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naverhtrad's review
5.0
I am highly glad that Fyodor Tyutchev, considered one of the three great lights of Russian Romantic poetry alongside Pushkin and Lermontov, rated an English translation not only of his nature and love poetry (his Deniseva cycle in particular is truly sublime, reprehensible as was the May-and-December extramarital affaire which inspired it), but also his political poems and letters.
Tyutchev clearly belonged to the same Slavophil and pan-Slavist school of thought to which belonged also Khomyakov, Kireevsky, Samarin and the brothers Aksakov. He was, like all of the aforementioned thinkers, both deeply conservative in a classical sense, and supportive of the freedom and uplift of Russia's serfs and peasantry. Dedicated above all to the principle, as he called it, of 'union, harmony, mutual confidence, voluntary subordination of individual interests to the great cause of the general interest' (or sobornost', in short) which he thought exemplified by Russia's inner life, his political writing, even if it comes off a little naive from the perspective of hindsight, shows a real clarity of vision. His treatment - not entirely unsympathetic - of the revolutionary German press shows quite presciently the way in which Russia has been portrayed by hostile governments with Eastern European ambitions ever since. And Tyutchev grasped quite well that Russia herself was not at issue for the hostile Western press, but rather the pathologies and spiritual turmoil of the societies themselves within which those press outlets operated.
Of particular interest to me, as a Russophile American Orthodox convert of Czech extraction, is his warmly-reciprocated literary friendship with the brilliant Czech linguist and poet Václav Hanka (whose reputation has been sadly tarnished by his attempt to pass off his Rukopisy Královédvorský a Zelenohorský as antiquarian examples of Czech epic poetry), and his positive general approach to the Czech people more generally. My one quibble with this volume is that it did not have any intertextual Russian, but relied solely on the translations into English, which did not always preserve the rhyming and modish language used by Tyutchev.
A minor quibble, though. Worth a read, for fans of Romantic poetry as well as aficionados of 19th-century Russian thought.
Tyutchev clearly belonged to the same Slavophil and pan-Slavist school of thought to which belonged also Khomyakov, Kireevsky, Samarin and the brothers Aksakov. He was, like all of the aforementioned thinkers, both deeply conservative in a classical sense, and supportive of the freedom and uplift of Russia's serfs and peasantry. Dedicated above all to the principle, as he called it, of 'union, harmony, mutual confidence, voluntary subordination of individual interests to the great cause of the general interest' (or sobornost', in short) which he thought exemplified by Russia's inner life, his political writing, even if it comes off a little naive from the perspective of hindsight, shows a real clarity of vision. His treatment - not entirely unsympathetic - of the revolutionary German press shows quite presciently the way in which Russia has been portrayed by hostile governments with Eastern European ambitions ever since. And Tyutchev grasped quite well that Russia herself was not at issue for the hostile Western press, but rather the pathologies and spiritual turmoil of the societies themselves within which those press outlets operated.
Of particular interest to me, as a Russophile American Orthodox convert of Czech extraction, is his warmly-reciprocated literary friendship with the brilliant Czech linguist and poet Václav Hanka (whose reputation has been sadly tarnished by his attempt to pass off his Rukopisy Královédvorský a Zelenohorský as antiquarian examples of Czech epic poetry), and his positive general approach to the Czech people more generally. My one quibble with this volume is that it did not have any intertextual Russian, but relied solely on the translations into English, which did not always preserve the rhyming and modish language used by Tyutchev.
A minor quibble, though. Worth a read, for fans of Romantic poetry as well as aficionados of 19th-century Russian thought.
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