with two iambic lines; that is, all four feet of the first two lines bear stressed syllables. Then the stress count falls off to two in each of the next three lines. • The transitional lines

6 and 7, the point where the "plot thickens," contain three and four stresses respectively. Line 8 shows a dramatic decrease to two stresses, this dramatism t accentuating the pure iambics of line 9: "Ljubja. i • i stradaja, grustno mleja." Note the three-part con struction of this line, something new for the poem.

The concluding line returns to the two-part norm and to « two stresses (the accent on "Ono" being rather weak).

The following diagram might be useful to sum up the structure of the whole poem and of its individual stan zas : Lines

1 2 '3 456789 10 ____m •_____ ♦ •_____ •_____ «___ •_____ • • »

INTRODUCTION PROBLEM RAMIFICATIONS RETURN/ RESOLUTION

FIGURE 5 Discussion of the next poem focuses on the role

of rhyme in closure by means of return to the norm after

deviation.

Tak, v zizni est* mgnovenija — a Ix trudno peredat!, B Oni samozabvenija a 4 v Zemnogo blagodat’. B Sumjat verxi drevesnye a Vysoko nado mnoj, C I pticy liK* nebesnye a 8 Besedujut so mnoj. C Vse poSloe i loznoe d Uialo tak daleko, E Vse milo-nevozraoznoe d 12 Tak blizko i legko. E I ljubo mne, i sladko m n e , f I mir v moej grudi, G Dremotoju obvejan ja — h 16 0 vremja, pogodil G (1855 ?)

Thus, in life there are moments — They are hard to express, They are the grace 4 Of earthly self-forgetfulness. The treetops murmur High above me, And only heavenly birds 8 Converse with me. Everything vulgar and false Has gone so far away, Everything sweetly-impossible 12 Is so near and easy. And it is a pleasure for me, and it is sweet for me, And peace is within my breast, In somnolence wrapped am I — 16 0 time, wait!

The basic rhyme pattern of this poem is alternating * dactylic (x x x) and masculine rhymes. The rhymes are t i quite close, as "mgnovenija/samozabvenija" or 56

f > "drevesnye/nebesnye." As is indicated by the letter "a” in the rhyme scheme to the right of the text, these pairs are close enough to be considered rhyming. The closeness of rhyme in the first twelve lines is in large part due to the fact that four of the pairs match

y identical parts of speech, as for example "loznoe/ nevozmoznoe," both neuter adjective forms in the nom inative case. In each of the two sets of exceptions an underlying grammatical connection between the elements of the rhyme pair is easily detected. Thus, the in finitive "dat*" ("to give") is evident in the infin itive of line 2, "peredat*," (pere— across plus "dat*" equals "to express, convey"), and is evident in the word with which "peredat*" rhymes, "blagodat*" (blaq/o— blessing plus o. plus dat * equals "grace" or "paradise*). I Similarly, the adverb "daleko" of line 10 is an ossified adjectival form, and therefore close to the short form t adjective "legko" with which it rhymes. Line 6 and line

8 rhyme the same case of the personal pronoun. The result is a great uniformity of rhyme and rhyme words for the first three-quarters of the poem.

This uniformity is not present in the last four lines. Line 14 ends with the locative case of a noun while line 16 and the poem concludes with a verb in the X

imperative. As for lines 13 and 15, they do not even

rhyme: t i 13 I ljubo mne, i sladko mne t t 15 Dremotoju obvejan ja —

When, the reader begins line 15 (or the listener hears

it begun) he naturally expects a rhyme. Its absence is

a deviation signaling the imminent conclusion. It can

also be added, recalling the discussion of framing key

words earlier in the chapter, that the syntax of line 15

(note the dash) recalls that of the opening line. And t note the similarity of sound between ’’obvejan ja — ” t and "mgnovenija” of line 1.

The penultimate line of the next poem is an in

teresting subject for analysis.

Sej den’, ja pomnju, dlja menja Byl utro ziznennogo dnja: Stojala mol£a predo mnoju, 4 Vzdymalas1 grud' ee volnoju, Aleli sceki, kak zarja, Vse zar£e rdeja i gorja! I vdrug, kak solnce molodoe, 8 Ljubvi priznan'e zolotoe Istorglos’ iz grudi eja... 10 I novyj mir uvidel jal (1830) That day, I remember, for me Was the morning of life's day: She stood silent before me, Her undulating bosom heaved, Her cheeks were scarlet, like the dawn, 58

Ever hotter glowing and burning! And suddenly, like a young sun, A golden declaration of love Froced itself from her bosom... And a new world glimpsed I!

The translation preserves the inversion of word order in the final line. This is a useful device to help toward closure, and one frequently employed by Tjutcev.

Turning from syntax to meter, we find the poem is writ ten in iambic tetrameter. But only one line, the con cluding line, contains all four stresses. All the other lines have one pyrrhic foot. In all cases but one it is the third foot that is without stress. The excep tion is the penultimate line, line 9, where the second foot is the pyrrhic foot. The closural force of the final, four-stress line is derived from the contrast with the "impure” lines preceding it. Besides acting as a signal of impending closure, the deviant pyrrhic foot in line 9 imparts added emphasis to the intonation of the last line. This effect can be guaged by com paring the actual lines to this combination (lines 6 and 10): yf Iff 6 Vse zarce rdeja i gorja... xx xx xx xx i i i * 10 I novyj mir uvidel jaJ xxxxxxxx

The distribution of emphasis is more even in line 6 than i i i it is in the actual line: "Istorglos' iz grudi eja," where emphasis is thrown forward in the line, onto \

t "Istorglos'." This shift forward anticipates dialec-

tically the emphatic stress on "jal" in the following

line. The final stress on the first-person pronoun "I"

is no accident, of course. The whole poem is a tri

umphant first affirmation of the self. The speaker's

thoughts begin and end with himself, and this is re-

fleeted in the structure of the poem. The last word

turns the poem back to the other, first occurrence of

the personal pronoun "I" in the nominative case, which

is in the first line. The concluding "ja” also rhymes

with the poem's first rhyme word, "menja" ("me").

There is something about the poem's rhyme pattern

worthy of mention. Although the rhyme schemes are

different, it is useful to compare the relationship

between rhyme and closure in the poem previously dis

cussed ("Thus, there are in life moments— ") with the

relationship between rhyme and closure in the poem being

discussed now. Here, as there, we find a high degree of

phonetic uniformity among the rhymes. The analysis of

"Thus,...” focused on the penultimate line's deviation

from the uniformity of rhyme, a deviation preparing for

return to the norm and closure. In a somewhat different

form, that same principle is operative in the rhyme

pattern of "That day, I remember, was for me," even

though, phonetically, all lines of the poem rhyme. 60

Focusing on the penultimate line, "eja" ("her," posses sive) rhymes with "ja," line 10. "Eja" is the archaic form of "ee," the modern genitive/accusative personal pronoun feminine. Although the pronoun continued to be spelled "eja" until the spelling reforms of the 1917

Revolution, pronounciation of the word so that it rhymes v with "ja" was already archaic m Tjutcev's time. When the reader came across the orthographic representation

"eja" in a position not involved with rhyme, he pronounced it normally, as "ee." The reader of post-revolution editions finds "ee" printed everywhere, except where rhyme is involved. Thus:

4 Vzdymalas1 grud' ee volnoju, but

9 Istorglos' iz grudi eja,

That is the background of this interpretation: The form "eja" in line 9 is foregrounded because it is arcahic. It stands out. But this is only half the story because an archaic form will stand out anywhere in a modern text. "Sej," the first word in the poem ("That day,...") is a case in point. If "ee" in line 4 ap peared in a modern edition as "eja," it would be another illustration of the foregrounding of an archaic word.

Such an appearance, however, would have to be structur ally motivated. In the case of line 4, "eja" would not be justified. The actual "Sej den*," on the other hand, is so justified. By taking the place of the usual

"segodnja" ("today,") it does two things. It immediately establishes the significance of the theme to be developed.

And, located on the boundary separating poetry from the world outside, it immediately marks that boundary, makes sure that the reader knows he is entering poetry, the poetic world. Nine lines later, the archaic "eja" warns the reader that he is about to leave that world.

It does this not only because the reader is aware of the usual form present beneath the unusual, foregrounded form, but also, and mainly, because that usual form

("ee") entails a deviation from the rhyme pattern. In other words, the reader sees and pronounces "eja," but thinks "ee." "Sej" admits the reader into the poem for an indefinite period; it could ,be the first word in an epic poem. But, given the poem’s pattern of paired rhyme, the deviation of line 9 signals imminent closure. 62

FOOTNOTES— CHAPTER II

^Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, 1968), 1—2.

2Ibid., 36. 3 Ju. M. Lotman, Lektsii po structural«noi poetike: Vvedenie, teoriia stikha (Brown University Slavic Reprint Vf 1968), 73-74.

4Ibid., 17.

^See I. Tfcargeneyl, "Osobennosti soderzanija i formyv poezii Tjutceva" (1854) in Fedor Ivanovic Tjutcev: Ego zizn* i socinenija, ed. V. Pokrovskij (Moscow, 1904), 47~.

^Poetic Closure, 102. CHAPTER III

Parallelism

Tjutcev's lyric poetry deals with relatively few themes. That is, his lyric poetry can be broken down into a few groups of thematically related poems. This fact, which finds an analogue in Monet's paintings of a particular scene or object under differing light conditions, as a process is termed Tjutcev's "intensive method" by L. Pumpjanskij, who goes beyond thematic parallels to observe that secondary themes and even certain lines and details recur and find their parallels scattered through the collected lyrics.'*’

It is possible to break down the work of most poets into thematic groups or cycles, for instance

Pushkin's cycle on the poet, or Yeats' Leda or Byzan- tium poems. Tjutcev's poetry is remarkable for the high degree of similarity between members of the respec tive groups, a similarity which is intensified by the modest size of his lyric production in comparison to the output of most first-rank poets, as well as by the uniformity of forms employed. Tjutcev is exclusively a practitioner of the "small form." 63 64

The term "intensive method" is capable of de— scribing not only the whole of Tjutcev's lyric pro duction, but also the individual works. The thematic parallelism discernible in his total output finds its analogue in the parallelisms of larger units of the individual poem, while recurrences of sub-thematic elements within his larger poetic context are compar able to the various recurrences which play supporting roles within the individual work.

Parallelism per se is not the point. Parallelism is inherent in any system of poetically organized speech.

Any poem is a structure of interrelated recurrences of one kind and another. The following statement, for instance, may serve as a broad definition of the syn tax of any poem: "Syntax is poetic when grammatically equivalent constituents in connected speech are jux taposed by coordination or parataxis, or are otherwise prominently accumulated. I would thus limit the term

"poetic syntax" to noticeable instances of grammatical 2 repetition." The remarkable thing about parallelism v/ in Tjutcev is not the phenomenon itself, but its in tensity. This will be demonstrated in the following analysis. 65

K N.

Tvoj milyj vzor, nevinno^ strasti polnyj, 2 Zlatoj rassvet nebesnyx cuvstv tvoix Ne mog — uvy! — umilostivit' ix — 4 On sluzit im ukoroju bezmolvnoj.

Sii serdca, v kotoryx pravdy net, 6 Oni, o drug, begut,vkak prigovora, Tvoej ljubvi mladenceskogo vzora, 8 On strasen im, kak pamjat' detskix let.

No dlja menja sej vzog blagodejan'e; 10 Kak zizni kljuc, v dusevnoj glubine Tvoj vzor zivet i budet zit* vo mne: 12 On nuzen ej, kak nebo i dyxan'e. v Takov gore duxov blazennyx svet, 14 Lis'vv nebesax sijaet nebesnyj; V noci grexa, na dne uzasnoj bezdny, 16 Sej cistyj ogn’, kak plamen' adskij, zzet.

To X.

Your sweet gaze, full of innocent passion, 2 The golden dawn of your heavenly feelings Was unable — alas I — to appease them — 4 It was to them a reproach unuttered.

Those hearts, in which truth is not, 6 They, o friend, run away, as a condemnation Of your love’s childish gaze, 8 It is terrible to them, like the memory of childhood years.

But for me that gaze is a good deed; 10 Like life's spring, in the soul's depths Your gaze lives and will live in me: 12 It is necessary to it Cto the soulj , like the sky and breathing.

Such, above, is the blessed spirits* light, 14 Only in the heavens does it shine heavenly; In the night of sin, on the bottom of the terrifying abyss, 16 That pure fire, like an infernal flame, burns. (23 November 1824) \

It might be helpful to start with a quick sketch

of the development of the pronouns in this poem. The

first two lines equate the girl's gaze with the dawn.

In the rest of the poem the pronoun "on" (English: "it1')

takes the place of her heavenly, dawnlike gaze. This

move to the pronoun is a move to the abstract. Speaking

in terms of metaphor, the abstract vehicle leaves the

tenor behind; "it" in turn gives rise to abstract similies

which become enmeshed in the other abstractions of the

poem. "On" is played off against "oni" in the first

stanza, against £their] "hearts in which there is no

truth" in the second stanza (and not the negative de

scription, another abstraction). This information about

the development of the poem's pronouns is necessary to

follow the development of the parallelism: "On sluzit

im — On strasen im — On nuzen ej — Sej cistyj ogn'"

("It was to them — It is terrible to them — It is ne

cessary to it — That pure fire"). It will be noticed

that the fourth member of this parallelism departs from

the pattern set by the preceding three members. It

is thus foregrounded, to what end we will see in the

course of the discussion below.

There is generally a caesura after the fourth

syllable. There are some variations. For instance,

line four's caesura is rather weak, while the emphatic 67 caesura after the fourth syllable of line 3: "Ne mog — uvy! — umilostivit' ix ~ " is augmented by a strongly marked pause after the first foot. The ceasura is often marked by a comma in the text. Line 12 carries a syn tactic pause in the second hemistich in the conjunction

"i" (•'and”). The first three lines of the final stanza return to the norm of the two-part line. Thus, the three-part division of the concluding line is a syntac tic means of foregrounding the line.

In general one half of a line modifies the other half, "halves11 of course being used to describe four plus six/seven syllable lines. This is done in the following ways. In the even lines 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and

16 are found similes. Of these, only line 4 is a simile by means other than "kak" ("like"). Of the even lines, only lines 2 and 14 lack a simile! The connection of these two lines is thus structurally forefounded by a deviation from the pattern: v 2 Zlatoj rassvet nebesnyx cuvstv tvoix

The golden dawn of your heavenly feelings

14 Lis’ v nebesax sijaet on nebesnyj;

Only in the heavens does it shine heavenly;

The lines are similar in their heavenly imagery; the words "nebesnyj" and "nebesa" establish a lexical 68 connection.

How does one hemistich modify the other in the odd' numbered lines? In lines 1, 5, 7, and 9 the modifying is accomplished by means of oblique cases, basically genitive. The stipulation "basically11 takes into ac count the case of line 5, where the locative plays a linking role similar to the genitive function: "Sii serdca, v kotoryx pravdy net." Line 3 has a helping verb ("mog") in the first hemistich and its dependent infinitive in the second half of the line ("umilostivit'"). In line 13, "Takov gore duxov blazennyx svet," the adjective "takov" and its noun are split

("svet"). Otherwise the genitives "duxov blazennyx" relate the structure of the line to that of lines 1,

5, 7, and 9. The halves of both line 11 and 15 are in apposition; one side is equated with the other side: v v 11 Tvoj vzor zivet i budet zit' vo mne

Your gaze lives and will live in me

v v 15 V noci grexa, na dne uzasnoj bezdny

In the night of sin, on the bottom of the terrifying abyss

This appositional structure relates these lines to line 14: v 14 Lis' v nebesax sijaet on nebesnyj,

Only in the heavens does it shine heavenly, 69

The underlined words give a tautological impression.

This impression leads up to the climactic last line.

In that line the equation of "ogn'" and "piemen'” makes

the contrast between the adjectives "cistyj" and "ad-

skij” all the more violent and dramatic: v w * * 16 Sej cistyj ogn', kak plamen' adskij, zzet.

That pure fire, like and infernal, flame, burns. Vvl y V«« C zzj in "zzet" is only

one of the elements differentiating the word from the

others to which it is linked by rhyme, namely "net,"

"let," and "svet." The deviation from Qe] to M dis

tressed I.S. Aksakov, who remarks in his biography of

Tjutcev that "This excellent piece is disfigured by the

incorrect rhyme in the manner of our 'classicists' of 3 the time." A structural view, on the other hand,

finds the rhyme to be an excellent device. The devia

tion represents a method of making the semantically im portant word the "dominant" of its fellow rhyme words. y Vf| Most significant is the rhyme "svet"/"zzet." The "svet"

Is the light of the blessed spirits; it shines ("sijaet") in the heavens. In contrast to this light, on the bottom of the abyss (note the rhyme-linked contrasts "nebesnyj"/

"bezdny") the "infernal flame burns," burning with a consuming fire in contrast to the non-consuming heavenly radiance. X

The discussion so far has had to do with instances

of parallelism fixed by position; that is, fixed by

syntactic structure or rhyme. In each instance Tjutcev

changed a member of the parellelistic group, made it

deviate from its fellows. The. reason for these devia

tions is not just negative, (to avoid what in its ex

treme might be called a nursery-rhyme effect), but also

positive, uniting aesthetic value and semantic signi

ficance .

Beside fixed parallelisms, there are unfixed, or

"free" parallelisms in the poem. A survey shows that

most of these relationships are contrasting. The

"golden dawn" is found in the second line, while line

15 features the "night of sin." "Sin" contrasts with the

"innocent passion" of line 1. "Innocent" is part of

the relationship "innocent"/"childish" (line 7), and

"memory of childhood years" (line 8). The three terms:

innocent, childish, childhood years, are thus equated.

But sound and positional parallelism bring into con

trasting relationship these hemistiches:

8 kak pamjat' detskix let

like the memory of childhood years

V Vtt 16 kak plamen1 adskij, zzet.

like an infernal flame, burns. 71

The purpose of the insignificance of the "let"/"net" vv«« rhyme is to prevent the importance of the “let"/"zzet" rhyme from being obscured. We will see below how the coherence of the poem could have used other such safe guards.

Let us first question why the memory of child hood years is terrible to them, and why these childhood years are equated to the infernal flame. The idea can be approached by following some other parallelisms to their ends. The contrast between "it" ("on") and "them" has been noted already. The speaker also contrasts y himself with "them:" "On strasen im"/"No dlja menja sej vzor blagodejan1e." This opposition explains how her V y V V Czivet] "Kak iizni kljuc, v dusevnoj glubine" (line 10). "Glubine," rhyming with "vo mne," contrasts with how her gaze "zzet" as an infernal flame "on the bottom of the terrible abyss." The parallelsim between

10 v dusevnoj glubine

in the soul's depths

v 15 na dne uzasnoj bezdny

on the bottom of the terrifying abyss is brought about by case similarity (locative), position in the second hemistiches of the respective lines, and conceptually: "v glubine" is conceptually equal to "na \

dne." The acoustics of “zivet" and the repetition of V v v v v /z/ in "zit'," and in "zizni.kljuc," link "zivet" to

"zzet."

The contrast between above and below represented

by "gore" vs. "na dne" is not meant to apply to the

depths of the speaker’s soul; there is no opposition

between his "glubina" and "gore," an Old Russian word

meaning "above." The above-below relationship might

be clarified by taking a look at Lermontov’s poem

"Angel," (1831). There a soul is brought from heaven

to earth by an angel singing a wonderful song. The

sound of that song remains with the soul, "wordless,

but alive." The soul languishes in this "world of

sorrow and tears," carrying within himself the memory

of the divine song. There is a vast difference between

the world view of the seventeen-year-old Lermontov and

that of the twenty-one-year-old Tjutcev as expressed in

"K N." In Tjutcev's poem the memory of innocence fills

"them" with hatred instead of longing. In the Ler

montov poem the human condition is to languish in a

world of "skucnye pesni" ("boring songs"); but in this v early poem of Tjutcev's the world is presented as being

much worse that that. In place of tedium is sin and

hell fire; the world does not just stifle the divine

as it does in "Angel:" (the song lingers, but its words V

are lost), but actively perverts and condemns it. This

is the reason why childhood memories are terrible to

"them” and why the still-uncorrupted girl’s gaze burns

them like infernal fire: these things remind them of

their lost innocence, v Tjutcev scholars have been unable to discover the

•identity of "Ms. X." The concerns of the poem allow

v one to conjecture that, indeed, Tjutcev had no one

particular in mind. The girl acts as a vehicle for a

sweeping statement about the world. The poet is quick

to move from the girl to the abstract; he progresses

from her to the plural of the last stanzas "blessed

spirits." He makes a universal statement in the

theological-apocalyptic style he was to make his own.

Relevant are: "prigovora," ne mog umilostivit',"

"zizni kljuc" (baptism), "cistyj ogn’" (Holy Spirit),

"plamen' adskij" (Lucifer), "zivet i budet zit’" (Paul,

Romans, 14.9), not to mention "sin" and the "blessed

spirits." The most apocalyptic term is the "abyss."

The Old Russian "gore" is the ossified locative case of

"gora" (mountain), thus providing a conceptual echo to

"abyss." The universality of the statement is concep

tually summarized by the presence of the four elements:

water in line 10, air in line 12, fire in lines 13 and 16,

and earth by implication, in the contrast with the 74 heavens, and as another meaning of "svet."

The organization of some elements into fixed paral lelisms foregrounds these elements. On a lower level, as has been seen, one element of the parallelism can be made to stand out against the others by means of a deviation of some aspect of the parallelism, provided the deviant element still adheres to the basic norm that identifies it as a member of the given parallelism.

The final rhyme word "zzet'1 is an excellent example of such a deviation. The free parallelisms require further theorizing. In general they are on a higher organi zational level in the hierarchical structure of the poem.

That is, they tend to be more extensively involved in the theme. Therefore, confusion of free parallelisms dam ages the coherence of the poem as a whole. To guard against this, the freedom of free parallelisms must be restricted. Free parallelisms must be more rigidly con structed than fixed parallelisms, whose "fixity" is built-in restriction. If elements of free parallelisms are not held in check, the danger is that unwanted associations will arise. An example of such an occurence is provided by the pair: V/ 10 v dusevnoj glubine

in the soul's depths 75

v 15 na dne uzasnoj bezdny

on the bottom of the terrifying abyss

The above interpretation of the poem tried to show

that these lines are meant to be in opposition. But

the parallelism they form raises disturbing questions

about the relationship of the speaker to the "crowd,"

about the relationship between the "night of sin" and

the depths of the speaker's soul. The intensive method

has become too intensive here. The major factor in the

confusion is that there are too many personae to which

the free parallelisms may, and do, gravitate.

These problems are solved in a poem written in

the same iambic pentameter six years later. The con

tent of the following work certainly allows the reader

to think that his suspicions about the speaker of "To

X." were not so ill-founded. The poem is entitled

"K N. N., " or, in English, "To X. X."

Ty ljubis', ty pritvorstvovat' umee^', 2 Kogda, v tolpe, ukradkoj ot ljudej, Moja noga kasaetsja tvoej — 4 Ty mne otvet daes' i ne krasnees'! I \S v Vse tot ze vid rassejannyj, bezdusnyj, 6 Dvizen'e perse j, vzor, ulybka ta ss ... Mez tern tvoj muz, sej nenavistnyj stra£, 8 Ljubuetsja tvoej krasoj poslusnoj.

Blagodarja i ljudjam i sud'be, 10 Ty tajnym radostjam uznala cenu, Uznala cvet: on stavit nam v izmenu 12 Vse radosti... Izmena l'stit tebe. Stydlivosti rumjanec nevozvratnyj, 14 On uletel s tvoix mladyx j^anit — Tak s junyx roz Avrory luc bezit 16 S ix cistoju du5oju aromatnoj. w No tak i byt*! v paljascij letnij znoj 18 Lestnej dlja cuvstv, primancivej dlja vzgljada Smotret', v teni, kak v kisti vinograda 20 Sverkaet krov' skvoz' zeleni gustoj. (1830) 4 You love, you know how to dissemble — 2 When, in a crowd, hidden from people, My foot touches yours, 4 You answer me and do not blush.

Still the same distracted, aloof appearance, - 69 The same movement of your bosom, the same glance and smile... And all the while your husband, that hated watchman, 8 Admires your obedient beauty.

Thanks to people and to fate, 10 You have learned the price of secret joys, You know the world: it sees as infidelity 12 All our joys... Infidelity flatters you.

The never-to-return blush of shame, 14 It has fled your youthful cheeks — As from young roses Aurora's ray flees 16 With their pure and fragrant souls.

But let it be so... in the burning summer heat 18 It is more flattering to the senses, more seductive to the glance To see, in the shadow, how in a cluster of grapes 20 Blood shines through the thick green.

Looking first at the fixed parallelisms of rhyme words, one finds that, semantically, they seem to be "de-fused

That is, when the rhyme words of a given stanza come together, there is no explosion — a definite contrast 77 to such rhymes as "nebesnyj "/"bezdny" ("heavenly',/,,abyss,') in the previous poem. Nor are there here striking inter- stanzaic rhyme-connections. There is some similarity

(phonetic) between the feminine rhyme words of stanzas two and four: "bezdusnyj"/’’poslu^noj": : "nevozvratnyj"/

"aromatnoj," but this similarity does not cause a chem ical reaction of an obvious, striking sort. It is, however, in fact a key to the larger structure of the poem.

Stanzas three and five are linked, not by any phonetic similarity among their rhymes, but by their rhyme patterns. Three of the poem's five stanzas show the rhyme pattern a B B a, feminine lines enclosing mas culine rhymes. In stanzas three and five this is re versed. This deviation from the norm draws attention to the relationship between these two stanzas. But, analysis shows, it is perhaps more important that this device, along with the similarity of feminine rhymes in stanzas two and four, draws stanzas two and four to gether. The lack of tension between the feminine rhyme words is counterbalanced by the tension between the statements of stanzas two and four. Stanza two focuses on the unchangeable external appearance of the speaker's

y mistress: "Vse tot ze vid;" she does not breathe any faster or smile any differently; her absent-minded, X

distracted demeanor, her "aloofness," conceal the passion

buring within. And, as line 4 tells, she does not blush.

In contrast to stanza two's stress on external

permanence, the imagery of stanza four concentrates on

inner change. The second stanza's preoccupation with

the physical is opposed by the fourth's spiritual orien

tation. This opposition can best be discussed by fol

lowing the relationship between free parallelisms. The

reader is told that she does not blush (ty ne kras-

nee^'); line 13, using another word for blush, the noun

"rumjanec" instead of a verb, says that the "blush of

shame" has gone, and will never return. That is, the

blush of shame is not "obedient;" unlike her "obedient

beauty," it cannot be called back or controlled at will.

The reader of Russian will note the relationship between

the verb "krasnet*" (to blush) and the word for "beauty,"

"krasa." In fact, what the poet means by the blush of

shame is not physical at all: when the dawn leaves the

roses they are still young to the sight. It is their

invisible fragrance, their "soul" that is gone. The y word translated as "aloof" is "bezdusnyj," an adjectival

combination of the prefix "bez" (without) and "dusa"

(soul). Thus two metaphors, that of line 4 describing

an external feature of the woman, and that of line 16,

a figurative reference to a quality of a rose, come to V

be taken literally. (An ’’actual,” as opposed to fig

urative , reference to the ’’scent” of a rose would in

volve the word ”duxi” ("scent). This word, and the

word "dux,” (spirit"), is etymologically related to the

word for soul, "dusa." The difference in velar conson

ants is rooted in the history of the Slavic palital-

ization of velars). It is only in retrospect that the v relationships between "bezdusnyj" and "aromatnoj’’ and v between "poslusnoj" and "nevozvratnyj’’ strike us. The

poet has used the positional stability of fixed paral

lelisms to advantage, and has imposed the necessary

restrictions on free parallelisms.

Stanzas three and five focus on the secrecy of

the passion. Stanza three does so by means of plain

statement: "You have learned the price of secret joys."

This is also the method of the first stanza, a style

that reminds one of that of the realistic novel; "When,

in a crowd, hidden from people..." Line 3 could be a

detail from such a novel. As such, it would be lost

amid the thousands of other details, or subordinated

to more vivid or larger actions or events. But here,

in the lyric, the line could not be more highly charged.

Stanza five transforms the artistic prose of the first

stanza and the plain statement of stanza three into

poetic imagery. 80

t The syntax of lines 2 and 19 is similar: "Kogda, t i t v tolpe" — "Smotret', v teni." This similarity directs the reader to imagine a hidden place in a surrounding, and unpleasant, milieu. In the first stanza this is the crowd; in the fifth it is the "burning summer heat."

Note the contrast with the imagery of dawn in stanza four (Aurora). And, that stanza's emphasis on youth and purity, on the spiritual, is opposed to the last stanza's afternoon, when the ripe grapes shine like blood through the foliage. Although the woman does not blush, this image gives the reader a glimpse of the passion hidden within. Note the similarity (both are j-stem verbs) I between line three's "Moja noga kasaetsja tvoej" and i the final "Sverkaet krov'." Also similar are "Infi delity flatters you" and line eighteen's "It is more flattering to the senses..."

A summary of the way this poem works should men tion the similarity of its contrast between physical and spiritual to that of "To X." The spacial means of representing this contrast are also similar in the two poems. The tension is greater, however, in the later poem because the "intensive method" is less ambitious.

Free parallelisms in "To X. X." are well-marked (for example: "bezdusnyj"/"dusa") and oppositions are re stricted. Instead of making a universal statement 81 touching all points of the compass, the poet restricts himself to the opposition between the inner and outer worlds. And this opposition is worked out, essentially, for only one persona, the speaker's mistress. Finally, the role of fixed parallelisms, is mainly an organising one. Their semantic load is not as striking as it was in the earlier "To X."

The opposite is true of the fixed parallelsirns in the following poem. Here they play the major semantic, as well as organizing, role within the structure of the work.

Pervyj list

List zeleneet molodoj. A 2 Smotri, kak list'em molodym B Stojat obvejany berezy, c 4 Vozdu^noj zelen'ju skvoznoj, A Poluprozracnoju, kak dym... B

6 Davno im grezilos' vesnoj, A Vesnoj i letom zolotym, — B 8 I vot zivye eti grezy, c Pod pervym nebom gelubym B 10 Probilis' vdrug na svet dnevnoj... A

O, pervyx listjev kra^ota, D 12 Omytyx v solnecnyx lucax E S novorozdennoju ix teg'ju! f 14 I slysno nam po ix dvizen'ju, f Cto v etix^tysjacax i t'max E 16 Ne vstretis' mertvogo lista. D (1851)

The First Leaf

The young leaves are turning green. 2 See how the young foliage \

Fans the stand of birches 4 With airy greenery, translucent, Semi-transparent, like smoke...

6 Long ago they dreamt of spring, Of spring and golden summer, — 8 And now these are living dreams, Under the first sky of blue 10 They burst suddenly into the light of day...

0, first leaves' beauty, 12 Washed intthe sun's rays With their new-born shadows! 14 And we can hear in their movement That in these thousands and shadows ..and multitudes) 16 You will not find a dead leaf.

The words underlined in lines 1, 2, and 7 of the

translation are rhyme words that could not be placed at

the end of the line without doing something drastic to

English syntax. In each case the adjective follows the

noun it modifies in the Russian. This is also the case

in line 9, but there "sky of blue" did not seem to be

too bad a solution. The same is true of the transla

tion of line 10. The point of all this is that the

analysis focuses on rhyme. From the scheme to the right

of the text it can be seen that the rhyme pattern of the

poem falls into two parts. The first two stanzas share

the same rhyme sounds, the only difference being that

A B becomes B A in the fourth and fifth lines of the

second stanza. The last stanza introduces new rhyme

sounds and an extra line. The reversal of A B to B A is designed to tell the

reader something. It sets up an opposition between the

words involved which naturally focuses on the elements

in the strongest relative position. One's attention is

drawn to the last words in the stanzas, "dym" ("smoke")

and "dnevnoj" ("day" [an adjective}). In this way

these words are made the "dominants" of their respective 5 parallelisms. They are foregrounded against the poem in general, and in their parallelisms in particular.

They determine what their respective parallelisms are like. The principle can be seen as being essentially that of deviation from the norm. The deviating element is the defining element. Thus, "dym" ("smoke") rhymes with "molodym" ("young"), "zolotym" ("golden"), and

"golubym" ("blue"). It will be noticed that even if

"smoke" were not positionally foregrounded, it would stand out as the odd-fellow in this group. Here "smoke" stands for the same thing it stands for in Turgenev's novel Smoke: the transitoriness, the illusory nature of things. In particular it means that the young foliage of line 2 not only looks like smoke, but will last just as long. It modifies in the same way the "spring and golden summer" of line 7. These too will pass like smoke, as will the "sky of blue" in line 9. 84

Lines 1 and 2 both end with the adjective "young"

(molodoj, molodym). This makes the word important in the poem, emphasizes it. It also dooms it to modifi cation by both of the dominant rhyme words of the stanzas.

Thus "molodoj," like "skvoznoj" ("translucent") and

"vesnoj" ("spring"), are modified by "dnevnoj" ("day").

The meaning clearly is that youth, and spring, are transient things of "but a day."^ Similarly, when the two feminine rhymes of the stanzas come together,

"grezy" ("dreams") points up the transitory nature of the greenery "fanning the birches."

The transiency of youth and spring, things of

"but a day," things that have "burst suddenly into the light of day," is treated in terms of light and shadow in the third stanza. These shadows are hints of the night hidden behind each day in Tjutcev's cosmology.

In his famous poem "Day and Night," for instance, he depicts day as a cloth of gold drawn over the nameless abyss of night. This opposition is expressed in the rhymes _E (lines 12 and 15): "lucax" ("rays")/"t'max"

("shadows"). The shadows, in keeping with the poem's emphasis on transiency, make the reader see day in terms of potential night. That is, he is made aware of some thing most people do not usually consciously think about: night is nearer with each moment of the day. \

This movement toward night is suggested by the rhymes

of lines 13 and 14: "ten'ju" ("shadow")/”dvizen*ju"

("movement"). Thinking of the sort just mentioned is

common in baroque poetry. The movement of day towards

night, or the progress of the seasons towards winter is

in such poetry an aspect of the progress of a man's

life towards death. Just as a little more night is

present in each successive moment of the day, so, in

this way of thinking, "death is present not only at the 7 end of a man's life, but at every point along the way."

Barbara Herrnstein Smith (op. cit.) is speaking in par

ticular of George Herbert's "Mortification." This is

the first stanza:

How soon doth man decay! When clothes are taken from a chest of sweets To swaddle infants, whose young breath Scarce knows the wayj Those clouts are little winding sheets g Which do consigne and send them unto death.

In "The First Leaf" line 13 carries the idea that the

appearance of the young leaves, like the infant's birth

in Herbert's poem, brings with it the mark of the leaves'

demise: the leaves appear "With their new-born shadows."

The progression of the seasons is mentioned in lines 6-7.

It was "long ago" that the birches dreamt of spring:

that is, presumably winter. The poem itself captures a moment in May. It is summer that lies directly ahead,

but already the poet’s mind is on winter, on night, and

on death. The discussion has shown that the final line,

although it invariably strikes the reader as sudden and

paradoxical, is well motivated. Much of its unmotivated

impression is due to the false impression given by the

title, "The First Leaf." Despite the constant emphasis

on transitoriness, the reader expects that "the first

leaf" is a young one. Instead the poet goes beyond

the bright daylight, and beyond the new life bursting

forth everywhere, to discover that

Night £is] the shadow of light, And life, the shadow of death. 9 ~ Swinburne

The incidences of parallelism in the three poems

analyzed so far in this cahpter may now be summarized.

"To X.” has a high degree of development of both free

and fixed parallelisms. "To X. X." is a case where free

dominate fixed, while in "The First Leaf" fixed para

llelisms are in ascendancy over free. The operation of

a principle of adjustment is observable here. Just as

the freedom of free parallelisms must be counteracted by increasing the strictness of the individual elements*

adherence to the parallelism's norm, in the same way a development of one kind of parallelism is counter balanced in terms of the other kind of parallelism. One might imagine "measuring" the development of parallelisms N

on a vertical, plus-and-minus scale. It would then be

possible to term a parallelism^ development "increasing,"

as "positive" (moving, say, from 0 toward 10), as having

"direction" (for instance, "going up"). This system

allows one to say, taking into consideration the ad

justment concept, that if one parallelism is "positive,"

'etc., the other type in a given, successful poem is

"negative," is "decreasing" in development. This system

permits the discussion of tension between types of

parallelism, and is the key to the following discussion

of the relationship between syntactic parallelism and

meter in two poems by Tjutcev.

Meter is a parallelism. In A Linguistic Guide to

English Poetry Geoffrey Leech writes:

Stripped of all subtleties, conventional English metre is nothing more than rhyth mic parallelism: a patterning of the suc cession of stressed and unstressed syl lables with greater regularity than is necessary for spoken English in general.

By "conventional English meter" he means the system based

on regularity in number of syllables as well as number

of stresses. This system is known as "accentual-

syllabic," or, more commonly in relation to Russian verse,

"syllabo-tonic." This is the basic system of Russian

verse as well as of English. In both languages the sys

tem stands against, on the one hand, poetry based on \

8 8

syllabic regularity, and, on the other, verse measured

by number of stresses alone (accentual, or tonic verse).

Russian learned poetry evolved from syllabic verse.

Lomonosov, whose "Ode on the Taking of Xotin" (1739)

marked the decisive break with the syllabic system, at

first insisted in his theoretical writings that all

lines must be pure. That is, each line in a poem written

in iambic pentameter should, he wrote, have five stressed

syllables. This proved impracticable for even Lomono

sov himself, and pyrrhic feet were allowed. This is the v system in which Pushkin, and Tjutcev, wrote. "Tonic"

(or "accentual") verse was "canonized" in Russian poetry

by the great symbolist Aleksander Blok (1880-1921).

In the poetry written according to the syllabic

system one can find iambic lines, trochaic lines, and

so on. One can find, likewise, some tonic lines in

eighteenth and nineteenth century syllabo-tonic Russian

poetry. This necessitates making a distinction between

accidental and deliberate deviation from the metrical

norm. It is, of course, the present reader’s historical

advantage, his acquaintance with Russian tonic verse,

that allows him to attempt such a distinction. This is

what makes it possible, judging from, practically

speaking, three of Tjutcev*s poems, to see in the poet

a precursor of those poets who deliberately practice tonic verse. Tjutcev's contemporaries, on the other hand, were denied the historical advantage. It must vf also be taken into consideration that Tjutcev wrote no complete poem in tonic verse. We are speaking about a deviation from the norm, not an attempt to establish a v new norm. And, in speaking of Tjutcev's contemporaries, two other qualifications are needed. First, Tjutcev was never widely known. The first appearance of

"Silentium!" was in an obscure journal, Molva, No. 32

(1833), page 125. By this time Tjutcev had already been living in Munich for ten years, and had not yet published the first group of his "Poems Sent from Ger many." When he did so, (1836), these were not signed, just initialed. So his experiments in versification hardly had a chance to exert much influence. Neither did the anonymous poet who, even after his return to

Russia, joined no literary circles and, moreover, stead fastly refused to talk about his poetry, much less ex plain why some of his poems would not "scan." The second qualification follows from the first. When y Tjutcev's poetic identity did become known, in the early 'fifties, only a handful of literary men, (mem bers of the literary "establishment" at that), saw the

"deviant" versions of "Silentium!" and "Dream at Sea." N

They saw no purpose, and no virtue, in deviations from

the metric canon, as indicated by the fact that they

collaborated in "correcting” the meter and eliminating

the deviations. For instance: "Silentium!" is written

in iambic tetrameter. The stresses on the fifth syl

lables in the following two lines represent an uncanon-

ical "deviation" from the iambic norm: • i i 4 Vstajut i zaxodjat one x x xx xx xx

v » » » 5 Bezmolvno, kak zvezdy v noci xx xx xx xx

The "corrected" lines return to the iambic canonical

norm: i i i 4 I vsxodjat i zajdut one xx xx xx xx y II 1 5 Kak zvezdy jasnye v noci; xx xx xx xx

These "corrections appeared in all-editions from 1854

to the 1917 revolution.

The discussion that follows has to do with two of

the three poems known for their metrical deviations.'*'^

It should be added that "Silentium!" was already a fa

mous poem in its corrected version, while "Last Love,"

for reasons that are unclear and, perhaps, unknown, had 12 to endure only minor "corrections." The discussion

focuses on the relationship between syntactic parallelism

and metric deviations. 91

Poslednjaja ljubov' v Oj^kak na sklone nasix let 2 Neznej my ljubim i suevernej... Sijaj, sijaj, proscal'nyj^svet 4 Ljubvi poslednej, zari vecernej!

Polneba obxvatila ten', 6 Lis’ tam, na zapade, brodit sijan'e, Pomedli, pomedli, vecernij den', 8 Prodl.is', prodlis', ocarovan'e.

Puskaj skudeet v zilax krov', 10 No v serdce ne skudeet neznost1... O ty, poslednjaja ljubov'! 12 Ty i blazenstvo i beznadeznost1. (between 1852-1854)

Last Love

0, in our declining years 2 How much more tenderly we love and more superstitiously... Shine, shine, farewell light 4 Of last love, of sunset!

Half the sky has been covered by a shadow, 6 Only there, in the West, hovers a radiance, — Linger, linger, evening of the day, 8 Stay on, stay on, enchantment.

Although there is thinning of the blood in the veins, 10 Yet in the heart there is no thinning of tenderness... 0, last love! 12 You are both bliss and hopelessness.

The reader is struck by two aspects of the poem in the original: the regularity, indeed hyper-regularity of the syntax that results from intensive parallelism, and the metric irregularity of the poem. The former will be discussed first. The intensity of parallelism in syntax is attested to by the very fact that so many of the word combinations can be described using rhetorical terms. The above cited book by Geoffrey Leech will be consulted to aid 13 in this description. The names are only a convention, and the listing will not be exhaustive. The most strik ing elements of rhetoric in the poem are the repetitions

*'Sijaj, sijaj" (Shine, shine), and "Pomedli, pomedli"

(Linger, linger) and "Prodlis*, prodlis'” (stay on, stay on). This is epizeuxis, the repetition of a word without any intermission. The words underlined below,

9 Puskaj skudeet v zilax krov', 10 No v serdce ne skudeet neznost’... might be considered to represent an instance of ploce, an intermittent repetition. But if one considers the two prepositional phrases between the repetitions, he finds a case of antistrophe, which can be diagramed this way: (...a...b...) (...b...a...), the letter b repre- i senting the prepositional phrases. The line: "Ljubvi I I y I posledne j, zari^ vecerne 111 is an instance of homoio— teleuton, the repetition of the same derivational or inflectional ending on different words. This device is also present in line 2. Indeed, that line could be described in terms of a number of devices. Perhaps it is best to finish describing syntax, and go on to me trics, by noting that the two comparatives of line 2 \

are paralleled by the two nouns separated by "i" (’’and”)

of line 12. Interestingly enough, there is also a rhyth

mic parallelism connecting lines 2 and 12: syllables

5-8 of both these lines are unstressed. This aids

closure by developing a frame for the poem. It also

connects the lines bearing the main idea of the work.

‘The speaker is describing his last love with mixed emo

tions; he is triumphant in that love has held its own,

even increased its "tenderness" and "bliss," against the

ravages of time. At the same time, he is aware that time

will, inevitably, win out, that resistence is heroic,

enchanting, but "hopeless." He is therefore aware that

any sunset could be the last, and hence loves "more

superstitiously."

Lines 2 and 12 are the only lines of the poem in

which syllables 5 through 8 are unstressed. This is

better appreciated after viewing the scansion of the

poem. The me.thod of scanning the poem adopted by the

late Boris Unbegaun, based on the idea of hypermetrical

syllables, seems preferable to a metric representation 14 based on a mixture of different kinds of verse feet.

Hypermetrical syllables appear in square brackets. 94

1 1 1 1 1 X XX X X X X X t t t 2 X XX X X X X XX 1 f 1 1 3 X XX X X X X X f f I 1 4 X X X X X X X XX 1*1 1— 1 1— 1

1 1 1 5 X XXX X X X X 1 t • 1 6 X X X X w X X t*]x X X 1 1 I 1 7 X X X X X X X D 3 1 1 1 8 X X X X XX X XX

1 I 1 t 9 X X X X X X X X 1 1 I 10 X XXX X X X X X 1 1 t 11 X XX X XX X X 1 • 12 XX X X X X X X X

Six of the 12 lines have four stresses. Line 3 is one of these, joining pure iambics and intense syntactic parallelism. Five of the twelve lines contain hyperme trical syllables; or, three of the six four-stress lines contain them. As mentioned, lines 2 and 12 are stressless on syllables five through eight. Lines 4, 6, and 7 illustrate on a smaller scale the principle according to which the whole poem is organized. These four- stress lines "measure positive" on the scale imagined above. In terms of iambic tetrameter, they have attained the highest regularity possible. But, this regularity \

is counterbalanced by the addition of one hypermetrical

syllable in line 4, and two in lines 6 and 7. This is

movement in the opposite direction, away from regularity,

"measuring negative." With this in mind, let us take a

wider look at the poem, recalling the intense parallel

ism, the hyper-regularity of its syntax. The function

of stress deviation is to offset, to counterbalance

this hyper-regularity. The resulting tension between

positive and negative development is what gives the poem

its power to move the reader. If the regularity were

not counterbalanced, the poem would be a plodding,

lifeless thing, indeed corresponding to the idea of

"hopelessness." If, on the other hand, the deviations

were allowed to go unopposed, the work would fall into

melodrama, with an excess of "bliss," and into senti

mentalism, with its unqualified "tenderness." Instead,

the tensions of form perfectly correspond to the dia

lectic playing itself out in the soul of the speaker,

who sees his love as both "bliss" and "hopelessness."

The aim of the analysis of "Silentium!" below is

also to discover the relationship between the poem*s

syntax and its metric deviations and, in particular, to

discover the structural role of this relationship. As

we stated in the previous chapter, the point of closure

is the point at which poetic structure reveals itself. 96

The method of the following analysis, then, is to find out how the poem closes, in the process achieving our primary goal.

Silentium! y Molci, skryvajsja i tai 2 I £uvstva i me£ty svoi — Puskaj v dusevnoj glubine 4 Vstajut i zaxodjat one Bezmolvno, kak zvezdy v noci, — 6 Ljubujsja imi — i molci.

Kak serdcu vyskazat* sebja? 8 Drugomu kak ponjat' tebja? Pojmet li on, cem ty zives'? 10 Mysl* izre£ennaja est' loz'. Vzryvaja, vozmutis' kljuci, — 12 Pitajsja imi ~ i molci.

Lis'V Vzit' v samom sebe umej — 14 Est' celyj mir v duse tvoej Tainstvenno-volsebnyx dum; 16 Ix oglusit naruznyj £?um, Dnevnye razgonjat luci, — 18 Vnimaj ix pen'ju — i mol£i!.. (1830 ?)

Be silent, hide yourself and conceal 2 Both your feelings and your dreams — In the soul's depths 4 Let them rise and set Soundlessly, like stars in the night, — 6 Admire them — and be silent.

How can the heart express itself? 8 How can another understand you? Will he understand what you live by? 10 A thought that is spoken is a lie. By stirring up the springs, you cloud them, 12 Drink of them — and be silent. \

Just know how to live within yourself — 14 There is in your soul a whole world Of mysterious-magical thoughts; 16 The outside noise will drown them out, Daylight will drive them away, — 18 Harken to their singing — and be silent!..

The poem is written in paired masculine rhyme.

"Molci,” the first word in the work, is also the last

word in every stanza. Besides acting as a refrain, this

insures that six of the poem's eighteen lines will rhyme

with each other. When it is noticed that the first two

lines of the poem also end with the sound £,il , one can

postulate that closure is based on return to the norm

after deviation. In view of the great uniformity dis

played by the fifth and sixth lines of each stanza,

what tells the reader which return to the norm is the

last? This can be ascertained by comparing the elements

in the refrain lines. Lines 6 and 12 are identical in

composition: imperative verb — pronoun — conjunction

— imperative verb. Line 18, however, is made up of

these elements: imperative verb — pronoun — noun —

conjunction — imperative verb. Thus, there is a slight,

but meaningful, deviation in the very return to the norm

after deviation.

We may now concentrate on the individual stanzas,

in particular on the first stanza. The syntactic norm

of the first stanza is a line composed of two major V.

elements, or simply of two parts. In three of the

lines the two parts are joined by the conjunction "i"

(and) : v v 2 cuvstva _i mecty feelings and dreams

4 Vstajut zaxodjat Rise and set v 6 Ljubujsja imi — jl molci. Admire them — and be silent.

Line 3 is composed of an imperative form ("Puskaj") and

a prepositional phrase: "in the soul's depths." This

phrase forms a parallelism with line five's "in the

night." Two lines deviate from this pattern and have

three principal parts, lines 5 and 1:

v 1 Molci, skryvajs ja i tai Be silent, hide yourself and con ceal

5 Bezmolvno, kak zvezdy v noci Silently, like stars in the night

This aspect of line 5 helps round off the stanza by

recalling the opening line. But, even as we consider

these lines as deviations, note their syntactic uniform

ity. They rhyme, and in addition rhyme with lines 2

and 6. Line one contains three imperatives which can

find three other imperatives in the stanza to relate to

in various ways. "Molci" — "mol^i" (identity); "tai"

— "molci"V 1 (rhyme); "skryvajsja" — "1jubujsja" (both

reflexive verbs). Line 1, like lines 2, 4, and 6, has \

two elements joined by "i" ("and")" "skryvajsja i tai."

Line 5, as was mentioned, has a prepositional phrase

that relates it to line 3. These details may be summed

up by concluding that there is a very high degree of

syntactic uniformity and regularity in the first stanza.

Now that we are familiar with the syntactic or

ganization of the first stanza, let us look at its

metric structure. The deviant lines of the poem are

lines 4, 5, and 17. As has been mentioned, these were

"corrected" for the second printing of the work in 1854.

One approach to the deviations, to their role in the

poem, is sometimes referred to as that of "impressionist

criticism." Within the context of the poem the move

ment of the lines suggests the mysterious movement of the

celestial spheres. There is definitely something in

this. ' And since the meaning of a poem cannot be para

phrased, there will always be a need for criticism that

attempts to put the inexpressible into words. Another

approach concludes that the poet probably felt the de

viations were necessary to avoid rhythmic rigidity. One

can only agree, or disagree, with the impressionistic

approach. But it is possible to show that, even with

out the deviant lines, rhythmic rigidity is avoided.

Here is a scansion of the second stanza. \

100

1 t t 7 X XX X XX XX 1 1 t 8 XX X X XXXX f 1 I 1 9 X X XX XXXX 1 t 1 10 X XXXX X X X f f t 11 X XXX X X X X « f 1 12 X XXXXXXX

Line 9 has four stressed syllables, the first line in

the poem to do so (lines 13 and 14 subsequently have

four). Speaking of intonation, lines 7—9 are questions.

Line 10, one of the most famous lines in Russian liter

ature, is different intonationally by being declarative,

and different metrically by carrying a stress in the

second foot, unlike lines 7 and 8 which feature a pyrrhic

in the second position. In addition, the poet makes use

of a rhythmic device permitted by the canon, the sub

stitution of a trochaic foot to open line 10.

The thesis of this analysis is that the deviations

from the metric canon function as a counterbalance to

the intensive parallelism of the poem's syntax as dis

tinguished from a mere avoidance of rigidity. In view

of the hyper-regularity of the first stanza's syntax,

it is not surprising that, of the three deviant lines,

two are in that stanza: 101

III ft* 4 xxxxxxxx Vstajut i zaxodjat one t i t i i %/1 5 xxxxxxxx Bezmolvno, kak zvezdy v noci

The third deviant line is line 17, a classic ex

ample of penultimate deviation before a closural return

to the norm. Something can be learned about the poem's

structure by comparing and contrasting this line with

its "correction." I I v ' * * ' Correction Dnevnye oslepjat luci xx xx x x xx i i ^ i i i i Original Dnevnye razgonjat luci xx xx xx xx

The correction preserves the word order of the original:

adjective — verb — noun. This cannot be preserved in

translation. The original "Daylight will drive [them]

away" becomes "Daylight will blind £ them] ." "Daylight"

is a composite of the adjective "dnevnye" ("day") and v the noun "luci" ("rays"). But this is not the main thing.

The most important difference between the versions is i phonetic. The stressed /o/ of "razgonjat" is lost on I the change to "oslepjat." The "o" beginning the

latter word is only there orthographically. In Russian

an "o" in a syllable preceding the stressed syllable in _ _ i a word is pronounced like £a] . The line "Bezmolvno, I v* kak zvezdy v noci" illustrates some other features of

Russian phonetics. The "o" following the stress in

"Bezmolvno" is not pronounced as M either, but as 102 schwa. The orthographic "e" in "zvezdy" is, however, pronounced like [o] because it is stressed and comes after a soft consonant and before a hard consonant.

The structural implication of having a real [o] in the penultimate line can be suggested by recalling a detail of a previous analysis, that of "Thus, in life there are moments — ." In that poem the penultimate line breaks the rhyme pattern. Like line 17 of "Si- lentiumi", it is a deviation before a return to the norm and closure. But at the same time, as was noted, the ending of the line recalls the last word of the first line:

» 1 Tak, v zizni est' mgnovenija — f V 15 Dremotoju obvejan ja

A sort of frame in key sounds is thus set up. This happens in "Silentium!" too. The key sound is [o] .

Examination shows that the occurrence of [o] in the poem is strictly regulated, and the location of allowed occur rences is strategically restricted. [o] is confined to two lines in the first stanza, is found in lines 8-10 of the second,makes an insignificant appearance in line

13, and that is all until the penultimate line. [o]occurs eleven times altogether. Four of these are found in the three deviant lines, and two others are in line 10: * V 1 * v ■ r T "Mysl' izrecennaja est' loz'." [oj is thus a sound- symbol of the mysterious inner life. This inner life N

103

is incompatible with the noisy, turbulent world outside.

The tension between inner and outward life is expressed

phoneticallyo The "phonetic diagram" of the poem

opposes to the vowel M and its allophone 03 • Only stressed occurrences are counted. The "diagram"

follows.

i 1 £ i

o o o i i i

o o o o £ O O i i i i 4 l i i £ o i i Figure 6

The concept of "inner" vs_. "outer" is furthered con

ceptually by the fact that the occurrences of 1 °3 are

surrounded by the occurrences of 03 • Because of the coordination of with deviations from the metric

canon and, on the other side, the connection of

with syntactic parallelism and stanzaic structure, the

organizational principle of this poem can be said to

parallel that of "Last Love." 104

FOOTNOTES— CHAPTER III

Pumpjanskij, 11-19. The “intensive method” is defined on page 11: C TJut£ev’s usual working methodj “should be called intensivnyj in the exact, non- conversational sense of the word, and in contrast to the extensive method of Pushkin's work, which always intends to conquer new areas of genre, theme, and style. Intensive poetic work, on the contrary, comparatively early and more or less im mediately finds its particular area (in the case of Tjut^ev the metaphysical interpretation of history and nature), narrows the number of signi ficant themes in this area, and develops this min imum o_f themes."

2 \ Mac Hammond, “Poetic Syntax” in Poetics. Poetyka, Poe- tika. (The Hauge, 1961), 482.

3I.S. Aksakov, Bioqrafija Fedora Ivanovica v Tjutceva v (Moscow, 1886), 320-321.

4 v B. Ja. Buxstab, in his introduction to the 1957 edition of Tjutcev's poetry (op.cit.) makes note (p. 47) of some instances of difficult syntax in Tjutcev. He cites the first line of "K N. N.“ with this clarification: “To est' ljubiS' i umee£* pritvorstvovat'.“ Buxstab says such syntax is an as pect of the archaic and declamatory style present in the poet's work. This is true, but misses the point as far as the present poem is concerned. The ambiguity of the syntax has a semantic relevance. It tells the reader not one, but two things. She does love. But also, she loves to dissemble. The theme of the poem involves the tension between these two kinds of loving. The Russian “K“ in the title is a preposition meaning “To." “N.“ and “N. N.“ has been translated to "X.“ and "X. X.“ to show that no “Natasha" or Natasha Nikolaevna: is meant.

^In an unpublished lecture at Masaryk University, Brno, 1935, Roman Jakobson said: “The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art: 105

it rules, determines, and transforms the re maining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure." Quoted from Readings in Russian Poetics: Forma list and Structuralist Views, L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, eds. (Boston, 1971), 82.

"but a day" as in: "Life is but a day;/A fragile dew- drop on its periolous way/From a tree's summit." — Keats.

^Poetic Closure, 113-114. O The Penguin Metaphysical Poets, Helen Gardner, ed. (Baltimore, 1966), 132-133.

9 A.C. Swinburne, Selections, R.H. Stoddard, ed. (New York, 1884), "Atalanta in Calydon," 11.

"^Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. (London, 1969), 111. The sentences quoted are di rectly followed by this statement: "(Notice that this is parallelism, not complete repetition, be cause although the rhythm is repeated, the actual sounds, of course, are not.)" It is the present writer's feeling that Lotman's concept of "to i ne to" renders the idea of "complete repetition" obsolete. Complete repetition is impossible be cause not only does a subsequent occurrence be come something new within the poetic structure, but the antecedent is also changed. Thus, in the pre sent study, recurrences that, to the eye or ear, may seem to be "complete repetitions" are treated as parallelisms. See Ju. M. Lotman, Lektsii po struktural1noi poetike: Vvedenie, teoriia stikha (Brown University Slavic Reprint V, 1968)", 73-74.

^These three are: "Son na more" ("Dream at Sea"), "Poslednjaja ljubov1" ("Last Love"), and "Silen- tium1"

12In the Moscow edition of 1886 the last line reads: V ' • • V » ( » ) "Blazenstvo ty i beznadeznost'." (x x x x x x i x x x), an arrangement designed to eliminate the \

106

hypermetrical fifth syllable of Tjutcev’s line.

■^Leech, Chapter 5: "Verbal Repetition."

"^Boris Unbegaun, Russian Versification (London, 1956) 90-91. This is a more satisfactory way of looking at the poem than considering it as primarily iambic with anapaestic substitutions. \

CHAPTER IV

Thought and Emotion

This chapter begins with a brief survey of Tjut- v cev's reputation as a "poet mysli," a "poet of thought"

or of "ideas." This survey is followed by a look at

certain emotional aspects of his lyrics. Then the re

lationship between thought and emotion in Tjutcev’s

poetry will be discussed, with the purpose of dis

covering the key to this relationship.

The term "poet of thought" has been used to de- v scribe Tjutcev, and by extension his poetry, for over

one hundred years. The term has become a tradition. It V has become "automatized," to use Viktor Sklovskij's

term. It is easy to use the term without really thinking

about its meaning. In the process of its development

it has lost most of whatever accuracy it may once have

had, and has become a separate entity in itself.

The term "poet of thought" seems to have three

major components which reflect both its origin and its

development. These components are: the relation of the y reputation to the biographical Tjutcev; the relationship 107 \

108

between the term "poet of thought" and the general in— v clination of Tjutcev*s poetry; the connection between y Tjutcev*s reputation and critical and scholarly inter

pretations of his poetry. Let us consider in turn

these three aspects of Tjutcev as a "poet of thought."

V Everyone who ever knew the biographical Tjutcev

agreed that he possessed a remarkable mind. His mental

gifts were discovered quite early, as was his literary

ability. Himself a poet, Tjutcev*s tutor, Simeon Egor-

ovic Raic, encouraged his pupil's interest in literature,

and at the age of fifteen Tjutcev became an honorary

member of the literary circle known as the "Society of

V V the Lovers of Russian Literature" ("Obscestvo ljubitelej

rossijskoj slovestnosti"). At about the same time Tju

tcev began to attend lectures at Moscow University, from

which he graduated "ahead of his class" at the age of

eighteen.

But by this time it was already clear that literary

societies were too formal for Tjutcev, and that the or

ganized system of university courses cramped his wide-

ranging and self-willed intellectual interests. He

received a grade of "excellent" on his final examination,

but his intellectual abilities were never again to re

veal themselves in a formal environment. The remarkable

scope of his knowledge, the acute penetration of which \

109

he was capable, thereafter made themselves known only

incidentally, in private conversation, in witty comment

ary on current events, in the "improvisations11 that made

him a celebrated figure in the salons of high society,

both in Munich, where he spent some twenty-two years,

and in St. Petersburg, where he lived from 1844 until his

death in 1873.

The polemical glitter of his political articles,

his conversational abilities, his amazing memory— these

were only superficial phenomena, only hints of an active

and by no means superficial psychic life. The sharpness

of Tjutcev's logic and the essential seriousness of his

intellectual concerns made themselves known, among other

places, in arguments with the German philosopher Schel- v 1 ling, with whom Tjutcev was acquainted in Munich.

It was the poet's son-in-law and biographer, Ivan

V Aksakov, who was most influential in connecting Tjutcev v and "thought." Describing Tjutcev's last years, Aksakov

notes that he preserved his mental acuity, his ability

to reason and argue in abstract terms, even when beset

by the infirmities of old age. The biographer ascribes

this to the fact that "The major, dominating element in

Tjutcev was thought— and thought in its very essence,

not so much eternally young as eternally mature; or, to

put it more exactly, thought that does not recognize \

110

2 age." The strength of this thought was revealed in

the stubbornness with which the poet, a victim of a

series of strokes, mentally clutched to life. Although

he was lying helpless on his death bed, writes Aksakov,

[My slitel'nostO The power of thought was in him an innate, essential element of life— and it was able to die away and did die away only atvthe last. [..J The first concern of Tjutcev, as soon as he began to regain con sciousness, was to feel for his mind Co scupat' svoj uml . To live meant, for him, to think, and with the first still feeble return of strength, his thought went into action, began to sparkle and glitter* as if regaling itself with its own vitality.

Those are some of the biographical components of y Tjutcev's reputation as a "poet of thought." Turning

our attention now to the general inclination of his

poetry, we find that it consistently turns toward phil-

' osophical considerations. If a poem begins with a def

inite situation or relationship, then it consistently

opens out, widening its scope toward the universal. An

example is the poem "To X." (page 65 ). There a par

ticular young girl's persecuted innocence leads to a

universalized statement about the fate of good in this

world, "the bottom of the terrible abyss." If a poem

begins with a wide view, its developemnt consistently

leads the reader deeper, to an essential deduction.

Such is the poem "Smotri, kak na recnom prostore" ("See

how on the river's expanse"), the complete text and \

111

4 translation of which can be found in the notes , page 134.

The first three stanzas of this poem describe ice floes

moving down a river in spring. Each has the same des

tination and fate: to melt and merge in the "fatal

abyss." The final stanza makes the essential statement: V v v 0 nasej mysli obol'scen'e, Ty ?eloveceskoe Ja, Ne takovo 1' tvoe znacen'e, Ne takova 1* sud'ba tvoja?

0 our thought's delusion, You, the human I, Is not that your significance, Is not that your fate?

Tjutcev's poetry in its philosophical aspect was

open to a wide range of definite and possible influences.

The name of Schelling has already been mentioned. It is y not known whether Tjutcev was familiar with Schopenhauer's

The World as Will and Representation, which appeared

in limited copies in 1818. He was, of course, well

versed in the French Enlightenment, while he is reported

to have known the Pensees by heart. From Raic he gained

a good basis in the classical thinkers, and we know that

he would harrass Schelling with the Apostle Paul. Turning

to poet-philosophers, Tjutcev's reverence for Goethe is

well known, while he was personally acquainted with the

Russian "Ijubomudry" ("Lovers of Wisdom"), and with the

work of the "Russian Hamlet," Baratynskij, another poet

who bears the title of a "poet of thought." These V

112

various influences and connections represent, in con— A junction with the marked philosophical bent of his poetry,

the second major component of Tjutcev1s reputation as a

"poet of thought."

The third component of the reputation we are sur

veying finds its origin in the work, of critics and scho

lars. Turgenev wrote an important article in 1854, the

year in which the first collection of Tjutcev's poems

appeared. Turgenev wrote: "If we are not mistaken,

each of his poems begins with a thought."*’ In 1859

the poet Afanasij Fet continued this line, observing

v that "in calling Tjutcev a 'poet of thought' we are V pointing to only the major characteristic of his poetic

nature." One feels that Lev Tolstoj must have had this

characteristic in view when he said why he preferred

Tjutcev to Pushkin. Pushkin, he granted, is wider, but v "as a lyric poet, Tjutcev is incomparably deeper than 7 Pushkin." Vladimir Solov'ev, who is generally acknow

ledged as the greatest Russian philosopher, contrasted

the breadth of Goethe to Tjutcev's depth:

Even Goethe did not, perhaps, grasp as profoundly as our poet the "dark root of universal life" Ctemnyj koren' mirovogo bytij Not even Goethe]J felt as strongly or was as clearly aware of that mysterious foundation of all life— of nature and ox man,— the founda tion upon which is based both the meaning of the cosmic processes and the fate of the human soul and the whole process of history. Here Tjutcev indeed stands forth as completely indi vidual, and if he is not unique, he is probably the most powerful fin g this sphere]! in all poetic literature. v v Solov’ev’s article on Tjutcev is a landmark in Tjutcev criticism. His discussion of the opposition between

"cosmos" and "chaos" indicated an affinity with Nie tzsche's opposition of Apollo and Dionysius. His hail- ing of Tjutcev as a metaphysical seer signaled the Syro va bolist discovery of Tjutcev as a forerunner and as a poet-philosopher.

At the same time that Turgenev was observing that v every poem of Tjutcev's begins with an idea, the journal

Panteon was attacking the same poetry in the name of logic, good sense, and the rules of Russian grammar.

The hostile critic saw "nelepost'" ("absurdity"),

"nevozmo^nost'" ("impossibility"), and "nesoobraznost'" w . ("incongruity") in such expressions as "gromokipjascij kubok" ("thunder-bubbling goblet"), "mglistyj polden'"

("misty" or "dark afternoon"), or the "sumra<£nyj svet" 9 ("twilight light") of stars. A specialized knowledge of the literary language of the period is needed to understand some of these objections. A knowledge of the specific context is required to realize the strangeness of others. For our purposes here, a survey of the emotional aspects of Tjutcev's verse, it is more expedient to cite a recent formulation of the relevant principle of word usage involved. Boris Buxstab writes: v Tjutcev's poetic word usage is connected with the aspiration to bring near, to merge human experiences with the "soul of nature." Fol lowing Zukovski^, but much more daringly and obviously, Tjutcev transfers the semantic center of the word onto its "emotional halo" C "emotsional'nyj oreol"],— sometimes even to the extent that the word's usage contra dicts its objective Qpredmetnyj^ meaning, something which Zukovskij avoided doing. ®

What Buxstab means is that certain words in Tjutcev's poetry, such as "sumrak" and "mgla," are inseparable from defininte emotional and psychological associations

The following poem provides some examples of the "emo tional halo:"

v Tixoj noc'ju, pozdnim letom, Kak na nebe zvezdy rdejut, Kak pod sumracnym ix svetom Nivy dremljuscie zrejut... Usypitel'no-bezmolvny Kak blestjat v tisi nocnoj Zolotistye ix volny, Ubelennye lunoj... (23 July 1849)

In the still of the night, in late summer, How the stars glow in the sky, How, under their dusky light, The slumbering cornfields ripen... Drowsily-silent, How shine in the night's stillness Their golden waves, Whitened by the moon...

The emotional halo is dominant in the combination v referring to the stars' "dusky light," "sumracnyj svet V

115

and also in the phrase "Usypitel'no-bezmolvny" ("Drowsily-

silent"). These are the emotional keys to the poem, the

tones by which its mood is established. The phrase

"Usypitel’no-bezmolvny" produces a synesthetic im

pression.^^ That is, "silent" seems to pertain to the

sense of hearing, but actually refers to the golden

color of the waves of corn. The whole phrase "Usy- • i pitel'no-bezmolvny" seems to refer to how the corn

fields "shine" ("blestjat"), but it also imparts a ver

bal connotation to the noun "waves" ("volny"), de

scribing their swaying, rhythmic undulations both fig

uratively, by means of words used in a metaphoric sense,

and onomatopoeically, the rhythm of the line suggesting

such motion. This rhythm is in keeping with the con

notations of "Usypitel* no" that refer to hypnotism and

entrancement. These connotations make the word "two

dimensional." On the one hand, it presents sleep as

a dying down of activity, while in its other dimension

it denotes the mysterious life that quickens at night,

describing, perhaps, the ripening of the corn under the

enchanting moon.

The analysis of this particular poem would be

incomplete without some attention to this question:

how are the emotional and psychological associations

just noted integrated into the poetic text? How is the N

116

light of the ’’emotional halo" diffused throughout the

poem? Study of the sound patterns of the poem shows

that the vowel /u/ plays the major role in this dif

fusion. /u/ is not reduced when unstressed, and appears

four times in the poem, each time in words whose "emo

tional halo" dominates over their "objective meaning:" v "sumracnyj svet, " "Usypitel'no-bezmolvny," and "Ube-

lennye lunoj" in the final line. The emotional con

notations we discussed above become attached to the sound

£u} over the course of the poem. The appearance of two

sounds in the poem's final line signals the cul

mination point of the piece, the high-point in the the

matic development of the mood.

Fet did not miss the emotional, irrational side of

Tjutcev's verse, remarking that he is "not rarely fan

ciful and capricious." As for Lev Tolstoj, there are a

number of instances recorded of his being moved to tears

by Tjutcev's poetry. One feels that there must be a

y connection between Tolstoj's preference for Tjutcev

over all other Russian poets for most of his life and

the emotive theory of art expounded in his What is Art?

If Tolstoj was moved to tears by Tjutcev, the poet and

critic Nikolaj Nekrasov had more elaborate ways to ex- v press the emotional charge latent in a Tjutcev poem.

Nekrasov said that he could not read the last lines of 1 1 7

"Kak okean ob'emlet sar zemnoj" ("As the ocean embraces the earthly sphere”) without feeling an "involuntary shudder” run down his spine, while he compared the sen sation produced by a reading of "Autumn Evening” ("Est' v svetlosti osennix vecerov") to that experienced by a young man sitting at the bedside of a beautiful, dying 12 young girl with whom he is in love. Of course, this tells us at least as much about Nekrasov as it tells v us about Tjutcev's poetry.

The application of the formal method to the study of Tjutcev's poetry brought to light secrets of the emotional side of his poetry that previous readers had felt intuitively. Andrej Belyj found that Tjutcev's rhythmic profile is the "richest" of the nineteenth- century Russian poets. It can be generalized that this rhythmic variety enhances the emotional expressiveness of the verse. The restoration of the "deviant" lines \ made this richness even more striking. Ejxenbaum's description of Tjut^ev as a "poet of exclamations" and an "oratorical" lyric poet pointed to other important emotional properties of his poetry. Tynjanov developed the idea of the "microscopic ode" as an indication of the eighteenth-century side of Tjutcev's heritage, and as a conceptual explanation of the expressive force of his lyric: the expressive powers of foregrounded V

118

elements are assimilated and relatively neutralized in

the "large form" of the ode. In the "small form" of

the lyric their expressive force is enhanced.

In the opening chapter's description of the tex

ture of Tjutcev's lyric poetry it was mentioned that he

will use the rare (in Russian) present tense form of the

verb "to be," "est'}" a form generally reserved for sci

entific or philosophical writing. The form is found also v in Derzavin's monumental philosophical poem "Vodopad,"

"The Waterfall," a work of the "large form," consisting

of seventy four six-line stanzas. But it appears there 13 only once, in stanza 34:

0! slava, slava v svete sil'nyxi Ty toXno est' sej vodopad.

0! glory, glory of the world's powerful! You are exactly like this waterfall.

This is the first declarative statement of the poem's

philosophical theme. The use of the form "est'" em

phasizes the philosophical concerns of the poet. Note

too that these important lines are situated in almost the

center of the poem, being lines 199-200. "Est'" is fore

grounded, but its effect is inevitably reduced by the

immensity of the poem's four hundred forty four lines,

and also relatively neutralized by the fact that it is

commensurate with the dominating philosophical theme of

the work. 119

It follows from the size difference alone that

"est*" makes a greater impression in the following poem

by Tjut^ev, which is four hundred thirty nine lines

shorter than Derzavin's "The Waterfall."

V razluke est* vysokoe znac^en'e: Kak ni ljubi, xot' den' odin, xot' vek, Ljubov' est' son, a son — odno^mgnoven'e, I rano l 1, pozdno 1* probuzden'e, A dolmen nakonec prosnut'sja £elovek... (6 August 1851)

In separation there is a lofty meaning: No matter how you love, be it a single day, or an age, Love is a dream, and a dream — an instant, And whether sooner, or later, an awakening, And one must finally wake up...

,,Est,l, appears twice in these five lines, while it ap peared only once in "The Waterfall." But size is not

the only thing contributing to the effect of "est'"

in Tjutcev's poem. As was mentioned in the first chapter,

the philosophical and logical coloration of "est*" clashes with the emotional aspects of the lyric. In

the poem just quoted, "est'" is juxtaposed with "razluka"

("separation"), an emotionally-charged word and one belonging to a non-philosophical poetic tradition. The opening "est'" indicates the philosophical slant given

to a traditionally lyric theme. The tension between rationalism and emotion is the key to the effect of the whole poem.

Another good example of tension between thought \

120

and emotion is found in the opening line of a poem v that was discussed on pages 24-29, "Pervucest' est' v

morskix volnax" ("There is melody in the sea waves")*

Note that this tension is built into the juxtaposed V 14 words themselves: "Pervucest1 est1." It will be

recalled that the theme of this poem is the dissonance

between man and nature. Implicit in the tension between

"Pervucest*" and "est*" is the answer to the question:

"Why does the 'thinking reed' complain?" That is, the

dissonance between man and nature is the result of man's

misguided attempt to rationalize. In this poem, as v elsewhere, Tjutcev is advocating an irrational phil

osophy. v Speaking of philosophy, and of Tjutcev as a "poet

of ideas," we should note that in his important essay

of 1928, L.V. Pumpjanskij states that Tjutcev did not

devise an original philosophical system, and mentions v some of the trends that are combined in Tjutcev's poetry, 15 for instance Slavophilism and Neo-Platonism. In his v biography of Tjutcev, Aksakov tells us that Tjutcev

understood Slavophilism in his own, unorthodox, way.

y K.V. Pigarev notes that "Tjutcev cannot be said to

express a consistent philosophy in his verse."1^

Richard Gregg summarizes the philosophical approaches

by which Tjutcev has been interpreted and concludes X

121

that Tjutcev can only be considered a "philosopher” if

the philosophical contradictions in his views are 17 suppressed. Thus, it appears that the tensions between

thought and emotion found in his poetry were mirrored v m Tjutcev’s life.

The presence of "est1” in a lyric poem is one

possible source of tension between thought and emotion.

Another form of tension between logic and feeling is

based on the relationship between structure and content.

The most extreme example of this mode of tension in v Tjutcev’s poetry is provided by the following poem: v Ne paz ty slysala priznan'e: ”Ne stoju ja ljubvi tvoej." Puskaj moe ona sozdan’e — No kak ja beden pered nej...

Pered ljuboviju tvoeju Mne bol'novvspomnit' o sebe — Stoju, molcu, blagogoveju I poklonjajusja tebe...

Kogda, poroj, tak umilenno, S takoju veroj i mol'boj Nevol'no klonis' ty koleno Pred kolybel'ju dorogoj, y Gde spit ona — tvoe rozden'e — Tvoj bezymennyj xeruvim, — Pojmi i i ty moe smiren’e Pred serdcem ljubjaSEim tvoim. (1851) More than once you have heard my admission: ”1 am not worthy of your love.” Granted, it is my creation -jr- But how poor I am ^before iiQ in comparison... V

122

In front of your love It is painful for me to think of myself — I stand, I keep silent, I revere And bow in worship before you...

When, at times, so touchingly, With such faith and supplication Involuntarily you bend your knee Before the dear cradle.

Where she sleeps — given birth by you — Your nameless cherubim, — Understand then also my humility Before your loving heart.

The content here is an emotional one. Scholars have

used biographical evidence to find that the baby in the

poem is Tjutcev's first child by his mistress, E.A. Den

is' eva. The poem was written before the child was 18 christened: she was still a "nameless Cherubim."

The speaker also speaks of his love in emotional terms,

for instance: "I am not worthy of your love," "It is

painful for me to think of myself," "I bow in worship

before you," and so on. Yet the emotions here are

strongly checked by the precision of the poem's struc

ture, the exactitude of the correspondences that are

set up. He bows in worship before her. The verb "po-

klonjat'sja" ("to worship") is related to the verb

"klonit'sja," "to bow," which is what she does in line.11.

Thus, he kneels before her, and she bows before the

cradle. Her love is, he says his creation, while she

has given birth to the child. Note the similarity be- i tween the Russian words involved, "sozdan'e" and \

123

"roaden'e." In addition, the word "ljubov'" (”loven)

is feminine in Russian, as is the child, thus allowing:

3 Puskaj moe ona sozdan'e Granted, _it is my creation

13 Gde spit ona — tvoe rozden'e — Where she sleeps — given birth by you — Cliterally "your birth.0

v The italics in line 13 are Tjutcev’s. There are other

quite obvious parallels: it is painful for him to

think about himself (line 6), while she kneels "Nevol’no,"

("involuntarily," "without thinking"). The exactitude

with which the elements click into place clashes with

the emotional side of the poem. The question of balance

in this tension is a matter of judgement. To the pre

sent reader it seems that thought dominates over feeling,

even to the extent that the logical exactitude of the

correspondences stiffens the emotion. In the concluding

sections of this chapter we will see that overbalance v to the side of logic is not characteristic of Tjutcev’s

lyric poetry. What is characteristic is the reverse:

an overbalance to the emotional side.

T.S. Eliot’s concept of the "objective correlative"

has been much discussed and debated, defended, and tell

ingly attacked. In the following discussion let us take

the concept as it was first introduced by Eliot. In

this shape it can serve as a useful tool toward the \

124

understanding of the relation between thought and V emotion in Tjutcev's poetry. In a passage that F.O. 19 Matthiessen called a locus classicus of criticism,

Eliot defines the "objective correlative." It is:

a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.20

In "More than once you have heard my admission" we

found what is almost a maximized correspondence between

object and emotions. After reading that poem, one has

only to think of the cradle in order to evoke all the

emotions of the poem. Now, as was mentioned, "More than y once..." is not typical of Tjutcev in this regard.

Object and emotion are usually not to tightly fused.

And usually emotion dominates over its objectification.

On the basis of his initial conception of the objective

correlative, Eliot would say that in the poetry of the

"essential Tjutcev" a "dissociation of sensibility"

has occured. In the history of English literature,

says Eliot, such a dissociation took place in the early

eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, he says,

thought and feeling were simultaneous: "A thought to

Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility."

He "felt [his] thought as immediately as the odour of

a rose," and objectified it in the objective correlative. 125

Poets after the "dissociation, " on the other hand, 21 "thought and felt by fits, unbalanced." Of course, he does not mean that everything in the seventeenth century was automatically balanced. He finds, for instance, that Hamlet is unbalanced: the emotions of 22 the play are "in excess of the facts as they appear."

Given what has been said about the balance between v thought and emotion in Tjutcev, it should not be sur prising that, when Gregg looks for objective correlatives in Tjutcev, he most often finds an excess of emotion instead. Here is a poem, followed by Gregg's obser vation to this effect.

Vecer mqlistyj i nenastnyj... £u, ne Savoronka 1* glas?.. Ty li, utra gost' prekrasnyj, 4 V etot pozdnij, mertvyj cas? Gibkij, rezvyj, zvucno-jasnyj 6 V &tot mertvyj, pozdnij cas, Kak bezum' ja smex uzasnyj, On vsju dusu mne potrjas'!.. (1836)

An evening misty and nasty... Hark, isn't that a skylark's call? Is it you, morning's splendid guest, 4 At this late, dead hour? Limber, lively, sonorously-clear 6 At this dead, late hour, Like a terrible laugh of madness It has shaken my whole soul!..

Gregg finds that the lines "fail to communicate fully because of a breach in thought and feeling between the middle and final parts. Specifically: the song of the \

126

lark on a cold misty night is certainly an anomalous

event; but the emotions described in the final lines

seem out of all proportion to the facts which elicit 23 them"

A number of questions arise from the matters at

hand. Questions of evaluation and aesthetic judgement

are involved. For instance, is the lack of an objective

correlative a mark of aesthetic failure. Gregg seems

to think so. He takes the lack of an objective corrsl-

ative to be a sign that the poet has lost control of his

material. Some readers might agree with that; others

will disagree. It is beyond the scope of the present

study to decide the question on aesthetic grounds, that

is, by developing a theory of aesthetic evaluation.

What can be done here, however, is to show that the

poet is, indeed, in control of his material and that

this "excess" of emotion is planned and calculated.

Because of this planning, what might be a weakness in v some poets is, under Tjutcev's control, a source of

strength, originality, and expressive power.

We can see Tjutcev's control over this excess of

emotion in the consistency with which he uses a par

ticular device to bring the "excess" about. This de

vice will be called an "intensifier." An "intensifier,"

quite simply, makes something more intense. The usual \

127

way to make an adjective more intense is to raise it

in degree. Does this mean that every comparative or

superlative is an "intensifier?” No. An "intensifier”

is a device. It is therefore identified not only by

what it is, but also, and mainly, by what it does. The

following poem provides an example of what intensifiers

in Tjutcev's poetry do.

Kogda, v krugu ubijstvennyx zabot Nam vse merzit— izizn*, kak kamnej gruda, Lezit na nas,— vdrug, znaet bog otkuda, Nam na du^u otradnoe doxnet, Minuv^im nas obveet i obnimet I strasnyj gruz minutno pripodnimet.

Tak inogda, osenneju poroj, Kogda polja uz pusty, rosci goly, 9 Blednee nebo, pasmurnee doly, Vdrucj vetr poduet, teplyj i syroj , Opavsij list pogonit pred soboju I du^u nam obdast kak by vesnoju... (22 September 1849)

When, within the sphere of our murderous cares Everything disgusts us— and life, like a pile of stones, Lies on top of us,— suddenly, god knows from where, On our souls comfort breathes, With the past it fans and embraces us And the dreadful weight it temporarily raises.

Thus, sometimes, in autumn, When the fields are already bare, the groves are naked, 9 The sky is more pallid, the distance is more gloomy, Suddenly a wind comes up, warm and moist, A fallen leaf it drives before it And it seems that it pours spring over our souls... \

1 2 8

In this poem life is presented in the gloomiest

terms possible. In the first stanza the speaker com

pares life to a pile of stones under which he is buried

alive; this is a cairn, an image for a tombstone. The

second stanza translates the living death into seasonal

terms. The time is late autumn. Everything is bare

and dead. The "intensifiers" are found in line 9: the

sky is not just colorless or pale, but, "more pallid;*1

the dales are not just bleak, but "more gloomy.*' It

is at this point of greatest intensity that the opposite

is called up— spring.

"Intensifiers,” then, follow a "logic of opposites."

In bringing the emotions of the poem to the highest pitch,

they signal a switch to the opposite. In the poem just

cited, the "intensifiers" took a grammatical form, the

comparatives of line 9. In "An evening misty and nasty,"

which was quoted a few pages earlier, the intensifiers

take the form of a rhetorical figure, "antistroph,"

the repetition of terms in reverse order: (•..a...b...) 24 (...b...a..•). Line 4 reads: "At this late, dead

hour?" and line 6 reverses this to : "At this dead,

late hour." These echoing lines intensify the effect of

the bird's clear call, leading to the poem's "one step

beyond" the facts as they appear.

Let us look at the poem below with the purpose of 129 examining the consequences of intensifiers for the whole poetic structure.

v Den' i noc'

Na mir tainstvennyj duxov, Nad etoj bezanoj bezymjannoj, Pokrov nabrosen zlatotkanyj Vysokoj voleju bogov. 5 Den' — sej blistatel'nyj pokrov — Den', zemnorodnyx oîvlen'e, Dusi boljaêj iscelen'e, 8 Drug Xelovekov i bogov! y No merknet den’ — nastala noc'; Pri^la, i s mira rokovogo Tkan' blagodatnuju pokrova Sorvav, otbrasyvaet proc*... I bezdna nam obnaêna S svoimi straxami i mglami, I net pregrad mez ej i nami — Vot otcego nam noc* strasna! (1839)

Over the mysterious world of spirits, Over that nameless abyss, A veil is thrown, of gold brocade, By the exalted will of the gods. 5 Day is this resplendent veil — Day, the reanimation of the earth-born, The ailing soul's healing, 8 Friend of men and gods!

But day darkens — it is night; It has come, and from the fatal world The blessed fabric of the veil It has torn away and thrown back... And the abyss is exposed to us With its terrors and darkness, And there is no barrier between it and us — That is why night is terrifying to us!

The intensifiers are represented by the "intensive parallelism" of lines 5-8. The poem is written in iambic pentameter. The first foot of lines 5, 6, and 8 is 130 reversed (a trochaic substitution or "xorijamb") to give the lines greater emphasis. In each case the stress falls on a one-syllable word beginning with the sound£d3-

The lines are written in the "high style,” in archaic diction that does not come through in translation.

These are elements designed to give added force to the syntactic parallelism of the lines.

Turning to the second stanza, we note that the last line, "That is why night is terrifying for us," is cited by Ejxenbaum as being a "prosaism," an oratorical 25 turn of phrase. Pumpjanskij is more specific, seeing v in the line the influence of Tjutcev*s readings in Ger man philosophy, the line being, he claims, a paraphrase 26 of the German phrase "Darum ist...." Whether or not we agree with these appraisals of the line, the contrast is clear between the poetic "pokrov zlatotkannyj" ("veil of gold brocade"), line 3, and "I net pregrad" ("And there is no barrier"), line 15. If one views the theme of the entire poem in terms of a contrast between lan guage levels, one comes to the question: What allows the poem to keep its balance when the most emphatic part of the poem, lines 5-8, is the part where the ornate, poetic language is concentrated? These lines cause us to see day as artifice, a resplendent embroidery recalling the "pletenie sloves*," ("weaving of words"), \

131

the ornate style of fifteenth-century Russian church

writing. Against the ornate language listing the day's

attributes, the short, prosaic and generalized state

ment that night is exposed "With its terrors and dark

ness" stands out in sharp relief. It acquires an ex

pressive power far in excess of what it says seman

tically. What has happened is that the ornate, glit

tering description of day, in being so impressive, has

foregrounded simplicity. A statement that would be

flat in an uncharged context, the statement that night

has come "With its terrors and darkness,” here acquires

great power. Lines 5-8, the "intensifier" with which

we began, have by their very expressiveness conjured

up an opposing force.

Let us now recall the statement by Turgenev that

was quoted earlier. He said that "every poem of Tjut-

<£ev's begins with a thought." The question now is: v Given the characteristic excess of emotion in Tjutcev's

lyrics, what happens to this thought after the begin

ning? What happens is that the initial thought is

consistently filtered through the emotive design of the

poem, a transformational process that changes the idea

into its opposite. Much attention will be devoted to

showing how this works in subsequent chapters. The

present chapter will close with a brief demonstration of 132 how the ’’logic of opposites” leads to the initial idea of "Mai'aria" ("Infected Air"). v Ljublju sej bozij gnev! Ljublju sie, nezrimo Vo vsem razlitoe, tainstvennoe Zlo — ^ V cvetax, v istocnike prozra^nom kak steklo, I v raduznyx lucax, i v samom nebe Rima. 5 Vse ta z vysokaja, bezoblacnaja tverd', Vse tak ?a grud* tvoja legko i sladko dysit, Vse tot ze teplyj vetr verxi derev kolyset, 8 Vse tot ze zapax roz, i eto vse — est' Smert*!..

Kak vedat*, mozet byt' i est1 v prirode zvuki, Blagouxanija, cveta i golosa, v Predvestniki dlja nas poslednego casa I usladiteli poslednej na^ej muki. I imi-to Sudeb poslannik rokovoj, Kogda synov Zemli iz zizni vyzyvaet, Kak tkan'ju legkoju avoj obraz prikryvaet, Da utait ot nix prixed uzasnyj svoj!

I love this wrath of God! I love this invisibly Poured into everything, mysterious Evil — In flowers, in the spring transparent as glass, And in the rainbow-colored rays, and in the very sky of Rome. 5 Still the same lofty, cloudless firmament, Still in the same way your bosom lightly and sweetly breathes, Still the same warm wind sways the tops of the trees, 8 Still the same scent of roses, and all this — is Death!..

How can one know, perhaps there are also in nature sounds, Fragrances, colors and voices, Portents for us of the last hour And sweeteners of our final agony. And by means of them the fatal emissary of the Fates, When he summons the sons of Earth from life, Covers his image as if with a light cloth, Yea he hides from them his terrible arrival! (1830) What is this "wrath of God" to which the speaker re fers? To suggest an answer to this question, not the same thing as an analysis of the poem, let us look for the "intensifiers" of the poem. Recalling "Day and

Night," we look, and find the intensifiers in the in tensive parallelism of lines 5-8. What is the emphasis of these lines? Permanence. "Still the same...Still in the same way...Still the same.. .Still the same...'*

"What does this obsession with permanence reveal in terms of the "logic of opposites?" It reveals a pre occupation with time and its passing. The preoccupa tion is betrayed in the second stanza by the various references to time: "the last hour," "the final agony,

"the last call from life." The speaker stresses the permanence of the beauties found under the sky of the

"eternal city" because he is obsessed with their muta bility. The question is, then,why does the speaker say that he loves time, which has infused all things with its poison of inevitable decay and death. The answer, a familiar one in romantic literature, is that the beauty of things lies in their very mutability. FOOTNOTES— CHAPTER IV

1See Gregg, 76-77; 9.

^Aksakov, 292.

3Ibid., 310.

4 V Smotri, kak na recnom prostore, Po sklonu vnov^yoziv!ix vod, Vo vseob^emljuscee more , , L*dina za l'dinoju plyvet. x x x x y Na solQce 1' raduzno blistaja, II* noc’ju v p^zdnej temnote, No vse, neizbezimo taja, Oni plyvut k odnoj mete. v Vse vmeste — malye, bol'sie, Utrativ preznij obraz svoj, Vse — bezrazli?ny, kak stixija, — Sol*jutsja s bezdnoj rokovoj!..

v v v 0 nasej mysli obol'scen'e, Ty, £elove£eskoe Ja, Ne takovo 1’ tvoe znacen'e , Ne takova 1* sud'ba tvoja? (1851)

See 'how on the river’s expanse, As the newly awakened waters descend Into the all-embracing sea, Ice floe after ice floe floats.

Whether glittering gladly in the sun Or at night in the late darkness, They are all, inevitably melting, Floating to the same end.

All together — little, great, Having lost the former shape, All — identical, like the elements Flow together into the fatal abyss 1. 135

O our thought’s delusion, You, the human I, Is not that your significance, Is not that your fate?

5 v I.S. Turgenev, quoted from "Osobennosti soderzani^a i formy poezii Tjutceva," Fedor,Ivanovic Tjutcev: Ego zizn' i socinenija. Sbornik istoriko-liter- aturnyx statej. ed., V. Pokrovskij (Moscow, 1904), 47.

C y A.A. Fet, "0 stixotvoreni j ax F. Tjutceva," Russkoe slovo No. 2 (1859), 75.

7Quoted in D. Blagoj, "Citatel' Tjutceva -- Lev Tolstoj," Urania, 238.

®Vladimir Solov'ev, "Poezija F.I. Tjutceva," Vestnik Evropy 2 (1895)736-752.v Here quoted from **Vozvysennoe v poezii Tjutceva," Fedor Ivanovx£ Tjutcev: Ego zizn' i socinenija, 33.

^Panteon, 17 (1854), No. 10 (October), 20-21. Summarized by Pigarev, 142-143, and by D. Blagoj in "Genial'- nyj russkij lirik," Literatura i dejstvitel*nost1 (Moscow, 1959), 454.

^Buxstab, Russkie poety (Leningrad, 1970), 54-55.

^William Coates, Tjutcev and Germany: The Relation of his Poetry to German Literature and Culture (Harvard University unpublished dissertation, 1950), 127, sees the influence of German Romanticism in Tjutcev's use of synesthesia.

12Nikolaj Nekrasov in "Kartiny priroda v stixotvorenijax Tjutceva," Fedor Ivanovic Tjutcev: Ego %izn' i socinenija, 22.

^G.R. Derzavin, Stixotvorenija (Leningrad, 1957), 184.

14 v This was pointed out to me by Professor Frank R. Sil- bajoris. ■^Pumpjanski j , 32ff.

■^Pigarev, 208-210.

Gregg, 23—2G.

18 See Pigarev's notes to the 1957 edition, 358.

^F.O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.5. Eliot fl (New York, 1969), 58.

2®T.S. Eliot, "Hamlet and his Problems" ^ 1 9 1 9 ) , Se- lected Essays, New Edition (New York, 1964)/ 124-125.

21Ibid., "The Metaphysical Poets £l92ll ," 247.

22Ibid., "Hamlet," 125.

23Gregg, 155.

24 Leech A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, 82.

25' Ejxenbaum, 400.

2^Pumpjanskij, 26. CHAPTER V

Logic and Structure

In this chapter the two main types of poetic v structure taken by Tjutcev's lyrics are discussed. The first type of structure is called the "logical struc ture," while the second follows the "logic of opposites.

The chapter closes with a consideration of the connec tion between poetic structure and poetic statement.

The word "logical" is here understood to apply to that which "follows as a reasonable inference or natural consequence."'1' A logical structure is, quite simply, one in which the elements follow one another as one would expect them to. And the interrelationships between the elements are what one would expect them to be. The interrelationships exhibit the property which Kenneth Burke once called "piety: the sense of 2 what properly goes with what." The fact that the re lationships are "expected" and "natural" has various consequences for the poetic structure. Among these is a marked tendency away from overt statement: be cause relationships follow natural logic, the poet does not feel the need to explain things to the reader. Im agery is primarily based on likeness, either inherent 137 138 likeness (in its extreme the archetype), or likeness established by contiguity. It would follow that such poetry inclines more toward an even than toward an un even texture. In terms of effect, this is a subtle poetry when handled properly. When it fails, it is because the "expected" has become the obvious, and

"piety" has become a cliche.

Analysis will show that the following poem is an example of logical structure.

Ja pomnju vremja zolotoe, Ja pomniu serdcu milyj kraj: Den' vecerel; my byli dvoe; Vnizu, v teni, Jsumel Dunaj.

5 I na xolmu, tam, gde, beleja, Ruina zamka vdal' gljadit, Stojala ty, mladaja feja, 8 Na rmSistyj oper^is' granit, v Nogoj mladenceskoj kasajas' Oblomkov grudy vekovoi; I solnce medlilo, pros^ajas* 12 S xolmom, i zamkom, i toboj.

I veter tixij mimoletom Tvoej odezdoju igral I s dikix jablon’ cvet za cvetom 16 Na pleci junye sveval.

Ty bezzabotno vdal' gljadela... Kraj neba dymno gas v luc£ax; Den' dogoral; zvucnee pela 20 Reka v pomerk^ix beregax. y I ty s veselost'iu bespecnoj St^astlivyj provozala den'; I sladko zizni bystrotecfnoj 24 Nad nami proletala ten1. (between 1834-1836) V

139

I remember a golden time, I remember a land dear to the heart: Day was becoming evening; we were together; Belov/, in shadows, was the sound of the Danube.

And on the hill, there, where, whitening, The castle's ruin looks into the distance, You stood, fairy-like, Leaning on the mossy granite,

Touching v/ith your youthful foot The ancient mass of the ruins; And the sun lingered, bidding farewell To the hill, and the castle, and you.

And the quiet wind in passing Played with your clothes And made blossom after blossom of the wild apple trees Fall on your young shoulders.

You without a care looked into the distance... The edge of the sky was going out smokily in rays; Day was burning out: louder sang The river between the darkened banks.

And you in carefree gaiety Were seeing off the happy day; And sweetly fast-flov/ing life's Shadow flew by over us.

In this poem the landscape combines the roles of setting

and theme, the theme being the metaphorical foregrounding

of certain elements against the gackground of nature.

The subject of the poem is stated in the first line:

this is a lyric remembrance of the past, a memory from

a "golden time.” Its theme, to be more exact, is the

persistent passing of time, time's incessant work of

erosion, and the fragility of the moment. That fra

gility is underscored here, of course, by the fact that

the moment described in the poem is already only a memory. V

140

A look at the rhythmic organization of the v/ork

finds that two lines in the poem have initial pyrrhic

feet, lines 5 and 17. And, a parallelism links lines 6

and 17:

5 I na xolmu, tarn, gde,beleja, 6 Ruina zamka vdal* gljadit

.17 Ty bezzabotno vdal’ gljadela...

5 And on the hill, there, where, whitening, 6 The castle's ruin looks into the distance

17 You without a care looked into the distance...

A comparison is set up between the ruins and the girl

by means of the similarity between the second hemistiches

of lines 6 and 17. Further analysis will show of what

this comparison (and contrast) consists. The pyrrhic

feet seem to be a reaction to the concepts developed

in the lines preceding them. Line 4, for instance,

speaks of the sound of the moving river, and of the

shadow, which as we know from line 3, is the shadow

of approaching evening. The accelerated first hemi

stich of line 5, and then the deliberately choppy move

ment of the other hemistich ("there, where,..."), re

presents in this context a determined breaking away

from the pure iambic tetrameter of line 4. In terms

of the metaphors involved, line 5 is fighting against

the current of time that is rushing by in the guise of

the river below. The opposition of "Below" (line 4) 141

to the hill which the speaker indicates using the em

phatic "there, where," is a purposeful part of the

speaker*s resistence against time.

Stanzas three and four are rhythmic twins. That

is, of their eight lines, seven have a pyrrhic third

foot. There are no other matching stanzas in the poem.

* The exception to the rhythmic norm of stanzas three and

four is line 15: "And from the wild apple trees blossom i i t after blossom" ("I s dikix jablon* cvet za i cvetom"), a pure iambic line. This is an attractive

picture: the wind ruffling her dress, the white rain

of apple blossoms in the passing breeze. It is also a

metaphor for the passing of time. In stanza three time

seems to be balanced by means of the contact, basically

a contrast, between her "youthful foot" and the "ancient

pile" of the ruins. And, as line 11 tells us, the sun

"was lingering" ("medlilo"), "medlit'" being a verb

with a root meaning "slow," and which can also mean "to

slow down." In contrast to the balancing and slowing

of time's progress in stanza three, the initial pyrrhic

foot in line 13 represents an acceleration. The "quiet

wind" is replaced by the river, which sings "louder"

now. This increase in the volume of the river's "song"

is a function of the passing of time: with the coming

of evening the other sounds have died down. Thus, in 142 contrast, the sound of the river seems louder. Now not just the region "below," but also the hilly banks are in shadow. Lines 18-19 describe the end of day in terms of a candle going out. Line 19 shows an initial trochaic i • foot ("xorijamb"): "Den1 dogoral" ("Day was burning i out"). This rhythm connects the line with line 3: "Den' v * vecerel" ("Day was becoming evening"). The latter line can be seen as describing a more gradual process in that movement seems to be from a primary state (day) to an intermediate (evening); but "Day was burning out" seems to indicate passage from one primary (day) to the other

(night). ^t follows from this conception that the progress made by time in eighteen lines has reduced the alternatives, making oppositions sharper and the moment more defined and terminal. The use of the word "kraj" also works to this end. The word appears twice in the poem. At the end of line 2, it means "land:" 11 Ja pomnju serdcu milyj kraj" ("I remember a land dear to the heart"). This memory is strongest in stanzas two through four. But, by stanza five, the increased pro gress of time has moved the day to the region of smoky sunset, and memory with it. The second appearance of

"kraj" is in a situation commensurate with the temporal fragility of a sunset, and also with a sunset's ex pressive force. The one-syllable word has moved from 143 its strong, final position in the pure iambics of line 4 i to the weaker initial position before "neba." "Kraj" is thus foregrounded, and not in the meaning of "land" this time, but in the meaning of "edge." The land of the memory is thus burning out, already distant, on the horizon.

The youth of the girl is contrasted to the age of the ruined castle. But this contrast seems to point to similarities too: the way the castle is described as

"whitening" might be thought of as anticipating apple blossoms, which would imply that, just as the castle passed into a ruin, so she will pass into a memory. The memory of such an ephemeral a thing as a "fairy" con trasts with the way "granite" is remembered. But if granite is the more permanent for being the more material,

"gold," in the emotional, not metallic, sense, is more dear. The poem, with its contrast between the girl’s carefree unawareness and the speaker’s preoccupation with mutability, ends, it seems, with the recognition that in its very transciency is the moment's "sweetness:"

"And sweetly fast-flowing life's/Shadow flew by over us." The poem thus concludes by closing a full spatial circle. The shadow that was "Below" in line 3, and which rises to cover the banks in line 2 0 , flies by v "above" in the last line. The adjective "bystrotecnaja" 144 in "fast-flowing life" makes the connection between time and the river more explicit.

A river, of course, is an archetypal metaphor for time. The way it fits into the logical structure just examined may be summarized by borrowing the fol lowing sentences from an essay by W.K. Wimsatt:

The metaphor in fact is scarcely noticed by the main statement of the poem. Both tenor and vehicle, furthermore, are wrought in a parallel process out of the same material. The river landscape is both the occasion of reminiscence and the source of the metaphors by which remin iscence is described. 3

It is interesting to note that "I remember a golden time" and "Mai*aria” come to the same conclusion: that the beauty of things lies in their mutability. They come to this conclusion in different ways, "I remember.." via a structure of "natural" logic, "Mal'aria” by means of a logic of opposites. In the poem just analyzed, thought and image "are wrought in a parallel process;" in "Malaria” they stand perpendicular to each other.

The idea of "Mal'aria" cannot be reasonably inferred from the poem's insistence on the permanence of things.

It is a poem of paradox, of heightened contrast. "I remember a golden time" is a poem based on comparison.

The connection between the passing breeze and passing time, like that between a river and time, follows

"natural logic." The connection between sleep and death 145 in the first stanza of the next poem follows the same logic.

Bliznecy

Est' bliznecy — dlja zemnorodnyx Dva bozestva — to Smert' i son, Kak brat s sestroju divno sxodnyx — Ona ugrjumej, krotce on...

No est' drugix dva blizneca — I v mire net £ety^prekrasnej I obajan'ja net uzasnej, Ej predaju^cego serdca...

Sojux ix krovnyj, ne slucajnyj, I tol'ko v rokovye dni Svoej nerazre^imoj tajnoj Obvoro^ajut nas oni.

y V W I kto v izbytke oscuscenij, Kogda kipit i stynei^ krov' , Ne vedal vasix iskusenij — Samoubijstvo i Ljubov'! (1852)

The Twins

There are twins — for earthdwellers Two divinities — Death and Sleep, Like brother and sister marvelously alike — She is more sullen, he is more meek... ^The word "sleep" is masculine in Russian.J

But there is another set of twins — And in the world there is no pair more splendid, And there is no fascination more terrible Than the heart which surrenders to them...

Theirs is a union of blood, not an accident, And it is only in fatal days that, By means of their unsolvable secret, They bewitch us.

And who, in an excess of feelings, When the blood boils and freezes, Has not known your seduction — Suicide and LoveJ 146

In this poem the poet uses the logical relationship of

the first stanza as a foil, a backdrop against which the

paradoxical relationship that is the subject of the next

three stanzas is projected, acquiring in this way even

greater force. There are several striking combinations

leading up to the closing statement, providing motiva

tional underpinning. In line 7 we find the combination I ^ "terrible fascination" and the rhyme "prekrasnej/uzasnej"

("splendid/terrible"). And in line 14 the blood "boils and freezes." This is an "intensifier," marking the high-point of emotions, the zenith of the "excess of V V V V feelings" ("izbytok oscuscenij"). The emotional charge of the line is underscored by the fact that the line is a four-stress iambic line, and thus a deviation from the rhythmic norm of at least one pyrrhic foot per line.

The intensifier anticipates the unexpectedness of the twins' identities, and leads up to the "unnautralness" of their combination. Line 5, "But there is another set of twins," is surprising, but the reader does not know that this set will be combined according to the "logic of opposites" until he reaches the last stanza.

The point of closure is the point at which the motivational factors of the given structure are revealed.

In "The Twins" the first of these factors to appear is the rhyme combination "krov*/ljubov'" ("blood/love"). N

147

This combination expresses the "blood kinship" of the

second set of twins. It is interesting that this very / rhyme was one of those marked as a cliche by Pushkin 4 in an article published posthumously in 1841. We have

already seen that Tjut^ev was not afraid to violate the

rules of versification and word usage of his time. Here

we see that he does not worry about a "flat" rhyme, as

long as it accomplishes what he wants it to do. The

content and sensibility of the poem, on the other hand,

would hardly have seemed "flat" to Russian readers in

the early 'fifties. It is frequently pointed out that

this poem antedates Baudelaire's "Les Deux bonnes soeurs" 5 by seven years. "The Twins," however, was not published

until 1886.

One of the poems discussed in the chapter on para

llelism also provides a good example of a strucutre

organized according to the "logic of opposites." It

will be recalled that the first two stanzas of "The

First Leaf" describe a stand of birches under a blue

spring sky. Here is a translation of the last stanza:

0 , first leaves' beauty, 12 Washed in the sun's rays With their new-born shadows! 14 And we can hear in their movement, That in these thousands and shadows 16 You will not find a dead leaf.

It seems that the spring day, in being so full of life, has called up an opposite. The lively impression of the thousands of leaves has called up the idea of one dead leaf. It might be added that the impression of life reaches its zenith in the penultimate line, which fea tures an intensifier that is not shown in the transla- v \ v tion above. Line 15, "Cto v etix tysjacax i t’max , 11 can also be translated as “that in these thousands and multitudes. 11 "Thousands and multitudes" is basically redundant as far as information goes, but as a repe tition it acts to heighten the emotional charge of the line, leading to the opposite concept.

At this point it can be stated that the structure organized according to the "logic of opposites" and featuring an unexpected "twist" in which the opposite appears, is characteristic of Tjut^ev. The following poem illustrates this logic and the "twist;" what makes it a bit unusual is that the motivational underpinning of the "twist" can be seen to follow "natural logic."

Utixla biza...legceV dysit V Lazurnyj sonm Zenevskix vod — I lodka vnov' po nim plyvet, I snova lebed' ix kolyKet.

Ves den', kak letoin, solnce greet, Derev’ja ble'Scut pestrotoj , I vozdux laskovoj volnoj Ix pyjanost' vetxuju leleet. v A tam, v torzestvennom pokoe, Razobla^ennaja s utra, Sijaet Belaja gora, Kak otkroven'e nezemnoe. 149

Zdes* serdce tak by vse zabylo, Zabylo b muku vsju svoju, Kogca by tam — v rodnom kraju — Odnoj mogiloj men'^e bylo... (11 October 1864)

The "biza" has calmed.. .easier breathes The azure assemblage of Geneva's waters — And the boat once again sails on them, And once again the swan sways them.

All day, as in summer, the sun warms, The trees glitter with color, And the air with a caressing wave Caresses their decaying splendor.

And there, in triumphant peace, Revealed since morning, Shines the White mountain, Like an unearthly revelation.

Here the heart in the same way would forget everything, Would forget all its suffering, If only there — in the homeland — There were one less grave...

The "biza" is a north wind that blows on Lake g Geneva. The use of this local word increases expression because, under the word, as it were, the reader senses

"burja" ("storm"). "Biza" foregrounds the storm that has passed, and particularizes it. In contrast to this particularization, in the third stanza Mt. Blanc is freed from local color, becoming via natural logic a symbol of the beyond, larger than life. Underlying this set of oppositions in the basic contrast "here" ("zdes'")

— "there" ("tam"). The tension between these oppo sitions is paralleled by the tensions inherent in the 150 other imagery of the poem. The application of the adjective "azure" (or "sky-blue") to the water anti cipates line 7, in which a feature of water, a wave, is attributed to the air. The juxtaposition "decaying aplendor" suggests the instability and transciency of the colorful scene. The poet underlines this trans ciency by noting that the autumn day is "like summer."

In contrast to the seasons are the eternal snows of the white mountain.

The biographical background of the poem is the death of the poet's mistress of fourteen years, E.A. Den is* eva, which took place 4 August 1864. The reader who uses natural logic does not need this exact enformation to detect a subtext which infuses the poem with another level of meaning. After the storm, life, symbolized by the boat, again goes on. The imagery discussed above indicates the precarious nature of this life. In sug gestive contrast to the autumn splendor of the illusory summer is the swan of line 3. In folklore swans are symbols of the spirits of the departed. In this sense, the swan stands in contrast to the boat, the symbol of life. Swans are white, thus anticipating the whiteness of the mountain, the "revelation" from the other world.

Thus, on the one hand, the scene on Lake Geneva is contrasted to the "other world" of "peace." On the V

151

other hand, In the "twist" of the last stanza, it is in

opposition to the "homeland," Russia, where Denis'eva

is buried.

The rhythm of the last stanza is significantly

different from that of the two preceding stanzas. Line

5 is the last fully iambic line until line 13. The heavy

rhythm of the last stanza especially contrasts with

lines 10 and 12, both two-stress lines. The conditional

clauses in "b(y)" give a different "feel" to the three

lines before the last line. The repetition of the verb

"zabylo" ("would forget") intensifies the effect of the

lines and leads to the "twist." Note the echoing effect

of "zabylo...zabylo.•.bylo."

The "twist" in the following poem lacks the moti

vation of its counterpart in "The ’biza' has calmed:"

Sijaet solnce, vody bl e^ u t , Na vsem ulybka, zizn' vovvsem, Derev'ja radostno trepescut, Kupajas' v nebe golubom. w 5 Pojut derev'ja, blescut vody, Ljubov' ju vozchix rastvoren, I mir, cvetuscij mir prirody, 8 Izbytkom Xizni upoen.

No i v izbytke upoen'ja Net upoenija sil'nej Odnoi ulybki utnilen'ja 12 Izmucennoj du^i tvoej... (26 July 1852) 152

The sun shines, the water sparkles, A smile is on everything, life is in everything, The trees quiver joyfully, Swimming in the blue sky.

5 The trees sing, the water sparkles, The air is dissoved by love, And the world, the blossoming world of nature, Is intoxicated by an excess of life.

But even in an excess of life There is no intoxication stronger Than a single smile of tenderness 12 From your tortured soul.

There is no ’’natural logic” to prepare for the new con

text introduced in the last stanza. This poem is like

the previous one, however, in that the final stanza is rhythmically different from the others. Each of the

first two stanzas of this iambic tetrameter poem have

two pure lines and two lines with a pyrrhic third foot.

Lines 9 and 10, however, have pyrrhics in the first foot as well as in the third, while the last line of the poem has a stressless second foot. This last deviation from the rhythmic norm can be thought of as paralleling the

’’deviant” or "decadent” sensibility of its content.

Perhaps an observation from Mario Praz's classic study of the decadent sensibility can be of use to us here.

He writes: "In the romantics feeling takes the place 17 of the ’conceit’ of the seventeenth century.” The seventeenth century writer might compare, way, lovers and a compass. The romantic, says Praz, seeks to combine \

153

disparate feelings. In Tjutcev's poem the reader is

shown the vibrant, joyful smile of nature in juxtapo

sition with the "tortured smile" of the speaker's

feminine companion.

The comparison with the seventeeth century conceit

is useful. But an examination of the mechanism of the

conceit and the dynamics of "The sun shines..." reveals

an important difference. The "metaphysical conceit"

takes disparate things, things that apparently have

nothing in common, and demonstrates that the different

do meet, if only to a limited, though usually vital,

extent. To this extent, the metaphysical conceit is

a synthesizing device. The "conceit of feelings" in

Tjutcev's poetry, on the contrary, is not synthesizing.

It is not based on a logic that seeks to make the distant

close, but rather on a logic by which differences are

intensified. In "The sun shines..." the speaker shows

the reader the joyful, healthy smile of nature just

before referring to the "tortured soul" of his com— Q panion. As it was in "The 'biza' has calmed," the

primary effect is one of contrast.

The last part of this chapter concerns the re

lationship between the structures discussed and poetic

statement. For our purposes here, "poetic statement"

may be understood to mean the "message" of the poem. 154

In terms of poetic statement, what is the difference between the logical structure and the structure organized according to the "logic of opposites?"

The logical structure is generally a structure of synthesis. Overt statement is de-emphasized, but the message can be deduced from the logical interrelation ships of the relevant elements and from the direction their development follows. The interrelationships are based on a principle of integration; the development leads toward resolution.

As was seen in the previous chapter, emotion is the dominant in poems organized according to the "logic of opposites." The texture of this poetry is uneven, with emotional devices foregrounded. The "statement" may be thought of as lying "submerged" beneath the sur face of the poem. Just as the emotional halo of some words may contradict their objective meaning, the sense of some overt formulae may contradict the real state ment of the poem because these formulae are dominated by emotion. Thus the repeated "Still the same..." of

"Mal'aria" contradicts the statement of the poem, the speaker's obsession with the passing of time.

The structure following the "logic of opposites" is essentially a structure of contrast. IN "Mal'aria" a calculated inbalance leads to the statement. Peoms 155 containing the illogical "twist," however, are calculated to balance. This is not a synthesis, but a State of tension between thesis and antithesis. In terms of statement, this tension may take two forms. First, the tension may itself be the statement. Second, there may be no statement at all; the opposites are poised with no resolution evident. The chapter will conclude with examples of these two forms of statement.

0 ves^aja du^a moja! 0 serdce, polnoe trevogi, 0 , kak ty b'eX'sja na poroge Kak by dvojnogo bytija!.. y Tak, ty zilica dvux mirov, Tvoj den 1 — boleznennyj i strastnyj, Tvoj son — proroceski-nejasnyj, Kak otkrovenie duxov... y Puskaj stradal*ceskuju grud* Volnujut strasti rokovye — Du?a gotova, kak Marija, K nogam Xrista navek pril'nut*. (1855)

0 my prophetic soul 0 heart, full of anxiety, 0 , how you beat on the threshold, As it were, of a dual existence 1..

Yes, you are the denizen of two worlds, Your day — painful and passionate, Your sleep — prophetically-unclear, Like the revelation of spirits...

Let the suffering breast Be disturbed by fatal passions — The soul is ready, like Mary, To cling forever to the feet of Christ. s

156

This religious address to the soul recalls, with

its sensual tinge, the work of the mystic Germans of

the baroque period. "In the poetry of this period,"

writes an authority, "the symbol of Mother Earth ^Frau

Welt} is represented by the theme of Mary Magdalene;

one may say that this theme, because of the striking

antithesis which it personifies, is the baroque subject 9 par excellence." The baroque impression of the poem

is strenthened by the "twist," the suddenness with which

the concluding image is sprung on the reader, and by the

emblematic character of the image itself. Magdalene, V the embodiment of the day's "fatal passions," clings to

Christ, the symbol of purity and the spiritual. The

image does not mean resolution of the dual existence.

Instead, the last stanza states, these opposites will

"forever" ("navek") remain unreconciled, joined in a

tense, vascillating relationship parallel to that of

day and night.

In "O my prophetic soul" the duality, the unre

solved contrast, is made evident from the first. The

following poem builds more gradually toward the final

state of tension.

I grob opuscenW uz V v mogilu, I vse stolpilosja vokrug... Tolkutsja, dy^at t^erez silu, Spiraet grud' tletvornyj dux... 157

I nad mogiloju raskrytoj , V vozglavii, gde grob stoit, u5?enyj pastor, sanovityj, Re^ 1 pogrebal'nuju glasit... v

VescaetV V brennost' celovec’ju,V V Grexopaden1e , krov* Xrissta... I umnoju, pristojnoj rec’ju Tolpa razlicno zanjata... v A nebo tak netlenno-cisto, Tak bespredel'no nad zemlej... I pticy rejut golosisto V vozdusnoj bezdne goluboj... (1836)

And the coffin is already lowered into the grave, And all have crowded around... Jostling together, they can hardly breathe, The breath of corruption constricts the breast...

And above the open grave, At the head of the coffin, The learned pastor, and stately, Goes through the burial speech...

He speaks authoritatively of the mortality of man, The First Fall, the blood of Christ... And with the intelligent, proper speech The crowd is variously occupied...

Meanwhile the sky is so incorruptibly pure, So limitless above the earth... And the birds soar vociferously In the airy blue abyss...

The initial movement is downward, into the confines of the grave. The next three lines of the poem develop the concept of closeness, constriction, and corruption. Then the "learned pastor" speaks of mortality and of "The

Fall" (note the downward movement again) and its con sequence, suffering and the need for redemption. In ironic contrast to all this is the last stanza, with its

emphasis on purity and space, the lack of strictures

and limits. The "tletvornyj dux" ("breath of corrup-

tion") in line 4 contrasts with the sky, "netlenno-

cisto" ("incorruptibly pure"). The lack of air in the

crowd contrasts with the "limitless" and "airy abyss."

The use of the word "bezdna" to describe the sky is an

ironic reversal of the spacial limitations inherent

in "grave" because "bezdna" means literally "without

bottom." The birds in the sky are played off against

the "pastor," who, it is stressed, is so "learned" and

"stately." This opposition is underlined lexically.

The verb "glasit" is used to describe how the pastor

says his speech. This verb is related to the Slavonic

"glas" ("voice"), an element of the high style. The birds are not stately, but noisy, soaring "golosisto."

The translation to "vociferously" does not show that

the root is the Russian word "golos" ("voice"), which belongs to the unmarked style of normal usage. The

pastor's obsession with death and corruption contrasts with the freedom of nature, and with nature's "obses

sion" with life.

The word "ironic" was twice used in the above analysis to describe particular contrasts in the poem.

But, on second thought, is it really so clear where the 159 irony lies? Is it the poem, or is it the prejudice of, let us say, an anticlerical reader with no belief in The Fall, that attributes "true wisdom" to nature, to the unconcerned "birds of the field?" There is, after all, suffering, death, and corruption in the world, and for everyone. In being unaware of this, one might

'just as truly say, the birds are stupid. The crowd is only "variously occupied;" many there, like the birds, are too occupied in their own concerns, or too distracted by the beauty of the day, to pay attention to the speech or heed what is, after all, undeniable, the pastor's point about the mortality of man. Once one becomes aware of the possibility of an alternate reading, one becomes aware that such unresolved conclusions, con clusions at which one is unable to determine which of two contrasts is the dominant, are frequent in Tjutcev, another aspect of tension in his poetry. FOOTNOTES— CHAPTER V

^"Oxford English Dictionary, ’'logical," definition 3.

2 Kenneth Burke, "The Range of Piety," Terms for Order, ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman (Bloomington, 1964), 50. 3 From the widely anthologized essay "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery," easiest found in W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon (I^exington, 1954), 103-118.

4 v See the article entitled by the editors "Putesestvie iz Moskvy v^Peterburg," A.S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie socinenij v desjati tomax 3rd edition "(Moscow, 1964), VII, 298. 5 Les Deux Bonnes Soeurs

La Debauche et la Mort sont deux aimables filles, Prodigues de baisers et. riches de sante, Dont le flanc toujours vierge et drape de guenilles Sous l ’eternel labeur n ’a jamais enfante.

Au poete sinistre, ennemi des families, Pavori de l'enfer, courtisan mal rente, Tombeaux et lupanars montrent sous leurs charmilles Un lit que le remords n ’a jamais frequent^.

Et la biere et 1 ’alcove en blasphemes fecondes Nous offrent tour a tour, come deux bonnes soeurs, De terribles plaisirs et d ’affreuses douceurs. fimmonded? Quand veux-tu m ’enterrer, Debauche aux bras 0 Mort, quand viendras-tu, sa rivale en attraits, Sur ses myrtes infects enter tes noirs cypres?

^See notes to 1957 Biblioteka poeta edition.

7 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans., Angus Davidson (London/New York, 1970), 38. g A reading of this reference in a larger sense— i.e., a reading that sees the "tortured soul" as belonging to nature— does not invalidate the point in question.

^Andre Moret, Le lyrisme baroque en Allemagne (Lille 1936), 40. CHAPTER VI

Abstraction and Empathy

The aim of this chapter is to suggest connections v between the structure and style of Tjutcev's poetry

and his world view. We may begin by quoting again

Vladimir Solov'ev's famous formulation: "Even Goethe

did not, perhaps, grasp as profoundly as our poet the

•dark root of universal life* £temnyj koren' mirovogo

bytija] . This "dark root*1 is identified by the

philosopher as "Chaos:1"

Chaos, that is, that negative infinity, the yawning abyss of all mindlessness and form lessness, the demonic fits that arise against all that is positive and proper— this is -the deepest essence of the world soul and the foundation of all the universe. The cosmic process ^Cosmos] brings this chaotic element within the bounds of a general structure, sub ordinates into the laws of reason, embodies in it little by little the ideal content of ex istence, giving sense and beauty to this wild life G • • This formulation shows affinity with the oppositions

that are the basis of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, which was first published in 1872. Nietzsche's inter pretation of Greek civilization in terms of a tension of opposites contradicted the view of the classical

Greeks that was prevalent in his time (and which is

162 . 163

still generally held today). This view followed Goethe's

"noble simplicity, calm grandure" and Arnold's "sweet

ness and light." Nietzsche finds that, besides this

tendency, which he identifies with Apollo, there is

another current running through Greek culture. This

other current, cruel, frenzied, pessimistic and dark,

he identifies with Dionysus. We need not go into the

details of this contrast. Instead, let us concentrate

of the central point of the essay. This point is sum

marized by Walter Kaufmann:

A careful reading of The birth shows that Niet zsche, far from glorifying "the Dionysian," ar gues that the achievements of the Greeks generally, and their tragedies in particular, cannot be understood adequately so long as we do not rea lize what potentially destructive forces had to be harnessed to make them possible.

The two forces are in a state of dynamic tension and

interaction. It is this tension that produces the greatest art:

Q...J the intricate relation of the Apollinian^ and the Dionysian in tragedy may really be sym bolized by a fraternal union of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of tragedy and of all art is attained.*5

Solov'ev is aware of the general implications of this tension for aesthetics:

The presence of the chaotic, irrational element in the depths of existence transmits to the various 164

phenomena of nature that freedom and power with out which there could be no life and beauty. Life and beauty in nature— it is the struggle and victory of light over darkness, but this neces sarily assumes that darkness is an actual force. And to have beauty it is in no wise necessary that the dark force be destroyed in the celebra tion of universal harmony: it is sufficient that the element of light master it, subordinate it, to a certain extent transform it, limiting, 6 but not abolishing, its freedom and opposition.

However Solov'ev does not move effectively from the general concept to its embodiment in particular Tjut??ev poems. His treatment of the tension involved is super ficial and non-insistent. Its lack of clarity may be illustrated by the fact that V. Savodnik, who quotes extensively from Solov'ev, misses the idea of tension.

Savodnik writes:

It is possible to distinguish two currents in Tjutcev's creative work: one is the Apollonian— bright, full of the enjoyment of life, reflecting life in the way it appears to the sharp and clear eye of the artist. The other— Dionysian, pul sating as a dark and boiling wave from out of the depths of the poet, full of mystical insights and icy terror. 7

He goes on to state that the Dionysian strain is the

"real basis" ("istinnaja osnova") of Tjutcev's creative originality, and divides the lyrics into two main groups on this basis. Thus "In the still of the night..."

("Tixoj noc'ju, pozdnim letom") (p. 114) is an Apollo nian poem, and "Day and Night" (p. 129) is a Dionysian poem. Whatever there is of tension is so slack as to \

165

become really mere thematic difference. Tension becomes

difference for the same reason Solov’ev is less effec

tive when he must move from the general to the particu

lar: the lack of a way to pass from philosophy to the

semantics of poetic form. Study and analysis is con

fined to theme. Sufficient when it comes to distin

guishing separate dominants from each other, this ap

proach is rarely able to consider Apollonian-Dionysian

tensions within a single poem, while the formal aspects

of this tension are beyond this approach altogether.

It is the main purpose of this chapter to consider the

tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian in terms of

poetic form. The key to this consideration is provided

by Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfuhlunq, 1907.

Worringer's study is translated as Abstraction and

Empathy and subtitled "A contribution to the psychology

of style." The field is art history; the styles are

Greek-Renaissance vjs. Eastern (Byzantine, Egyptian, etc.).

The former follows the "urge to empathy," while the

driving force behind the latter style is the "urge to

Abstraction." Worringer's next famous book, Form in g Gothic (Formprobleme der Gotik) , 1912, shows how these

polarities interact to produce Gothic art. The book

contains the contrasting chapters "Classical Man" and

"Oriental Man," which indicate the lines to be followed 166 by the present simplification of his views. Smoothing out or ignoring contradictions and irregularities, we may posit the groups: Empathy, Classical, Apollonian vs. Abstraction, Oriental, Dionysian. We will discuss one poem dominated by Empathy and one poem dominated by

Abstraction before studying the tension between these forces.

What is Empathy? Discussion of this question will supplement Worringer's theories with some concepts carried over from previous chapters of the present study.

A good poem with which to illustrate Empathy is the famous "Spring Storm." The real purpose, of course, is to learn more about the poem and its place in Tjutcev's work.

Vesennjaja groza v Ljublju grozu v nacale maja, Kogda vesennij, pervyj grom, Kak by rezvjasja i igraja, Groxocet v nebe goiubom.

5 Gremja£ raskaty molodye,- Vot dozdik bryznul, pyl’ letit, Povisli perly dozdevye, 8 I solnce niti zolotit. v S gory bezit potok provornyj, V lesu ne molknet pticij gam, I gam lesnoj i sum nagornyj — 12 Vse vtorit veselo gromam.

Ty skazes': vetrenaja Geba, Kormja Zevesova orla, Gromokipjas^ij kubok s neba, 16 Smejas', na zemlju prolila. (1828) 167

Spring Storm

I love a thunderstorm in the beginning of May, When spring's first thunder, As though frolicking and playing Rumbles in the sky of blue.

Young peals of thunder ring.out, Now a little drizzle has begun, dust is flying, Pearls of rain are hanging, And the sun is gilding the threads.

Down the hill rushes a swift torrent, In the woods there is no quieting of the birds' racket, The racket in the woods and the noise on the hill — All gaily echo the thunder.

You say: frivolous Hebe, Feeding Zeus’ eagle, A thunderseething goblet from the heavens, Laughing, has spilled upon the earth.

In this poem the urge to Empathy is manifested in the observer's delight in the scene. Worringer, quoting the aesthetician who most influenced him, Theo dore Lipps, summarizes the basis of the aesthetic ex perience of Empathy in these words:

Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self enjoyment. To enjoy aesthetically means to enjoy myself in a sensous object diverse from myself, to empathise myself into it. '’Wh a t I empathise into it is quite generally life. And life is energy, inner working, striving and accomplishing. In a word, life is activity. But activity is that in which I experience an expenditure of energy. By its nature, this activity is an activity of the 9 will. It is endeavor or volition in motion.”

Here the speaker is enjoying himself in the vibrant activity of nature, in the tumult of the storm and the 168 chatter of the birds. He feels himself one with nature and its activity to the extent that, in the last stanza, he goes beyond and "objective (or semi-objective) de scription of the storm to a mythologized "re-creation" of it. In the activity of the humanized Greek goddess he expends energy and finds aesthetic satisfaction in this poetic mastery of nature, and in his intellectual control of the situation.

We might note that the poem exhibits in its last stanza v/hat seems to be an example of the "twist" par allel to those we discussed in earlier chapters. There is, however, an important difference between the new context introduced in the fourth stanza here and the

"twist” in such poems as "The sun shines, the water sparkles" ("Sijaet solnce, vody blescut") (p. 151). The twist generally follows the "logic of opposites." The material of the second part of the poem generally stands at right angles to the first part. And it consistently happens that this difference is accompanied by a formal difference, a different rhythm, syntax, or even a dif ferent rhyme scheme. Here, however, the content of the last stanza is parallel to that of the first part, as are its texture, syntax, and conceptual elements.

We may take note of a few of these in passing. "Vetre- neja Geba" suggests the wind that makes the dust fly 169 because the word translated as "frivolous” ("vetrenaja") is .related to the word "veter" ("wind")* The birds in the woods, of course, prefigure Zeus* eagle. The tor rent that rushes down the hill anticipates the spilled goblet from the heavens; notice the similarity of these

» » i » components in Russian: "potok s gory" — "kubok s neba." I vv 1 The alliteration and assonance in "gromokipjascij kubok" parallels such previous sequences as "vse vtorit veselo."

The initial pyrrhic foot in line 15 ("gromokipjascij"'V V i equals x x x x x) finds its parallel in the third i t line ("Kak by rezvjasja"). "Zevesova," which with its

Slavonic ending might sound too grandiloquent in another position in the line, falls quite easily into the third position in line 14, pyrrhic in lines 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 , 12,

13, and 16. Lines 1, 2, 6 , 9-11 are pure iambics, at testing to the poem's rhythmic unity, to its structural cohesiveness and the evenness of its overall texture.

The "urge to Empathy" follows "natural logic."

There is a firm sense of "what goes with what." The former is evident here in the humanization of the forces of nature, the latter in the relationships between ele ments of the two parts of the poem. The proportioned sense for relationships extends to the treatment of space in the poem. The speaker is well-oriented with regard to the terrain, comfortable in his relationship \

170

to the sky, the hill, the woods which cast back the gay

sould of thunder. Empathy, says Worringer, entails

loss of the "world-instinct." This loss can be seen in

the aesthetic orientation of the speaker's painting of

the scene, in his trust of appearances, and especially

in his frank enjoyment of them; "the sun is gilding

the threads." The rain is, for him, "pearls;" the

thunder is "melody," literally "young." The rain is

not an elemental force, but rather referred to by using

a diminuitive form, "dozdik."V

Empathy arises from a feeling of confidence with

the visible world. Abstraction, on the other hand, be

trays a feeling of being lost and helpless in the uni

verse ;

Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the pheno mena of the outside world; in a religious respect it corresponds to a strongly transcendental tinge to all notions. We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space. When Tibullus says; "primum in mundo fecit deus timor," this same sensation of fear may be assumed as the root of artistic creation.

There is a significant difference between this fear as

it is manifested in primitive art and its manifestation

in the art of civilized peoples:

The rationalistic development of mankind pressed 171

back this instinctive fear conditioned by man's feeling of being lost in the universe. The civilized peoples of the East, whose more profound world-instinct opposed develop ment in a rationalistic direction and who saw in the world nothing but the shimmering veil of Maya, they alone remained conscious of the unfathomable entanglements of all the phenomena of life, and all the intellectual mastery of the world-picture could not deceive them as to this. Their spiritual dread of space, their instinct for the relativity of all that is, did not stand, as with primitive ^ peoples, before cognition, but above cognition. v There are a considerable number of poems in Tjutcev that display an 'immense spiritual dread of space."

The following is one of them. Here the "pokrov zla— totkanyj," the veil of gold brocade corresponding to the "shimmering veil of Maya," has already been torn aside, the world of appearances has already given way to the "real world" of elemental forces and constant flux. v Kak okean ob''emlet sar zemnoj, Zemnaja zizn' krugom ob"jata snami; Nastanet noc' — i zvu£nymi volnami Stixija b'et o bereg svoj .

To glas ee: on nudit nas^i prosit... Uz v pristani volsebnyj ozil celn; Priliv rastet i bystro nas unosit V neizmerimost' temnyx voln.

Nebesnyj svod, gorja^^ij slavoj zvezdnoj, Tainstvenno gljadit iz glubiny, — I my plyvem, pylajus£eju bezdnoj So vsex storon okrusfeny. (1830) 172

As the ocean embraces the earthly sphere, Earthly life is enveloped by dreams; Night falls — and with sounding waves The elements beat against their shores.

That is their voice: it compels us and pleads.. Already at the dock the magic boat has come to life; The tide rises and rapidly carries us away Into the infinity of dark waves.

The arch of the heavens, burning with starry glory, Mysteriously gazes from the depths, — And we float, by the flaming abyss On all sides surrounded.

The "scenery” of "Spring Storm" was all nicely laid out; a hill here, a wood there, the blue sky above. Here, with night, the world of things falls away, leaving an infinity of dark waves. The compass of this infinity is admirably rendered by the rhyme combinations of the last stanza. The rhymes of lines 9 and 11, "zvezdnoj/ bezdnoj" ("starry/abyss") unite with the spacial oppo sites of the heavens and the abyss. When line 11 says that the heavens, "burning with starry glory," look out of the depths, this is meant to be understood two ways. The depths can be taken to mean the depths of the sky. They also designate the depths of the dark sea in which the stars are reflected. This spacial disorientation is reflected in the rhyme "glubiny/okruzeny" ("depths/ surrounded"). The speaker of "Spring Storm" is quite at home in his surroundings. He is intellectually in control of the impressions it produces; (as: "The sun 173

gilds the threads"). Here the speaker is lost and

afraid. The feeling of familiarity is absent. Nature

is "infinite" and "mysterious." The forces of nature

were humanized in the last stanza of the previous poem;

here the forces of the universe are reduced to the "ele

ments" ("stixija"). And the speaker does not find

self-gratification in the movement of these forces.

They do not represent his will in motion. He is com

pelled into the magic boat. The boat is carried rapidly

and without direction into the infinite abyss by the

surging tides. Indeed, the one thing the speaker does want to do is resist the movement of the elements. His wish, and his failure to realize it, are embodied in the dynamics of the last stanza.

The poem is written in iambic pentameter. The

last line in each stanza is an exception, having just eight syllables. Line 8 begins with a pyrrhic foot.

This acceleration suggests the rapidity with which the boat draws away into the infinity of the waves. Line 9

seems to stand in counterpoint to line 8 in that it is a pure five-stress iambic line. Line 10, on the other hand, has no stresses in its second and fourth feet, i thus continuing the movement of "v neizmerimost'...."

The first foot of the penultimate line is also a stressless, accelerating foot as is the first foot of the last line, which is already one foot shorter than the lines

preceding it. The fourth foot of line 11 is also pyr

rhic, but this acceleration is tempered by the line's

feminine ending. In the last line the [p3in "storon"

is the element receiving the strongest stress. The

/o/ is foregrounded because it is the only occurence of

the phoneme under stress in the line. The meaning of

the hemistich: "on all sides" recalls the enclosing

structures of the first stanza. The most obvious of

these is the enclosed rhyme of the first stanza, A b b A.

Secondly, there is the arrangement of the terms of the

first two lines of the poem:

tKak okean ob"emlet (sar zemnoj, zemnaja zizn1) krugom

ob"jata snami} tAs the ocean embraces (the earthly sphere, earthly life)

is enveloped by dreams^

The £oQ in the last line of the poem interacts with the previous occurence of a stressed /o/ in the poem, in

the corresponding (fourth) foot of the previous line:

"I my plyvem £ o m ”3 • 11 This interaction takes the form of dynamic tension in that the idea of enclosure is counter acted by the verb of motion toward a goal "plyt'," ("to float" or "to sail"). Perhaps this tension between en closure and motion will stand out more clearly if con trasted with the verb and situation of Tjutcev's poem X

175

"The Swan" ("Lebed1") (See note 12 for text). There the

verb "lelejat'" is used to describe how the swan is

transfixed "between the double abyss" of the sky. "Lele

jat1" means "to cherish" and is a verb of stasis. This

verb of stasis agrees with the intonational pattern of

the final line of "The Swan," which helps close the i ' r • -1 poem on a note of stability: "Ty otovsjudu okruZen \.onJ."

("You are everywhere surrounded"). The intonation is

falling. In contrast to that, the intonation of the

last line of "As the ocean embraces the earthly sphere," t after falling to the back, rounded vowel /o/ in storon,"

rises toward the final stressed vowel, the high-mid

vowel . This intonation is commensurate with the

verb of motion "plyt'." If "The Swan" is a poem de

picting motion frozen in space, "As the ocean..." ex

presses rapid, frightening motion into space. The

rising intonation of the final hemistich furthers this

idea. The structures of enclosure create tension, but

are unable, ultimately, to withstand the forces carrying

the boat into space.

The speaker of "Spring Storm""felt himself into"

the activity of nature. The tensions of "As the ocean.."

suggest resistence against the forces of nature. This

is a feeble manifestation of the stylistic key to the

"urge to Abstraction:" 176

The happiness they £tne peoples of Eastern civilizations^ sought from art did not consist in the possibility of projecting themselves into the things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them, but in the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness, of eternalising it by approximation to abstract forms and, in this manner, of finding a point of refuge from appearances.13

The external world is the "veil of Maya" hiding the abyss that the Eastern, "Dionysian man" intuits and fears. Against this dread of empty space and flux the aesthetic of Abstraction balances an attraction to a single object. "Abstract forms," it goes without y saying, are not found in Tjutcev's poetry. But the general principle is there in his treatment of the object. It is Abstraction's fascination with the iso lated object that will allow us to study the interaction V and tension between Empathy and Abstraction in Tjutcev's poetry. We may begin with the following poem:

Est' v oseni pervonacal'noj Korotkaja, no divnaja pora — Ves* den' stoit kak by xrustal'nyj, I lutlfezarny vecera...

Gde bodryj serp guljal i padal kolos, Teper* u2 pusto vse — prostor vezde, — LiS' pautiny tonkij volos Blestit na prazdnoj borozde.

Pusteet vozdux, ptic ne slysno bole, No daleko e^£e do pervyx zimnix bur' — I l'etsja £istaja i teplaja lazur' Na otdyxaju^^ee pole... (22 August 1857) 177

There is in earliest autumn A short, but marvelous time — The whole day seems to be of crystal, And the evenings are radiant...

Where the lively sickle has caroused and the grain has fallen, Nov/ everything is already bare — space is everywhere, — Only the spider's delicate thread Glitters in the empty furrow.

The air is empty, the birds are no longer heard, But it is still long until the first winter storms -— And pure and warm azure pours down Upon the resting fields.

The syllabic length of the lines in this beau tifully-modulated poem varies from eight to twelve.

The number of stresses per line also varies from a high of five (lines 5, 6 , 9, and 10) to a low of two (line 4 or the last line). However the two-stress lines do not give an impression of abruptness, but are phraseologi- cally and phonetically constructed so as to further the poem's mood of placidity and tranquility. The picture is one of crvstaline days and radiant evenings; the fields are "resting," the sky is blue. The master- touch of the work, of course, is the fine detail that is discovered amid the vast surrounding spaces of the tranquil scene.

But this tranquility conceals the abyss. Its void is suggested by the emptiness of the fields, the emptiness that, before the passing of the sickle, had 178 been filled with life. The fields* emptiness is re flected in the emptiness of the sky; life has also van ished from this sphere. The birds are no longer heard.

The spaces of this poem may be represented by an empty circle. But in the middle of this circle, surrounded on all sides by emptiness, is one small, fragile object.

The poet's keen eye fastens, in desperation, on this one object. He hides his desperation behind the "emo tional halo" of the poem's last two lines. The tiny point in the center of the circle, the spider web, thus represents a delicate equilibrium between the speaker's delight in the present and his realization that his delight is resting on borrowed time. Note how the second line would be weakened if, instead of "but," the line read: "A short and marvelous time." The ten sion that results from the combination "short but mar velous" is transferred into the metaphor for this mar velous interval, the spider's delicate thread. Although the furrow is empty, the sickle having already passed by, the position of the web is one of tension because of the "logic" which suggests that time also passes like a sickle. The statement that it is still a long time until the first winter storms (line 1 0 ) has an effect contrary to its semantic meaning. To allay our fears of winter the poet would have done better if he 179 had not mentioned it. His doing so represents a failure to heed the advice of another poem: "0 , do not wake the sleeping storms,/Under them chaos stirs! (see ”0 cem ty voes', veter nocnoj ,11 p. 41). The speaker tries to hide these storms behind a veil of azure.

In this poem the "urge to Empathy" is manifested in the speaker's delight in the scene, especially in the enjoyment expressed in the last two lines. There he passes from an objective (or semi-objective) apprecia tion of the scene to a subjective experiencing of delight in it. He "becomes the field" in the sense that he experiences the warmth of the sky, and in that, like it does the field, it makes him feel at rest. In this sensual pleasure, in this rest, he finds aesthetic grati fication. However this gratification is in a state of tension with his awareness that all is flux, and that appearances are appearances only.

Abstraction is characterized by an obsession with time. Present in "There is in earliest autumn," this obsession is more obsessively manifested in the following poem:

Bessonica

âsov odnoobraznyj boj, Tomitel'naja noî povest'! Jazyk dlja vsex ravno cûzoj I vnjatnyj kaSdoinu, kak sovest' ! Kto bez toski vnimal iz nas, Sredi vsemirnogo nol'can1ja, Giuxie vremeni stenan'ja, Proroêski proscal’nyj glas?

Nam mnitsja: mir osirotelyj Neotrazimyj Rok nastig — I my, v bor'be, prirodoj celoj Pokinuty na nas samix;

I n a^a zn' stoit pred nami, Kak prizrak, na kraju zemli, I s na¥im vekom i druz’jami Bledneet v sumra£noj dali;

I novoe, mladoe plemja tem na solnce rascvelo, A nas, druzfja, i na?e vremja Davno zabven'em zaneslo!

L i ^ ' ^izredka, obrjad pecal'nyj Sversaja v polunocnyj cas, Metalla golos pogrebal'nyj Poroj oplakivaet nasi (1829)

Insomnia

The monotonous striking of the clock, The night's oppressive story I A language equally strange to all And as clear to everyone as his conscience

Who of us without anguish has heard, Amid the universal silence, The muffled moans of time, The prophetically farewell voice?

It seems to us: the orphaned earth Has been overtaken by ineludable fate — And we, in the struggle, by all of nature Are abandoned to ourselves;

And our life stands before us, Like a phantom, on the edge of the earth, And with our age and our friends It goes pale in the gloomy distance; 181

And a new, young tribe In the meantime has blossomed in the sun, And us, friends, and our time It has long ago swept into oblivion!

Only from time to time, the sad rite Performing at the midnight hour, Does the funereal voice of metal Sometimes mourn for us!

The ideas of the poem are structured into a pro gression of unresolvable divisions. The paradox in lines 3-4 shows the way the progression will develop.

The language of the night’s story is both strange and understandable. The key to the riddle of how this can be is not provided. The principle of contradiction is furthered in line 8 , in the combination "prophetically farewell voice." One half of the noun's modifier looks forward in time; the other ("farewell") looks back toward what was. This separation anticipates the "double effect" of the fourth stanza, where the speaker sees himself as a dimming phantom on the edge of the horizon.

The appearance of the double follows from line 12, where the speaker and those like him are "abandoned to them selves ."

The poem reads like a denial of Empathy. The speaker does not experience any "oneness" with nature.

Instead, he expresses his estrangement from it. He is in a "struggle" with "all of nature." Nature rejects him. He is "abandoned to himself." There is no \

1 8 2

"striving and accomplishing," no "activity of the will .11

Instead, the speaker has abandoned hope in the activity

of the will and acknowledges (line 1 0 ) the power of fate.

The state of insomnia itself signifies a dissonance

between the persona and nature. To be awake in deep

night, when the v/hole rest of the world sleeps, is un

natural and incompatible with Empathy. Instead of

realizing himself in a union with nature, the speaker

abstracts a single object from the otherwise universal

silence of the night. He identifies himself with the

funereal beats of the clock. Note in this connection

the rhyme "nas/glas" ("us/voice") in the second stanza,

and how "nas" ("us") in its various cases strikes ten

times during the course of the poem. This connection

between the speaker and his friends and the isolated

object contrasts sharply with the relationship between

the "young tribe" and nature. The young tribe's unity

with nature, its state of Empathy, is expressed in the

fact that it has ripened, like a plant or fruit, in the

sun. This organic life contrasts with the inorganic

composition of the abstracted object, the "funereal

voice of metal."

Abstraction's obssession with time is strikingly

displayed in "Insomnia," the signals of its passing

also representing the objects which the speaker 183

pessimistically tries to eternalize. The following poem,

however, seems to lack such a defined object. But the

principle is there, as the discussion will show.

Vecer

Kak tixo veet nad dolinoj Dalekij kolokol'nyj zvon, Kak sorox stai ^uravlinoj, — I v £ume list'ev zamer on.

y Kak more vesnee v razlive, Svetleja, ne kolyxnet den', — I toroplivej, molcalivej Lozitsja po doline ten'. (1826 ?)

Evening

How quietly wafts over the valley The distant bell’s tolling, Like the rustling of a flock of cranes, — And in the rustle of leaves it has died away.

Like a spring sea in high-tide, Brightening, the day is motionless, — £does not swayj And with more haste, more silently The shadow settles across the valley. y Tjutcev wrote a number of poems like this one during his first years in Munich (approximately 1826-183).

Scholars have rightly drawn comparisons between these works and the "Stimmungsgedichte" of the later German

Romantics (Brentano, Eichendorf, etc.). The poem at hand is a tonal study in, and of, a particular mood.

A recent study suggests that it could be studied in terms of ‘’acoustic fields."1^ This would involve showing how the sound patterns of the poem work together to 184 produce the desired effect. The relevant point here is that this effect would be one of harmony; the work is all of one acoustic tone. This harmony seems to extend to the description of the scene.

But tension can be found even in this placid scene. It is suggested in the syntactic "hitch'' the reader feels in the transition from line 3 to line 4.

Lines 5-6, however, seem to fully reestablish harmony, and we are told that the day "ne kolyxnet," (does not sway, is motionless and clear, without waves), like the sea in spring. But— the shadow does move, and faster.

The configuration of line 7, two comparatives together, v is characteristic of "intensifiers" in Tjutcev. The second element of the "intensifier" carries an even higher emotional charge in that it is paradoxical. That is, once "silent," something cannot really be "more silent." The intensifiers increase the tension between stasis and movement. In doing so, they become "emotion- objects." The poet is trying to eternalize, not a con crete object, but an emotional one. Or, on a larger, but parallel level, he is trying to freeze the day at the point of greatest tension and contrast. Note in this connection the intensification of the relationship between the advancing shadow and the statement that the day "is brightening" (line 6 ). The poet, following 185 the "urge to Abstraction," tries to find refuge in the

point of greatest contrast. In making this point an

emotional one, we might further theorize, the poet is

coming about as close to approximating the "absolute

value" of a spring day approaching evening as can be 15 accomplished in a lyric poem.

The idea of the "emotion-object" is developed

further in the discussion of the next poem.

Vostok belel. Lad^ja katilas', Vetrilo veselo zvucalo, — Kak oprokinutoe nebo, Pod nami more trepetalo...

Vostok alel. Ona molilas', S £ela otkinuv pokryvalo, — Dysala na ustax molitva, Vo vzorax nebo likovalo...

Vostok vspylal. Ona sklonilas', Blestjascaja ponikla vyja, — I po mladenceskim lanitam Struilas’ kapli ognevye... (1836)

The east whitened. The boat slid along, The sail was flapping gaily, — Like the sky overturned, The sea trembled beneath us...

The east reddened. She prayed, Having thrown back her veil, — A prayer breathed upon her lips, The sky exulted in her eyes...

The east flared up. She inclined her body, Her shining neck drooped, — And along her childish cheeks Streamed fiery ^tear^ drops...

There are two possible interpretations of what is being described here. One focuses on the beautiful handling of reflections in the poem, which, along with its sparkling colors, makes it like a finely-cut jewel.

The reflecting mirrors are set up in lines 3-4: "Like the sky overturned,/Under us the sea trembled." In the second stanza the speaker's passenger lifts her eyes toward the east in prayer. Line 8 transforms the re flection of the scarlet sunrise in her eyes into emo tional terms: "In her eyes the sky exulted." In lines

9-10 she bows, continuing her prayer. As she bows, she casts a reflection into the water. The play of the flaming sunrise on the ripples of the water makes it appear, in the reflection, that fiery tears are stream ing down her cheeks. This multi-faceted progression shows a delight in effects and appearances and the arrangement of effects that is clearly a result of the urge to Empathy. Let us turn now to Gregg's interpre tation, which can provide us with a transition to dis cussion of the aspects of Abstraction that are found in the poem.

Although we never learn the causes of the girl's unhappiness here, the intimacy of the lovers (they are evidently alone on a small boat at an early morning hour) and the remorse implicit in her tears and prayers suggest that a compromising incident may have occurred. Certain it is, at any rate, that the poet, far from sharing the girl's unhappiness, is in good spirits (for him the sails flap "gaily" and the sky seems to "exult" in her gaze)' and that she actually seems physically most attractive to him (the "dazzling neck" and the "childlike cheeks" appear in the final stanza) at the very moment when her grief has over whelmed her. The climax of Tjutcev's en thusiasm and the girl's distress do, in short, coincide.

Gregg calls this attitude of the speaker's an "erotic 17 attachment to the spectacle of feminine suffering."

There is definitely enough evidence from other of

Tjutcev's poems to support this interpretation. See,

of the poems discussed in the present study, "That day,

I remember..." ("Sej den', ja pomnju...") (p. 57) and yy "The sun shines..." ("Sijaet solnce, vody blescut")

(pp. 151-152). Quite often such poems reveal the com position that in a previous chapter was called the

"conceit of feelings." It is interesting that, in the analysis of "The east whitened..." that focuses on re

flections, the "fiery £tear] drops" represent an "ele mental" conceit of the baroque type (fire in ice, etc.)

We thus find an interplay of literary sensibilities in the poem that parallels the interplay of Russian eight- v eenth century and European romantic features in Tjutcev style.

The most immediate effect of the conceit of feelings is a heightening of the expressiveness of the sensation. In this heightening of sensation is the key to the meaning of the urge to Abstraction in the poem. 188

The first step towards seeing this is to contrast the supercharged sensation to a "normal" one. By "normal" is meant "usual." Usually the transaction of sensations is conducted smoothly and "logically." It might be compared to the way traffic is supposed to flow on the freeway. The "supercharged sensation," in this analogy, is an accident. In other words, it is a deviation from the norm. It would be designated as an "event" by 18 Lotman. An "event" is an occurrence that violates the relevant norm of a given system. "Events" are what we read about in the newspapers. The normative feeling towards a mistress or a young girl who is suffering or in distress is pity, concern, or commiseration. A feeling of enjoyment or "attachment to the spectacle of feminine suffering" is a deviation from the norm, and "event." The next step is to recognize the deviant sensation as an object. The discussion of the "emo tion- object in "Evening," the previous poem discussed, should make this easier to do. The supercharged sen sation is foregrounded against the indistinct, mono tonous background of freely-flowing feelings and sen sations, blurred and as usual as the traffic on the freeway. Following the urge to Abstraction, the poet seizes upon the "sensation-object" and pours himself into it. In this object he re-affirms his existence and "self-hood.” In it he finds a measure of stability in the face of the leveling, obliterating flux of the v usual. This is the key to Tjutcev's so-called "decadence.

The "sensation-object” is frequently connected with a temporalized event from the world of nature. This connection has two aspects. One emphasizes the flux of appearances. The other causes the event, in its ab stracted form, to function as an intensifier. In "The east whitened..." the intensifiers are three distinct moments in the sunrise. They increase the emotional charge of the "conceit of feelings," and provide focal points for the objectification of the sensation. As abstracted moments, the repetitions: "The east whitened

..., The east reddened..., The east flared up" repre sent the poet's attempt to eternalize the sensation, just as the speaker of "Insomnia" tries to forestall the approach of non-being by fastening upon the funereal beats of the clock. The abstraction of a moment from nature, or even a series as is found in "The east whitened," is not a manifestation of Empathy because there is no opportunity for progress or accomplishment.

The poet wants to capture the instant and preserve it.

It is an end in itself, not the beginning of an organic process of activity. 190

FOOTNOTES— CHAPTER VI

^"Solov'ev, quoted from "Vozvysennoe v poezii Tjut

^Solov'ev, Ibid., 34.

3 Walter Kaufmann, ''Translator’s Introduction," Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner (New York, 1967), 10.

^Kaufmann notes that Nietzsche did not say "Apollonisch, but rather "Apollinisch." Russian scholars who have applied the term to Tjutcev's work render it "apollon ovski j ', " as opposed to "dionisi j ski j . "

^The Birth of Tragedy, 130 (end of part 21).

^Solov'ev, 35.

^V.F. Savodnik, (fuvstvo prirody v poezii Pushkina, Lermontova, i Tiutceva (Moscow, 1911), 165. g In English: Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic. Herbert Read, intro, and ed. (New York, 1967). 9 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A contri bution to the psychology of style. Trans., Michael bullock (Cleveland,•1967), 5.

10 Ibid., 15

11 Ibid., 16.

12 Lebed 1

Puskai orel za oblakami Vstrecaet molnii polet I nepodviXnymi oX ami V sebja vpivaet solnca svet, 191

No net zavidnee udela, 0 lebed* cistyj, tvoego — 1 £istoj, kak tyv sam, odelo Tebja stixiej bozestvo.

Ona, mezdu dvojnojuvbezdnoj, Leleet tvoj vsesrjascij son — I polnoj slavoj tverdi zvezdnoj Ty otovsjudu okruzen. (end of 1820s — beginning of 1830s)

The Swan

Although the eagle beyond the clouds Meets the lightening*s flight And with motionless eyes Absorbs the sun's light.

Nevertheless there is not more enviable lot, O pure swan, than yours — And the divinity has clothed you with an element As pure as you yourself are.

The element, between the double abyss, Cherishes your all-seeing dream — And by the full glory of the starry firmament You are everywhere surrounded.

13Abstraction and Empathy, 16

14Almut Schulze, Tiutcevs Kurzlyrxk: Traditionszusam- menhanqe und Interpretationen (Munich, 1968), 35.

^ Abstraction and Emoathy, 17: to wrest the object of unending flux of being, to purify it of all its dependence upon life, i.e. of everything about it that was arbitrary, to render it necessary and irrefragable, to approximate it to its absolute value•M

■^Gregg, 65.

1 7 Ibid., 64.

I O Lotman, Strukturn, 286. CHAPTER VII

v Tjutcev and His Poetry

Tjutcev has always been known as a "poet for the

few" ("poet dlja nemnogix"). This phrase refers to some quality of his verse, we must suppose, that has made him a poet of devotees rather than of a wide public.

As for the biographical Tjutcev, he was always a "poet for the few" in the sense that relatively few people knew him to be a poet or thought of him as a poet. He was better known as a brilliant conversationalist than as a poet, better known for his political interests than for his lyric poetry. His passion for politics was con nected with his diplomatic career, which took him to

Bavaria in 1822. He resided abroad for twenty two years.

His command of languages allowed him to appreciate the various European literatures, but his own works, being in Russian, remained a mystery to those of his foreign acquaintances who might have appreciated them, such as his friend Heine. Both of Tjutcev*s marriages were to

German women, to whom, for all practical purposes, the world of his verse was closed, although it is known that his second wife studied Russian, the most striking evidence being the poem the poet placed in a book for 192 X

193

her to find, its heading in the language they ordin

arily used: "Pour vous a dechiffrer toute seule."^

But Tjutcev did not discuss his poetry with her. In

stead, his letters to her are filled with political ob

servations and forecasts. There is one in which poli

tics and literature are contrasted. In the following

excerpt from it, Tjutcev speaks of literature in the

disparaging manner that was his custom:

Truly Moscow is the arch-literary city, where all these writers and readers are taken as something very serious, and where, it goes without saying, the circle rules and governs— I mean the literary circle, the most unbearable of them all. I would be unable to live here, in this melieu, so wrapped up in itself and alien to all echoes from outside. I am by no means sure, for example, that the childish interest in yesterday's session [ of "The Society of the Lovers of Russian Literature! did not dominate, in the thoughts of the local public, over interest in the threatening events developing abroad.

Not only did Tjutcev not talk about his work with his

wife, but he was also loath to discuss it with anyone. V Pet recalls: "Fedor Ivanovic would painfully stiffen

up at the slightest allusion to his poetic gift, and no

one dared to strike up a conversation with him about 3 it." He did devote a few sentences to the subject,

however, which were recorded by some of his contempor

aries. These accounts all turn about the idea that his

poems somehow "created themselves," that they were not 194 the result of labor, but came into being "without having time to cool," and so on. Various "insights" of this sort are cited in the books of Pigarev and Gregg. Also 4 collected are notes on the genesis of particular poems.

Of the poem "Brat, stol'ko let soputstvovavsij mne"

("Brother, having traveled with me for so many years"),

Tjutcev wrote: "It came into my head in a state of half-sleep, as I was returning from Moscow at night."

Working with this reference to a state of half-sleep in conjunction with night, Gregg writes:

From these various accounts two facts are clear, First, that Tjutcev's poetic activity was the result of a compulsion so strong and spon taneous that it exempted him from the usual labor-pains of creation. Second, that one condition favoring this creativity was, how ever odd it may seem, a state of mental torpor — be it from lassitude, near-sleep, or mere boredom— of clinical significance. Since it is in such a state that the conscious mind is most prone to subconscious influences, the "unconscious" and "involuntary" aspect of Tjutcev*s creativity which Samarin and Aksa kov had noticed could be of interest to the psychologist as well as the literary critic. All of which is to say that the sources of the poet's creativity lay in, or very near, his subconscious,and that the function which it fulfilled may properly be called cathartic, that is, the periodic release of latent thought and feelings by expressing them in verse.5

The subsequent pages of Gregg's study are the best testimony of the accuracy of this deduction. Our remarks here will be limited to a qualification, a question, 195 and a suggested answer to that question. The quali fication is that insights into literature that psy chology is able to afford us do not depend so much on the particular state the poet might be in when he gets his idea as the evidence Gregg assembles might seem to suggest. That is, conscious craftsmanship and the sub conscious do not necessarily exclude each other. The promised question follows from this. How does the fact of intricate associations, subtle and polished orches tration, rhythm, and so on— the great craftsmanship y with which most of Tjutcev1s poems are made— how do these facts jibe with the idea of spontaneous generation, with the idea of verses that "write themselves?" It is y interesting that Gregg does not accept Tjutcev's hab itual deprecation of his own work: " C - 3 it is hard to believe that a somewhat hypothetical humility should so weaken his powers of discrimination that he should have no notion at all of his own poetry's worth.Yet

Gregg accepts the poet's statements, and the impressions

Tjutcev implanted in Turgenev, Samarin, and others, that his poetry cost him no effort. Anything, of course, \/ is possible. But one need not make Tjutcev into a

Sal'eri, "correcting verses with algebra," to suggest that getting the initial idea into shape was not so easy.

And yet, there are the incidents, like the one recorded 196

V by Tjutcev's friend and colleague at the bureau of cen sorship, P.I. Kapnist. "More than usually inattentive"

(as Gregg puts it) at a meeting of the bureau, Tjutcev was writing this poem: V v Kak ni tjazel poslednij cas — Ta neponjatnaja dlja nas Istoma smertnoqo stradan'ja, — No dlja dusi es£e strasnej Sledit^ykak vymirajut v nej Vse lucsie vospominan'ja... (14 October 1867)

However heavy the last hour — That incomprehensible for us Agony of fatal suffering, — It is still more terrible for the soul To trace how in it die away All the best memories.

Tjutcev, it seems from this account, wrote poems the way other people doodle. All the more so in that, when the meeting was over, Tjutcev just walked out, leaving the scrap of paper behind, where Kapnist found and saved it.

The following speculation suggests another way of interpreting the writing of the poem. It is based on an analogy with the way the greatest modern Russian poet,

Osip Mandel'stam, composed his poems. What is known about Mandel'stam's working method is owning to the poet's wife, Nadezda Mandel'stam, whose remarkable memoir Hope Against Hope was published in 1970. The proposed analogy centers on the possibility that Tjutcev, like Mandel'stam, composed his verses "in his head." v The verb "composed" is used following Mrs. Mandel'stam's stipulation that "M. never talked of 'writing1 verse, 7 only of 'composing' it and then copying it out." The labor involved in "composing" as opposed to "writing" is, obviously, less apparent. All the crossing out and changing of words that can make the draft illegible is done in secret, in the poet's head. "In the beginning,"

Mrs. Mandel'stam recalls, "from 1919 to 1926— I would not even know that M. was at work, and was always sur prised when he became tense and broody, sometimes run- g ning outside into the street to escape from small talk."

As for Tjutcev, he was known as a great walker, a wan derer of the streets of Petersburg. And most descrip tions of him include mention of the absentmindedness and preoccupation suggested by his features. With what was v Tjutcev so preoccupied? It is highly probable that he was "composing." The main point about "composing" as opposed to "writing" is that the poet's "draft" is al ways with him. It may demand the poet's attention at any time. Mrs. Mandel'stam provides this example: "Con stantly disrupting the ritual of drinking the wine, M. kept getting up_from the table and pacing quickly around

Kuzin's vast office. As usual, he was composing the poem in his head."^ In analogy with this, Tjutcev's writing 198 down during the committee meeting of '’However heavy the last hour" represents the final stage in the process of composing. It is impossible to say when Tjutcev began work on the poem. During the meeting, one may theorize, the final touches came to him. Now Gregg's book includes extensive discussion of the possible psy chological motives behind Tjutcev's attitude toward his poetry, the attitude that allowed him to abandon "How ever heavy the last hour" after it had been written down.

The present chapter will also devote some attention to this attitude. One of its aspects might be illuminated with the help of Hope Against Hope. After the difficult and demanding work of composing had been completed,

Mandel'stam too, it seems, displayed a certain apathy toward the written product, or at any rate toward the writing out of the inner composition. Mrs. Mandel'stam mentions that, after their marriage, her husband grew

"too lazy*1 to even copy out what he had composed, but instead would dictate his poetry to her.^ This might suggest that the process itself is, say, fifty-one per cent of "composing," while "writing" locates the greater part of its interest in the finished product. Or, once

TjutSev had, by composing, brought "However heavy the last hour" into existence, this existence was so real for him, 199 being so laboriously attained, that the act of writing it down was superfluous. v No one ever suggests that Mandel'stam was an in different craftsman. Quite the opposite. Yet, somehow, most likely following the ideas propagated by the poem himself that his verses came into existence by them- v selves, there is a myth about Tjutcev that amounts to this contention. It is hoped that the present study will help to dispel this myth. It will also be recalled that the first chapter contains an example of extensive rhythmic revision. Pigarev's book provides other ex amples of written revisions of particular poems.^ But, as Mrs. Mandel'stam has helped suggest, written revisions in most cases are, literally, only the "last word" in the process of "composing," a process which most often does without them.

The process of "composing" can suggest that Tjutcev's legendary ease of writing was deceptive, and his casual approach to writing only apparent. What possible ex planation might there be for Tjutcev's lack of concern with his poems and their fate? It seems that the answer must lie in the world view that, artistically, manifests itself in Abstraction. Let us now try to move from the poetry to the life. A way to do this is suggested by the love poems featuring the "sensation-object," a 200 supercharged emotion which acts as a point of self- realization and resistence against the instability of appearances and the threat of the void. That Tjutcev found such a point of self-realization in the love of his first wife for him is suggested by these lines to his parents: "I will not even speak of her love for me; even you, it is quite possible, would find it ex cessive." (1/13 December 1839)^ Whether the love of his second wife was also so excessive we do not so ex- pressedly know. It is certain, however, that she suf fered greatly during the fourteen years of the poet's relationship with E.A. Denis'eva. As for the poet's feelings, here is how he speaks of separation from his wife in a letter to her: "[[•••3 ^or me there is defin itely nothing more tormenting, nothing more profoundly contradictory to my nature than the nightmare of sepa- 13 ration." (21 May 1855) In the same letter he compares separation from her to amputation of part of himself.

Earlier, (6 August 1851), he had compared the letters separation necessitates to chalked-over windows, which signify nothing but absence, and had written:

In this is wretchedness: to lack to such an extent a distinctive personality...And this is what stops me from taking myself seriously enough to take an interest in the trivialities of my existence as soon as it is not in the company of yours. And that is why the only, very-slight feeling that I experience is a 201

feeling of muffled resentment that I cannot abandon myself, being abandoned by you.^4 v In another letter to Ernestina F. Tjutceva, he writes to his wife on a theme that pervades his letters, death and fate, and the terrifying instability of life:

[...1 I, at least, am able to do myself sad and bitter justice in that the feeling of an guish and horror has for so many years already been the usual state of my soul,— and if that is not sufficient to propitiate fate, then at least misfortune will not take me by sur prise. £.. rj I am like a person who knows in advance the kind of death to which he is condemned, and because of that sees constantly and in everything harbingers of the event he should avoid. But there is no doubt that my constantly deplorable state of mind is immeas urably aggravated by separation...Ah, where are those fairytale times when one lived without care, breathed freely, and people walked the earth without the suspicion that there were mines under their feet.^5 v The letter makes eloquently clear Tjutcev's need for another person to help ease, somewhat, his obsession with disaster. Perhaps to say the other person "eases" v Tjutcev's anguish is misleading, however, because what is involved, as has been suggested and as the following excerpts show, is an intensification, this intensifi cation affirming the poet's existence. The sentences below indicate that the comparison between hidden mines and the horror of life is not generally accurate. What is feared is not an explosion. The dread is of nothing ness, of non-being. This is clear at least in the poet's self-description following the death of his mistress: 2 0 2

The wound festers, it does not heal. Whether it is lack of courage, or weakness, I don't care. Only with her present and for her was I a personality, only in her love, her limit less love for me, was I conscious of myself... Now I am some thing, senselessly living, some kind of alive, suffering nothing.

What has become of me? What am I now? Is there anything left of that previous me that, once upon a time, in some other world,— there, with her, you £ Denis'eva's brother-in-law, A.I. Grorgievskij3 loved and knew,— I do not know. About all that has remained is some kind of burning, vauge memory, but even that often fails— there is only one characteristic and relentless thing— the feeling of limitless, unending, suffocating emptiness.

The poet summarizes the above in one succinct sentence:

"The real reason, I think, that separation is more dif ficult for me than for any other human being is that, 18 for me, separation is the same as non-being." This is the background behind the urge to Abstraction. In fastening on to a concrete object, the poet seeks to save it and himself. The same is true with regard to the "emotion-object" or the "sensation-object." This V is the background of Tjutcev's "decadence." The back ground is nothingness, the abyss of space, time, and change which, with its relentless undertow, sucks in everything eventually, even what seems to the individual to be most important: "Everything that seems to our minds significant out of all proportion, whether it be ex pectation or later memory, occupies such a small place 203

19 in reality." Even the most striking events, the most vivid sensations, fade into nothingness. This is the sense of the poem rescued from oblivion by P.I. Kap- nist:

However heavy the last hour — That incomprehensible for us Agony of fatal suffering, —— It is still more terrible for the soul To trace how in it die away All the best memories.

Concrete objects and "emotion-objects" are grasped to resist this fading. But is not the poem itself an ob ject, especially, in Tjutcev, an "emotion-object?" Why does he abandon these objects? Let us, in attempting / to answer, compare poems with other written objects, letters. The basis of the comparison will be obvious from the first excerpt, from a letter dated 26 July 1858:

Never, when writing a letter, do I have the feeling that, on the earth, at a certain dis tance, there is someone who is waiting for my letter and who will read it with pleasure. Rather it seems to me that I am a madman talking to myself.

The poet, one may theorize, must have experienced the same thing while at work on a poem, the sensation of

"talking to himself." The theory is substantiated by an earlier passage, this one written 31 August 1846:

It seems to me that I am writing to you from the opposite end of the earth, and the thought seems naive that this scrap of paper I have under my hand will reach you— to such an ex tent do I feel myself to be on the bottom 204

01 of an abyss. < - L y Tjutcev’s difficulty in believing in the reality of a letter once it is out of his hands and sent is anal ogous to his feeling for things he cannot see or ex perience directly: "I am always amazed at the reality of things when I see them again. The impression that is retained of them is always so pale and vague. Memory, of 22 course, is only a phantom." A poem is a phantom in this sense, a pale impression of the original impulse.

And most poems lack the measure of security an address provides a letter. We have seen how difficult it was for the poet to believe his letter would cross the abyss to the addressee. We can imagine then that writing down a poem was for him like sending a letter without an ad dress into the void of space and time. His carelessness with his poems follows from this pessimism.

Here is what Pigarev has to offer as an explanation v for Tjutcev's attitude toward his poetry:

It is highly likely that both Tjutcev's openly scornful attitude toward his poems, and his almost legendary carelessness about their fate, and his exaggerated author's modesty sprang from mainly one source: from the fact that, no matter how much he loved poetry (and indeed in the 'thirties he flatly declared that he loved equally "the fatherland and poetry"), he never considered writing the 23 basic concern of his life, his real calling. v What was the relationship between Tjutcev's poetry and 205 the rest of his life? The last part of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of this question. The key to an answer may be found in the juxtaposition of two poems addressed to the poet's muse. There is a tradition of such addresses in Russian literature. Poems to the poet’s muse very often present in capsule form the major concerns and characteristics of his verse. Baratyn ski j's description of his muse has become an emblem of his poetry: she is not a beauty,

No porazen bvvaet mel^kom svet Ee lica neob^cfim vyrazeniem.

But at times the world is struck By the singular expression of her face.

Blok's "K Muze" ("To [[My] Muse") reveals the premoni tions of destruction that haunt his poetry:

Est* v napevax tvoix sokrovennyx Rokovaja o gibeli vest'.

There are in your secret refrains The fatal tidings of doom. v Tjutcev has no poems entitled "To My Muse." The dis cussion immediately following, however, is based on the premise that the two poems juxtaposed belong to the tradition just mentioned. The signs suggesting this are v obscured by the fact that so many of Tjutcev's poems feature feminine personae, as well as by the tension between art and biography that is characteristic of his poetry. The first poem is quite early (1829). The \

2 0 6

English will suffice. The title is "Cache-cache,”

Frnech for "Hide-and-Seek.11

There is her harp in the usual corner, Carnations and roses are in the window, The afternoon ray has fallen asleep on the floor: The agreed-upon time! But where might she be?

O, who will help me find, this frolicsome imp, Where, where is she keeping herself? A bewitching nearness, as if it were paradise Poured into the air, is what I feel.

Not without reason do the carnations look cunning, Not without reason, o roses, is your petals' Blush warmer, your aroma fresher: I have guessed who has concealed, hidden himself in [the flowers I

Didn't I just hear the ring of your harp? Did you think to hide in the golden strings? The metal has shivered, brought to life by'you, And its sweet quivering still has not quieted.

Like little specks of dust dance in the afternoon rays, Like lively sparks in their native firel I have seen that flame in familiar eyes, And its rapture is known to me.

A butterfly has flown in, and from one flower to another, With simulated unconcern it has begun to flit about. 0 , that's enough spinning, my dear guest! Heavenly one, would I be able to not recognize you? (1829)

Apropos of this poem Gregg notes in passing that 2 "it escapes banality only by becoming confusingly coy."

The reader is not sure what is going on, and the poet,

it seems, is having too good a time to let him in on the

secret. P.B. Bykov, who knew Tjutcev in Petersburg V

207

and edited the 1913 edition of the complete works,

writes in the notes to that edition that the poem v was written in the first year of Tjutcev*s first mar

riage. Bykov suggests that the ''sylph11 is the poet’s 25 wife. In his notes to the 1957 edition Pigarev notes

that Bykov offers no evidence to support his statement,

and wisely adds that since we have no evidence that ?6 this wife played the harp, Bykov's data is dubious.

We need not enter into the controversy because the pre

sent reading does not make biography and a symbolic

reading necessarily exclusive. Indeed, a tension be

tween the two is characteristic of Tjutcev. The sym

bolic reading finds that the harp belongs to the poet's

muse. This is clearly a muse of Empathy. Notice how

she is infused into the air, partaking of nature as a

butterfly. This is a muse of sensation and energy:

inspired by her, the flowers grow brighter. She even

brings the metal of the strings to life.

That poem and its muse may be contrasted with the

feminine figure of this poem:

Ja ociV znal, — o, \eti ocx! V Kak ja ljubil ix — znaet bog! Ot ix vol^ebnoj, strastnoj noci Ja du^u otorvat' ne mog. 2 0 8

v \ V nepostizimom etom vzore, Zizn* obnazajuscem do dna, Takoe slysalosja gore, Takaja strasti glubina! v Dysal on grustnyj, uglublennyj V teni resnic ee gustoj, Kak naslazden'e, utomlennyj I, kak stradan’e, rokovoj.

I v eti cudnye mgnoven'ja Ni razu rone ne dovelos’ S nim povstre^at'sja bez volnen'ja I ljubovat'sja im bez slez. (1852)

Eyes have I known, — o, those eyes! How I loved them — God knows! From their bewitching, passionate night I could not tear my soul away.

In this unfathomable gaze Which laid life bare to the bottom Such sorrow could be felt, Such a depth of passion!

It quivered, sad and absorbed, In the deep shadow of her lashes, Like sensual pleasure, wearied, And, like suffering, fatal.

And in these marvelous moments Not once did it happen that I Met it without emotion Or admired it without tears.

Pigarev notes that the poem has generally been under stood as refering to Denis'eva’s eyes. He then ob serves that this view does not conform very well with the past tense used in the poem. That is, he doubts

the eyes are Denis'eva's since the poem was written near the beginning of her relationship with the poet, 27 which was to go on for some twelve more years. Gregg 209 feels the eyes are Denis*eva's, adding that " it would be rash to infer from this one grammatical point

£ the past tense^ that the poet was now no longer in love with his mistress. C • • *1 But it is no less certain that the use of the past tense throws the poem into an elegiac key which strongly implies that the poet's great 28 passion lies not before, but behind, him." It is not necessary to reject such "realistic," biographical reading in order to interpret the poem "symbolically."

According to such an interpretation, these are the eyes of the muse. When Gregg speaks of the "key" struck by the past tense, he is testifying to the emotional, ex- I pressive effect and function of the verbs, whose "emo tional halos" in this sense dominate over their objec tive meaning.

The differences between the muse of "Cache-cache" and this muse are clearly seen. The former was a bright muse, while this one is dark. The eyes of the former flame with "lively sparks," while the eyes of the latter are full of passionate night. The muse of "Cache-cache" is "frolicsome," while this one is "sensual" and "sad."

The frolicsome muse is superficial, a muse of pleasur able sensation. The muse of night is a muse of knowledge, whose gaze exposes the depths of life, and in doing so quivers with fatal suffering. The poet actively seeks 2 1 0

the impish muse of "Hide—and-Seek," while the relation of the poet to the dark muse is not one of pleasure and volition, but one of "tears,11 and of a fascination from which he cannot tear away his soul.

"When one stands face to face with reality," wrote Tjutcev in 1854, "|ja realit£) which insults and shatters one's moral being, is there strength suffi cient not to avert one's gaze for awhile and cloud one's 29 head with illusions?" The statement implies that there is no such strength. The question then arises: where did Tjutcev seek after illusions, in what did he try to escape? The muse of "Cache-cache" invites us to find that Tjutcev escaped into poetry, into the pleasant diversions of Apollonian illusion. This in- v vitation seeks support in Tjutcev's reputation as a

"pure" poet, a poet of art for art's sake. As did his reputation as a "poet of thought," this reputation of

Tjutcev'sV has three major aspects. Tjutcev V himself once said "Poetry proves nothing except the greater or 30 lesser talent of the writer." He is famous for his nature poetry, exemplified by "Spring Storm," and nature is the favorite domain of "escapists" and others com mitted to uncommitted beauty. The mystical escape and introspection epitomized in "Silentiurn!", one of Tjut- cev's most famous works, calls up, among others, the \

2 1 1

name of Novalis: "Nach Xnnen geht der geheimnisvolle

Weg." Finally, aside from Nekrasov, those who champ

ioned Tjutcev*s poetry were generally connected with

"art for art:" Turgenev, Fet, the symbolists at the

turn of the century. Meanwhile the formalist .Tynjanov

contended that "to a great measure Tjutcev*s poetry is 31 'poetry about poetry." v Will we find, then, that poetry was for Tjutcev

the means to avert his gaze from shattering reality,

a source of illusions by means of which the terrors of

being might be momentarily eased? We will— to the ex

tent that the Apollonian, or the "urge to Empathy" is

dominant in the individual works. But the greater the

tension between Empathy and Abstraction, the less suit

able the poetry becomes as a realm of escape. Poetry

that "lays life bare to the bottom," the poetry of the

"dark muse," is clearly not "escapist poetry." Indeed,

it is poetry that urges the poet to seek for escape

in the opposite direction, to escape from poetry into

the sphere of "real life," which, in comparison, is a

life of illusion.

Tjutcev sought refuge from poetry in two spheres

of illusion, that of politics and that of society. In

the whirl of political illusion, being caught up in a

succession of great events and mighty conflicts, it was 212 possible for him to avert his gaze from the essential futility of great men and the real insignificance of events when balanced against the blind forces of the universe. Escape into this arena demands more, of course, than the usual paper shuffling and trivial cere—

V mony. Hence Tjutcev's role as a political prophet.

Hence, too, the need for crises: the fate of Europe, indeed, of the world, was in the balance between the chaotic forces of Revolution and Russia, wrote the poet 32 in his political articles. He greeted the Franco- 33 Prussian war as "the beginning of the end of the world." The earlier Crimean War had elicited terms only slightly less cosmic. And then, following from the political prophecies and articles, there is the political poetry.

Unanimous agreement finds it inferior to the lyrics.

Gregg reveals, in a brilliant observation, what he calls their "retrograde quality." Reading them in succession,

one has the sense of regressing into an im mature, almost infantile world. Their ideol ogy is expounded with the repetitive rigidity of a child's catechism; their realia are the kings, swords, flags, and altars of a boys adventure book; and the moral code they up hold is rooted in the childlike veneration of established authority and faith in its omnipotence.34

Gregg then expounds his theories as to the psychological causes behind the phenomena. It is enough for us here to suggest that this "adventure-book poetry" was, in fact, 213

fulfilling the function of an adventure book. It al

lowed the poet to escape into its world of illusion, of

"established authority" and rigid repetition. It is,

in its way, a kind of abstract art. In its rigidity

and unshakable omnipotence the poet finds a refuge from

the arbitrariness of flux and the uncertainty of the

'true, chaotic reality.

Pigarev details the fact that, as the end ap-

proached, Tjutcev1s obsession with politics did not 35 decrease, but actually increased. Gregg notes that y Tjutcev never wrote as much poetry as he did during

the last thirteen years of his life— but primarily

political poetry. 3 (5 "It is so easy not to be!," he had

written in one of his poems (1870)^, but Tjutcev did

not sink into the abyss without one last attempt at

escape. A victim of a series of strokes, he lay on his

death bed. The priest had already read the last rites

when Tjutcev opened his eyes and asked: "V/hat are the

details of the taking of Xiva?" He died 15/27 July

1873.

The other avenue of escape from the reality of

poetry leads into the illusory world of society. It is

a widely stated fact, usually treated as just another

of the man's many paradoxes, that Tjutcev loathed society

and found such circles a great bore. Why, then, did he 214 so avidly frequent them? He himself provides an answer:

"My usual irritation is augmented in no small measure by the weariness I experience in the pursuit of ways to distract myself and to not see the terrible empti- 39 ness in front of me." With the approach of death, his consciousness of that terrible abyss grew stronger.

Stronger also, therefore, grew his need for the dis tractions of society. Valerij Brjusov, who made several contributions to Tjutcev scholarship, note that

Counter to the increasing ailments of old age, with the years he constantly extended the bounds of his acquaintances and relationships in a re lentless thirst to take part in the exchange of ideas and opinions. Ageing, he not only did not give up his constant attendance at all possible soirees, societies, and gatherings, but, on the contrary, gave himself up to them much more. Absolutely every day he would appear in a high- society salon, or in the drawing room of a writer, or in a circle of young people, not shunning differences of view, always ready to stand up for his convictions in a free, chivalrous argu ment . 40

"Chivalrous argument:" again a perceptive scholar em ploys an "adventure-story" motif in his description.

Without denying the normality of the need of a brilliant mind like Tjutcev's for the stimulating exchange of ideas, we may note the abstract quality of the experience. This is argument for the sake of sensation. The ideas per se constantly decrease in importance in the face of the inexorable advance of the terrible emptiness. And note \

215

the rigidity of the schedule: "absolutely every day."

In this may be seen an attempt to counter the arbi

trariness and uncertainty of the phenomena of life, v the abyss Tjutcev's poetic insight had revealed.

Perhaps Tjutcev thought to escape from poetry

by belittling it, to free himself from the revelations

of his "dark muse" by disowning her. Perhaps his "in

advertent" burning of the "greater part" of what he

wrote 1825—1836 was linked to this desire to escape from

the muse's passionate and suffering gaze. And his

carelessness with his poems was also perhaps motivated

by his desire to escape from her eyes, "which laid life

bare to the bottom." Fortunately for poetry, if he

was able, from time to time, to avert his eyes from

hers, he was unable to tear away his soul. 216

FOOTNOTES— CHAPTER VII

The poem is "Ne znaju ja, kosnetsja blagodat," and was written in 1851, the first year of the poet's re lationship with Denis'eva. Tjutcev*s wife did not find it until 1875, two years after the poet's death. One can only wonder what her feelings were as she read these lines, coming, as it were, from another world: "I do not know whether paradise will touch/My painfully-sinful' soul, /Whether it will be granted to it to rise and be renewed,/ Whether this spiritual coma will pass,/But if the soul were able/Here, on earth, to find comfort,/ You would have been paradise to me --/You, you, my earthly ^divine] providence I"

2 v Almost all of Tjutcev's letters are written in French. The most accessible collection of his letters (at this writing) is F.I. TjutJfev, Stixotvoreni ja, Pis'maT ed. K.V. Pigarev (Moscow, 1957): the letters (selected) are translated into Russian. The excerpt cited is in Stixotvoreniia, Pis'ma, 409. The "threatening events" refers to war be tween Austria and Prussia which began two days after the letter was written, 29 April 1859.

8A Fet, Moi vospominanija, II (Moscow, 1890), 2.

4 Gregg, 27-30; Pigarev, Chapter 6 , "Kak sozdaval Tjut cev svoi stixi," 321-323.

8 Gregg, 28.

6 Ibid., 29.

^Nad^da Mandel'stam, Hope Against Hope, trans., Max Hay ward, intro., Clarence Brown (New York, 1970), 71.

8 Ibid., 180.

^Ibid., 181.

10Ibid., 180. 217

^Pigarev, Chapter 6 .

12Stixotvorenija, Pis'ma, 380.

1 3 Ibid., 417.

■^Stixotvoreni ia, Pis * ma , 5 24, rtote to "V razluke est' vysokoe zna<5en'e"""*("In separation there is a lofty meaning.").

1 5 Ibid., 428.

"^Translated from G. Kulkov, Poslednjaja ljubov1 Tjutceva (Moscow, 1928), 47-48.

^^Ibid., 53.

■^Letter dated 25 June 1851 in "Lettres de Th. J. Tjutscheff a sa seconds Spouse, nee baronne de Pfeffel." Starina i novizna 18 (1914), 261.

19 Stixotvorenija. Pis’ma, 450, from a letter to his wife dated 12 January 1866.

20 v Translated from B. Ejxenbaum, "Pis'ma Tjutceva," Skvozf literaturu: Sbornik statei (Leningrad, 1924), 54, £photomechanic reprint; Mouton: The Hague, 1962Q

21 Stixotvorenija, Pis’ma, 391.

22 t i / Translated from D. Stremooukhoff, La Poesie et L fideo- loqie de Tiouttchev (Paris, 1937), 79.

2 3 Pigarev, 321.

24 Gregg, 42.

25 v v F.I. Tjutcev, Polnoe sobranie socinenij, ed. P.V. Bykov (St. Petersburg, 1913}, note to "Cache-cache,"383.

i 218

26 V F.I. Tjutcev, Polnoe sobranie stixotvorenij, 1957, note to "Cache-cache," 339.

^ I b i d . , note to "Ja oci znal," 351.

^Gregg, 168.

29 Stixotvoreni ja, P i s ^ a , 403-404. The letter, to his wife, is dated 19 June 1854.

3^Starina i novizna 18 (1914), 17.

31 v Tynjanov, in “Pushkin x Tjutcev," Arxaisty i novatory, 363.

33"Lettre a m. le docteur Gustave Kolb" (1844) and "La Russie et la revolution" (1848) in particular. These, and the two other articles, "La question romaine" (1850), and "Lettre sur la censure en Russie" (1857), appear with Russian translations in the Bykov 1913 edition.

33Starina i novizna 22 (1917), 259.

3 ^Gregg, 145.

3 3 Pigarev, 172-178; also: . Pigarev, "F.I. Tjutcev i problemy vne^nej politiki carskoj Rossii," Lit— eraturnoe nasledstvo 19-21 (1935), 177-256, and . "F.I. Tjutcev o francuzskix sobytijax (1870- 1873 g g)," Literaturnoe nasledstvo 31.32 (1937), 753-776.

3 6 Gregg, 201.

Q..ji tak legko ne byt’!" — "Brat, stol’ko let soputstvovav^ij mne" ("Brother, having traveled with me for so many years.").

3®Translated from Bux^tab, intro, to Polnoe sobranie stixotvoreni j , 1957, 14, "Xiva" ("Khiva") refers to one of the khanates the Russians conquered in their expansion into Central Asia. 219

^ Starina i novizna 21 (1916), 218.

40 v y V. Brjusov, "Kritiko-biograficeskij ocerk" m F.I. Tjutcev, Polnoe sobranie socinenlj, ed. P.F. Bykov, 1913. 2 2 0

APPENDIX

A Brief Chronology

1803 Tjutcev born at family estate of Ovstug, Orlov Province. 23 November/ 6 December.

1812 Napoleonic invasion. Semen Raic engaged as tutor.

1817 Tjutcev enters Moscow University.

1818 Named member of The Society of Lovers of Russian Literature.

1821 Passes final examinations at Moscow University. Enters foreign service.

1822 Given a post in Munich. Will visit Russia only intermittently and infrequently until his return in 1844.

1825 Decembrist Uprising.

1826 Tjutcev marries Eleanor Peterson (nee Bothmer).

1830 July Revolution in France.

1836 The poet accidently burns most of his works.

1836 Sixteen "Poems Sent from Germany" published in Pushkin's Cor:temporary under the initials F.T. Twenty-three published there in the next four years. Virtually no notice taken of them by critics.

1837 Pushkin's death. Tjutcev transferred to Turin.

1838 Tjutcev's wife and three daughters caught in fire on steamer Nicholas I. They survive, but wife dies later in the year.

1939 Tjutcev leaves post without permission to marry Ernestine Dornberg (nee Pfeffel). Loses post, settles again in Munich. X

2 2 1

1844 Writes "Lettre a M. le docteur Gustave Kolb,” the first of his political articles. Returns to Russia, settles in St. Petersburg. Rein stated in government service. Becomes a "lion of society.”

1848 Tjutcev greets European revolutions with "La Russie et la revolution” and "La question romaine.”

1849 Russia suppresses the Hungarian Revolution (June-August). v 1850 Nekrasov "discoveres” Tjutcev's earlier poems: writes about them in the article, "Russian Second-Rank Poets" in The Contemporary.

1850? Tjutcev meets Elena Aleksandrovna Denis'eva. Their relationship lasts fourteen years, until her death, at age thirty eight, 4 August 1864. They have three children. The cycle of related poems is called the "Last Love” cycle, after the poem "Poslednjaja ljubov'.”

1853- 56 Crimean War.

1854 Turgenev editor of the first collection of Tjutcev's poems.

1864 Denis'eva's death.

1866 Austro-Prussian War (Seven Weeks War).

1870- 71 Franco-Prussian War.

1873 1 January, Tjutcev's first stroke.

1873 15 July/27 July, Tjutcev's death. 2 2 2

Selected Bibliography

I. Tjutcev1s Poetry and Essays

F.I. Tjutcev. Polnoe sobranie stixotvorenij. Ed. K.V. Pigarev. Leningrad: Biblioteka poeta, 1957.

F.I. Tjutcev.V Polnoe sobranie socinenij. V Ed. P.V. Bykov. St. Petersburg, 1913.

II. Letters

F.I. Tjutcev v pis'max k E.K. Boqdanovoj i S .P. prolovu. Ed. E.P. Kazanovi£. Leningrad, 1926*.

"Iz pisem F.I. Tjutceva." Russkij arxiv, 3 (1898), 556-568. \ / f "Lettres de Th. I. Tjutscheff a son seconde epouse, nee Baronne de Pfeffel." Starina i novizna. 18 (1914, 1-63; 19 (1915), 104-276; 21 (1916), 155-243; 22 (1917), 243-293. v "Otryvki iz perepiski Tjutceva s kn. I.S. Gagarinym." Russkij arxiv, 1 (1879), 118— 138.

F.I. Tjutcev, Stixotvoreni ia, Pis'tna. Ed. K.V. Pigarev. Moscoe, 1957.

III. Books and Articles on Tjutcev

Aksakov, I.S. Biografija Fedora Ivanovi^a Tjutceva. Moscow, 1886.

Alekseev, M.P. "Nochmals uber T ’utchev und Goethe." Germanoslavica, 1 (1932-33), 64-69.

Belyj, A. (Bugaev). "Lirika i 'eksperiment," "Opyt* xarakteristiki russkogo ^etyrexstopnogo jamba," "Sravnitel'naja morfologija ritma russkix lirikov v jambiceskom dimetre." Simvolizm. Moscow, 1910. 223

v Berkovskij, N. Ja. Intro., F.I. Tjutcev, Stixotvoreni ja, Moscow, 1962. 5-78.

Bilokur, Borys, "Statistical Observations on Tjutcev*s Lexicon." The Slavic and Bast European Journal, 14 (1970), 302-316.

Blagoj, D. "Genial'nyj russkij lyrik." Literatura i de jstvitel1 nost 1 Moscow, 1959. 423-456.

"Tvorcestvo Tjutceva," "Tjutcev i Vjazemskij." Tri veka. Moscow, 1933. 180-235; 236-268. v ______. "Turgenev — redaktor Tjutceva." Turgenev i eao vremia. Moscow-Petrograd, 1923. 142-163.

Brandt, R.F. "Materialy dlja issledovanija: Fedor Ivanovic Tjutcev i ego poezija." Izvesti j a otdelenija russkoqojazyka i slovestnosti Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 16, Book 2 (1911), 1-65. Braun, M. "Der Daseinskamph der russischen Lyrik im 19 Jahrhundert." Die Welt der Slaven, 1 (1956), 308-321. v Briskman, M. "F.I. Tjutcev v komitete censury inos- trannoj." Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 19-21 (1935) 565-578. V %/ Brjusov, V. "F.I. Tjutcev: Kritiko-biograficeskij ocerk." F.I. Tjutcev, Polnoe sobranie soc?inenij. Ed. P.V. Bykov. St. Petersburg, 1913.

______. "Legenda o Tjutcev." Novyj put1, 11 (1903), 16-30. V V ______* "F.I. Tjutcev: Letopis1 ego zizni." Russkij arxiv, 3 (1903), 481-498, 641-652; 2 (1906), 310-320.

Bubnoff, Nikolaj von. "Tjutcevs philosophische Dichtung." Festschrift fur Max Vasmer. Wiesbaden, 1956, 91-104.

Buxstab, Boris. "F.I. Tjutcev. 11 F.I. Tjutcev, Polnoe sobranie stixotvorertiJ . Ed. "K'iV. Pigarev. Leningrad, 1957, 5-52. 224

Russkle poety. Leningrad, 1970. 9-75. v v Cernyj, K.M. "Annenskij i Tjutcev." Vestnik moskovskoqo Universiteta: Filoloqija, 2 (Marcn-April, 1973) 10-2 3".

Cizevskij, D. "^‘jutcev^und die deutsche Romantik." Zeitschrift fur slavische Philoloqie, 4 (1927) 299-323.

. "Zu einem Gedicht Tjutcevs." Zeitschrift fur slavische Philoloqie, 14 (1937), 325—3'31.

Coates, W.A. "Tjutcev and Germany: The Relationship of His Poetry to German Literature and Culture." Harvard University unpublished dissertation, 1950. V v Culkov, G. Poslednjaja ljubov' Tjutceva. Moscow, 1926.

______• "Ljubov' v zizniV i v lirike F.I. Tjutceva." V Tjutcevskij sbornik (1873-1923). Petrograd, 1923, 5-32.

______. "Stixotvorenija, prislannye iz Germanii. Zven'- ja, 2 (1933), 255-266. v v Darskij, D.S. Cudesnye vymysli: 0 kosmiceskom soznanii v lirike Tjufcffev,a~I Moscow, 1914.

Dolgopolov, L.K. "Tjutcev i Blok." Russkaja literatura, 10 (1967), 59-80.

Dudek, Gerhard. "Der philosophische und kunstlerische Gehalt der Gleichnisformen in F.I. Tjutcevs Poesie." Zeitschrift fur Slawistik, 3 (1958), 494-519. V V . Review of K.V. Pigarev, Zizn* i tvorcestvo Tjutceva. Zeitschrift fur Slawistik, To (1965),441-446.

Ejxenbaum, Boris. "Melodika russkogo liriceskogo stixa." O Poezii. Leningrad, 1969, 395-408.

"Pis'ma Tjutceva." Skvoz' literaturu. Lenin grad. 1924, 50-61. 225

Ferrell, James, "On the Problem of Unity in Stanzaic Poetry with Especial Reference to Tjutcev's Solutions." Orbis scriptus, Dmitrij Tschizew- skij zum 70 Gehurtstag. Munich, 1966, 202-210.

Fet, A. A. "0 stixotvorenijax F. Tjutceva." Russkoe slovo, Mo. 2 (1859), 63-84.

Florovskij, G. "Historical Premonitions of Tyutchev." Slavonic Review 3 (1924), 337— 349.

V V v . . v .Frank, S. "Kosmiceskoe cuvstvo v poezn Tjutceva." Russkaja mysl 1 11 (1913), 1-31.

Gifford, H. "The Evolution of Tyutchev's Art." Slavonic and East European Review. 37 (December 1958- June 1959),"378-386.

Ginzburg, L. O Lirike. Moscow, 1964, 89-101 et passim.

Gippius, V.V. "F.I. Tjutcev." Ot Pushkin do Bloka. Moscow, 1966, 201-224.

Gornfel'd, A.G. "Na poroge dvojnogo bytija (F.I. Tjutcev)" O Russkix pisateljax. St. Petersburg, 1910 , I, 3-26.

Gregg, Richard A. Fedor Tiutchev: The Evolution of a Poet. New York, 1965. v Grossman, L. Tri sovremennika: Tyjtcev, Dostoevskij, Apollon Gricor'ev. Moscow, 1922, 1-4; 6-37. v Gudzij, N.K. "Alliteracija l assonans u Tjutceva." Slavia 5 (1926-27), 456-469.

"Tjutcev v kulture russkogo simvolizma, Izvestija po russkomu jazyku i slovestnosti 3 (Book 2, 19307, 4"65-5~49. v Gustafson, Richard, "Tjutcev's Imagery and What It Tells Us." The Slavic and 2ast_ European Journal 4 (1960), 1-16.

Hoppe, Anni. "Selbstwiederholungen bei Tjutcev." Zeitschrift fur slavische P-hilologie 15 (1938), 92-101. 226

Jegorow, Borys. "Kategoria czasu w poezij rosyjskiej poXowy xix wieku." Slavia Qrientalis 17 (1968) 13-20.

Kazanovic,V E.P., ed. Tjutcevskij V al'manax. Leningrad, 1928.

Kerndl, A. "Studien uber Heine in Russland, II. Heine und Tjutcev." Zeitschrift fur slavische Philoloqie 24 (1956), 284-337. % V Koller, E. "0 rifmax stixotvorenija P.I. Tjutceva 'Plamja rdeet, plamja pyset.'" Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hunqaricae 17 (1971), 167-170.

______. ”0 zvukax tjutcevskix stixov." Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hunqaricae 16 (1970), 301-323.

Koroleva, N.V. "Poslednie izdanija stixotvorenij Tjutceva." Voprosy literatury 4 (1959), 217- 221. ______. "Tjutcev i Pushkin.” Pushkin: Issledovanija i materialy. 4 (Moscow" 1962), 183-207.

Lane, R.C. "Russia and the Revolution in Tyutcev*s Poetry: Some Poems of 1828—1830." Slavonic and East European Review 51 (April 1973), 214-230.

Le^nev, A.Z. "F.I. Tjutcev: Kriti^eskij o<£erk." F.I. Tjutcev, Stixotvoreni ja, ed. G.I. Culkov, Moscow, 1935, 5-40.

______. Dva poeta (Heine, Tjutcev). Moscow, 1934, 3-56.

Malaxovskij, V.A. "Epitet Tjutceva." Kameny 1 (1922), 17-31.

Majmin, E.A. "Vozvy^ennoe slovo F.I. Tjutceva." Russka- 1a rec' 1 (1973), 3-12.

Matlaw, Ralph E. "Tjutcev*s Punctuation and Tjutcev's Texts." Orbis scriptus. Dmitrij Tschizewskij zum 70 Geburtstaq. Munich, 1966. 529-535. 227

. "The Polyphony of Tyutchev*s *Son na more.*" Slavonic and East European Review 36 (December.)

. Review of Richard A. Gregg, T1ut£ev: The Evolution of a Poet. The Slavic and East European Journal 10 (1966), 112-114.

Mejer, Georgij. "2alo v dux (Mesto TjutCeva v metafizike rossijskoj literaturoj)." Frankfurt/Main, 1968, 95-122.

Mel*§in, L. (P.P. GrineviZ?] . OSerki russkoj poezii. St. Petersburg, 1904, 213-240.

Merezkovskij, D.S. Dve tainy russkoj poezii: Nekrasov i Tjutcev. Petrograd, 1915.

Nekrasov, Nikolaj. "Russkie vtorostepennye poety." Polnoe sobranie soSineni) i pisem. Moscow, 1951, IX, 204-221.

Ozerov, L. Rabota poeta. Kniqa statej. Moscow, 1963, 106-158.

Pigarev, K.V. Zizn* i tvorcestvo Tjutceva. Moscow, 1962.

. "F.I. TjutEev o francuzskix sobytijax (1870- 1873gg)." Literaturnoe nasledstvo 31-32 (1937), 753-776.

. "F.I. Tjutcev i problemy vneSnej politiki carskoj Rossii." Literaturnoe nasledstvo 19-21 (1935), 177-256.

______. "Sud'ba literaturnogo nasledstva F.I. Tjutceva." Literaturnoe nasledstvo 19-21 (1935, 371-418.

"£fto perevodil TjutSev." Zven*1a 3-4 (1934), 245-262.

. "Novootkrytye teksty Tjutceva." Zven'la 2 (1933) 267-284.

Pletnev, R. "O Lirike F.I. Tjutcfeva." Novyl 2urnal 85 (1966), 109-126.

Pokrovskij, V. F.I. Tjutcev: Ego zizn* i soEinenija. Moscow, 1904. Pumpjanskij, L. "Poeteija F.I. Tjutceva." Urania. Leningrad, 1928, 9-57. N

V v Savodnik, V.F. Cuvstvo prirodv v poezii Pushkina, Ler montova, i T-jutcfoVa. Moscow, 1911.

Schulze, Almut. Tjutcevs Kurzlyrik. Traditionszusam- menhange und Interpretationen. Munich, 1968.

Setschkareff, V. Schellincrs Einfluss in der russischen Literatur der zwanziaer und dreissiaer Jahre dos XIX Jahrhunderts. Leipzig, 1939. 99— 106.

Skatov, N.N. "Nekrasov i Tjutcev." Russkaja literatura 14 (1971), 20-35.

Solov'ev, Vladimir "Poezija F.I.. Tjutceva." Vestnik Evropy. 2 (1895), 736-752.

Stremooukhoff, D. La Poesie et l'ideoloqie de Tiouttchev. Paris, 1937.

Surina, N. "Tjutcev i Lamartin." Poetika 2 (1927), 148-167. v Tjutcevskij sbornlk. Petrograd, 1923. v Tynjanov, Jurij. "Pushkin i Tjutcev," "Vopros o Tjut- ceve," "Tjutcev i Geine." Armaisty i novatory. Leningrad, 1929.

Vinokurov, E. "P,aradoksy F. Tjutceva." Moskva 3 (1970) 198-205.

Weidle, Wladimir,ladimir, "Poslednjaja ljubov' Tjutceva." Novy j zurnal 18 (1948), 181-181-200.

Xodasevic,, Vladislav. "0 Tjutceve.Tjutceve." 1828 Literaturnye stat'i i vospominanija. -New York, 1954, 113-124,

IV. Other Books

Lohman, Ju. Lektsii po struktural'noi poetike; Vvedenie, teoriia stikha. Brown University Slavic Re- Print V, 1968.

Lotman, Ju. Struktura khudozhestvennoqo teksta. Brown University Slavic" Reprint IX, 1971. 229

Smith Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure. Chicago, 1968.

Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy. Michael Bullock trans. Cleveland, 1967.