Introductory Notes. The life of Fyodor Ivanovich Tutchev (1803-1873) may not seem poetical or romantic to a superficial observer

The life of Fyodor Ivanovich Tutchev (1803-1873) may not seem poetical or romantic to a superficial observer. He was a career diplomat and spent many years abroad, mostly in Germa­ny. His first wife belonged to the German nobility and was very beautiful. When she died rather young, he suffered an agony of depression but later married another German. His daughter was a dame de court in St. Petersburg. When back in Russia, a married man and about fifty, he embarked on a pathetic liaison with Elena Denisyeva, which lasted until her death in 1864. Lyrical pieces devoted to her were among the best in his poetic legacy.

Yet he was a true poet, and a great one. He wrote in Rus­sian, as well as in French and German. His translations of Ger­man poetry were numerous. His own poetry was full of thought, philosophic ideas and cosmic images. When in Germany, Tutch­ev enjoyed a personal friendship with Friedrich Schelling, an out­standing German philosopher and scholar. Schellingian attitudes and his philosophical pantheism often reveal themselves in Tu-tchev's imagery and diction. However, one should not take Tu­tchev as "a mere philosopher in verse"; his poetic visions were also passionate, full of deep emotion and strong feeling of nature. In his poems nature may "breathe," "sleep," "smile," it has a lan­guage °f ^^{s own:}

He то, что мните вы, природа: Не слепок, не бездушный лик — В ней есть душа, в ней есть свобода, В ней есть любовь, в ней есть язык.

________ Практикум по художественному переводу____

Nature is not what you just see: A copy, or a senseless view — It has a soul and liberty, It loves and hates, it speaks to you.

{Translated by T. Kazakova)

In the 1830s Tutchev established his place in Russian liter­ature as an outstanding, powerful lyricist. His early poems were highly praised by Pushkin and Zhukovsky and later admired by Turgenev, Nekrasov and Tolstoy. Politically he was rather con­servative, with Slavophil leanings and "sentimental fondness for Tsarism."

With few exceptions, his lyrics are among the greatest poetry ever written in Russia. As early as the first half of 19 cen­tury, his poetry, alongside that of Baratynsky, foreshadowed the fin de siecle renaissance, the "Silver Age" of Russian poetry, with its symbolic power, rhythmic and metric liberties and its deep concern with spirituality. One of the most sophisticated poets and philosophers of the Silver Age, Vladimir Solovyov, wrote an ar­ticle about Tutchev's poetry where he discussed his main themes and motifs, such as chaos, love, cosmos, the search for one's own soul, and others¹. Valery Brusov called his poetry "perfect." Leo Tolstoy, a rather unpoetic man by nature, marked one of his poems with the Russian letter "Г" (stahding for «Глубина» — "depth, profundity").

The poem chosen in the task for comparison, Silentium!, was apparently written in 1830 and first published in Molva in 1833. The tenth, quite enigmatic, line of this poem has become one of the most frequently cited and discussed: «Мысль изреченная есть ложь». A few translations of this poem exist; the three given below are most interesting from the point of view of both their likenesses and their differences.

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