Elena Aleksandrovna Deniseva(1826 - August 4, 1864, St. Petersburg) - mistress of Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev. Her relationship with the poet lasted for fourteen years; Three children were born out of wedlock, two of whom died less than a year after the death of their mother.
Tyutchev’s works dedicated to Deniseva (“Predestination”, “Oh, how murderously we love...”, “Last Love” and others) have an autobiographical basis. In literary criticism, the “poetic novel” addressed to her is called the Denisiev cycle.
Biography
She came from an old noble family of the Denisyevs, recorded in the 6th part of the noble genealogy book of the Ryazan province. She was born into the family of a poor nobleman, a participant in the Patriotic War of 1812, Alexander Dmitrievich Denisyev. Widowed at an early age, he remarried; After the appearance of her stepmother, the girl was taken under her care by her aunt Anna Dmitrievna, who worked as an inspector at the Smolny Institute. Her six nieces were brought up in Smolny: Maria, Olga, Anna, Pelageya, Alexandra and Elena, who, having become a pupil of this educational institution, was, however, in it (unlike other nieces) “in a special position” - she lived in her aunt’s apartment . As A.I. Georgievsky pointed out, Elena Denisyeva received a fairly free upbringing: from her adolescence she began to go to balls and attend social events.
Nature gifted her with great intelligence and wit, great impressionability and liveliness, depth of feeling and energy of character, and when she found herself in a brilliant society, she herself was transformed into a brilliant young lady who<…>always gathered around her many brilliant fans.
In the second half of the 1840s, Tyutchev’s daughters from his first marriage, Daria and Ekaterina, studied at the Smolny Institute. The poet often visited them; in turn, Elena Alexandrovna and Anna Dmitrievna were included in his house. Mutual interest matured gradually, the day of explanation - July 15, 1850 - became a major milestone for Tyutchev and Deniseva. A decade and a half later, in the middle of the summer of 1865, the poet noted this date with the lines: “Today, friend, fifteen years have passed / Since that blissfully fateful day / How she breathed in her whole soul, / How she poured all of herself into me.”
Roman Denisyeva with married man, who was old enough to be her father, was negatively perceived not only by secular Petersburg (the doors of many houses were pointedly closed in front of her), but also by Elena Alexandrovna’s parent, who disowned his daughter. Anna Dmitrievna also encountered difficulties: she was forced to resign from the Smolny Institute and move out of her office apartment.
During her fourteen years in the “illegal union,” Denisyeva gave birth to three children for the poet - daughter Elena and sons Fyodor and Nikolai. They were all recorded in metrics by the Tyutchevs. Georgievsky, who was Elena Alexandrovna’s brother-in-law, wrote that she always behaved very directly, considering herself “more of all his wife than his ex-wives.” The recklessness and immensity of her feelings was such that in 1862 Denisyeva admitted: “I live his life entirely, I am entirely his, and he is mine.” The poet spoke about what she experienced in a poem written in 1851.
Denisyeva with her daughter 1862-1863 Tyutchev 1860-1861Oh, how murderously we love, How in the violent blindness of passions We most certainly destroy that which is dear to our hearts! Fate was a terrible sentence Your love was for her, And it lay an undeserved shame on her life!
A series of tragedies
Death of Deniseva
In May 1864, Denisyeva gave birth to a son, Nikolai. After giving birth, her health began to rapidly deteriorate; doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. She died on August 4; Three days later, Tyutchev buried his beloved at the Volkovskoye cemetery. Being in a state of complete despair, the poet, according to the recollections of his contemporaries, was constantly looking for interlocutors with whom he could talk about Elena Alexandrovna. As Afanasy Fet said, Tyutchev “fevered and shivered in warm room from sobbing."
19. 07. 2011 306Here I am wandering along the high road
In the quiet light of the fading day,
It’s hard for me, my legs are freezing...
My dear friend, do you see me?
It’s getting darker, darker above the ground -
The last light of the day has flown away...
This is the world where you and I lived,
Tomorrow is a day of prayer and sorrow,
Tomorrow is the memory of the fateful day...
My angel, wherever souls have hovered,
My angel, can you see me?
F.I. Tyutchev, “On the eve of the anniversary of August 4, 1864”
Elena Aleksandrovna Denisieva
It's not for us to judge
how complex and inexplicable the path of love is, on what invisible strings the music of attraction sounds above it, how strong the note of passion is in this melody and how firmly intertwined it is with the impulse of the heart.
In different destinies this appears in its own way, and sometimes the external gaze turns to the feelings of lovers and lovers with condemnation, and foreign tongues are ready to disgrace these feelings, especially if they result in a long-term relationship.
This happened to the woman to whom the lines of the poem from the epigraph are addressed. Elena Aleksandrovna Denisyeva was born in Kursk into an old noble family, which, however, was fairly impoverished by the time of her birth. The girl lost her mother early, and her father’s remarriage led to growing problems in the couple’s relationship with the family.
Elena was sent to St. Petersburg in the care of her aunt, the senior inspector of the Smolny Institute, who quickly became attached to her niece by shopping for ladies' clothes and jewelry, and began to take her out into the world early. A young girl with good manners, pleasant appearance and remarkable intelligence was noticed and began to enjoy the attention of men, which promised her the possibility of a successful marriage. But…
Fedor Ivanovich Tyutchev
Together in Elena, the two eldest daughters of Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, a poet and diplomat, were raised in Smolny. He, by that time already married a second time, had some kind of magical influence for all the ladies he met in his life. Our heroine was no exception. But also F.I. Tyutchev could not resist the charm of the lovely E.A. Deniseva. The passion that flared up in both brought them into each other's arms. And while she remained a secret to secular society, nothing prevented meetings. She was 24, he was 47.
However, a scandal occurred when, just before graduation and court appointments,
It turned out that the Smolny student was expecting a baby. The aunt was hastily escorted out of the institute and given a pension. Almost all relatives and acquaintances abandoned Elena herself, and the father cursed his daughter. But it was Alexandra Dmitrievna Denisyeva, an aunt who had lost a prestigious place of service, who did not leave the young woman, settling with her, and even a classy lady from Smolny, Varvara Arsentievna Belorukova, visited ladies rejected by society, taking care of them for many years.
E.A. Denisyeva with her daughter Elena Tyutcheva
Despite everything, Lelya Denisyeva did not break off relations with her beloved man, and the strange love triangle existed for fourteen years, until the death of E.A. Deniseva. She gave birth to F.I. Tyutchev three children, and he gave them his last name with the consent of his legal wife Ernestina, who was aware of her husband’s relationship with another woman. The relationship in this unofficial couple was completely cloudless. Exhausted Lelya could make a scene for her lover, but could not refuse him. And he, despite these scenes, also could not imagine life without her.
Elena Alexandrovna died of consumption on August 4, 1864 at the age of 37, and soon the eldest daughter, also Elena, and the youngest son Nikolai, who was less than three years old, died from this disease. Only the son Fedor survived, who then lived a long life.
F.I. Tyutchev, who adored two women for almost a decade and a half and therefore did not make a choice between them, dedicated the most piercing cycle of poems to his insane passion for his Lela, including the well-known “Oh how murderously we love...”, “Don’t say: he’s like me.” before, loves...", "What did you pray with love...", "I knew the eyes - oh, those eyes!..", "Last love" and others.
One of them describes the dying hours of a woman who put her whole life on the altar of love, and not just her well-being and social approval:
All day she lay in oblivion -
And all of it was already covered with shadows -
The warm summer rain was pouring - its streams
The leaves sounded cheerful.
And slowly she came to her senses -
And I started listening to the noise,
And I listened for a long time - captivated,
Immersed in conscious thought...
And so, as if talking to myself,
She said consciously:
(I was with her, killed but alive)
“Oh, how I loved all this!”
You loved, and the way you love -
No, no one has ever succeeded -
Oh God!.. and survive this...
And my heart didn’t break into pieces...
And even many years after meeting Elena Alexandrovna, the poet will still address her:
Today, friend, fifteen years have passed
Since that blissfully fateful day,
How she breathed in her whole soul,
How everything poured into me...
It’s not for us to judge a love story, and the language does not dare to call it an anal word “romance”. But today, the fourth of August, we can remember her...
Valentina Ponomareva
Elena Aleksandrovna Denisyeva was born in Kursk, in 1826, into an old, but very impoverished noble family. Lost my mother early. Relations with his father, Alexander Dmitrievich Denisyev, an honored military man, and his second wife did not work out almost immediately. Rebellious and hot-tempered for the new “mother”, Elena was hastily sent to the capital, St. Petersburg, to be raised by her aunt, her father’s sister, Anna Dmitrievna Denisyeva, the senior inspector of the Smolny Institute.
This allowed her to raise her half-orphan niece on a common basis with the rest of the “Smolyans”: the girl acquired impeccable manners, slender posture, an excellent French-German accent, the basics of natural sciences and mathematics, solid knowledge in the field of home economics and cooking, and an exorbitant ardor of imagination, developed reading sentimental novels and poetry at night, stealthily from the classy ladies.
Anna Dmitrievna, overly strict and dry with her subordinates and pupils, became passionately attached to her niece, spoiled her in her own way, that is, early on she began buying her outfits, jewelry, ladies' trinkets and taking her out into the world, where she was seen as an elegant, graceful brunette, with an extremely expressive, characteristic face, lively brown eyes and very good manners - both seasoned womanizers and ardent “archive youths” (students of the history and archive departments of St. Petersburg and Moscow universities), representatives of ancient noble, often impoverished families, quickly drew attention.
Elena Alexandrovna, with her natural intelligence, charm, deep thoughtfulness, seriousness - after all, the life of an orphan, whatever you say, leaves an imprint on the soul and heart - and very refined, elegant manners, she could count on a very good arrangement of her destiny: Smolny Institute was under tireless guardianship of the Imperial Family, and the niece, almost an adopted daughter, of the honored teacher was going to be appointed a maid of honor of the Court upon graduation!
And then there was marriage, quite appropriate for her years and upbringing. 
But fate wanted to introduce her to Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev....
Fyodor Ivanovich was not a monogamous person. He could passionately adore two women at once and at the same time he did not cheat his soul. The women he loved responded to him with an even more selfless, selfless feeling; he sometimes captivated them from the first meeting.
Fyodor Ivanovich married early, at the age of twenty-three. After graduating from university in 1826, he was assigned to the diplomatic service in Munich and a year later became the husband of the lovely Eleanor Peterson, the widow of the Russian envoy, taking her with four sons from her first marriage. 
Eleanor was four years older than Tyutchev, she idolized him. “Never would a person become as loved by another person as I am loved by her,” Fyodor Ivanovich admitted years later, “for eleven years there was not a single day in her life when, in order to strengthen my happiness, she would not agree, not hesitate for a moment to die for me.”
They already have three daughters... And suddenly a new passion bursts into Tyutchev’s life. He falls in love with Baron Dernberg's wife Ernestine, one of the first beauties of Munich, whose beauty was combined with a brilliant mind and excellent education.
It was not just a hobby, which had happened to him before, but a fatal passion, which, according to the poet, “shocks existence and ultimately destroys it.”
Is it possible to hide such love from prying eyes for a long time? Moreover, Ernestine is now free: her husband died shortly after she met Fyodor Tyutchev. Their romance gets publicity. The wife, having learned about her husband's affair, tries to commit suicide... But he also loves Eleanor, loves both... One way or another, it is no longer possible to live in the same city, in the same country.
After a vacation spent in Russia, Fyodor Ivanovich went to a new duty station, in Turin. His wife and children are still in St. Petersburg, and he, taking advantage of the temporary loneliness, rushes to Genoa, where a farewell meeting with Ernestina is scheduled. Then none of them could have imagined that in a year and a half she would become Mrs. Tyutcheva...
The steamboat on which Eleanor and her children were traveling to her husband in May 1838 caught fire at night. I. S. Turgenev, who was among the passengers, later recalled how a certain young woman, without losing her composure, in a frenzy of general panic, barefoot, half-dressed, carried three babies through the flames. It was Eleonora Tyutcheva.
However, the cold and anxiety took their toll: three months later she died in suffering. The death of his wife shocked Tyutchev. He turned gray overnight...
Yes, and in these terrible days he dreamed of Ernestine and was convinced: if not for her, he would not have been able to bear the severity of the loss he had suffered... They got married in July 1839. 
The second wife of Fyodor Ivanovich, the delicate, very reserved Ernestina Feodorovna, whose maiden name was Baroness Pfefel, a native of Dresden, immensely adored her Theodora. Her father, brother and first husband - Baron Dernberg - spent their whole lives in the service of the Bavarian royal court, and in general, their whole family was heartily friends with the surname of the King of Bavaria himself, Ludwig, at whose court balls “dear Nesterle” always shone as a bright star, What was her family name?
After 22 years spent abroad, a new life began - at home, in St. Petersburg. Here the poet met his last love, which turned out to be both “bliss and hopelessness” for him...
His eldest daughters from his first marriage, Anna and Ekaterina Tyutchev, graduated from Smolny’s graduating class together with Elena. They were even very friendly with each other, and at first Helen Denisyeva gladly accepted an invitation to a cup of tea at the hospitable house of the Tyutchevs.
Tyutchev's romance with Elena Deniseva became the most powerful in his life. They met when she was 24, he was 47... and was developing frighteningly rapidly!
A decade and a half later, Tyutchev will write:
Today, friend, fifteen years have passed
Since that blissfully fateful day,
How she breathed in her whole soul,
How she poured all of herself into me...
Fyodor Ivanovich rented an apartment near Smolny overlooking the Neva, where they met. For a long time no one had any idea.
But soon Elena became pregnant. Isn't this a disgrace for the Institute of Noble Maidens! The relationship between Tyutchev and Denisyeva resulted in a social scandal. Cruel accusations fell on a woman who, for the sake of her loved one, neglected both her honor and her future. The scandal erupted in March 1851, almost before graduation and court appointments. Now the doors of the houses where she had previously been a welcome guest were forever closed in front of her. Her father cursed her.
Anna Dmitrievna was hastily escorted out of the institute, albeit with an honorary pension - three thousand rubles annually, but poor Lelya was “abandoned by everyone.” (A. Georgievsky) 
She has almost no friends left whom she doesn’t know in the world. In her new apartment, where she lived with her aunt and her newborn daughter, also Elena, only two or three friends visited her, the most devoted of them: Varvara Arsentievna Belorukova, a classy lady from Smolny, who took care of the children and elderly aunt after Elena’s death, Yes, a few relatives.
Only her Love and affection for Tyutchev saved her from complete despair. She forgave him absolutely everything: frequent absences, constant living in two families, he did not intend to, and could not, leave the devoted and all-knowing Ernestina Feodorovna and her maids of honor - daughters, his service as a diplomat and chamberlain. Selfishness, hot temper, frequent, absent-minded inattention to her, and in the end - even semi-coldness - and even the fact that she often had to lie to the children, and to all their questions:
“Where is daddy and why does he only have lunch with us once a week?” - answer hesitantly that he is at work and very busy.
Free from sidelong glances, contemptuous pity, alienation, and everything that accompanied her false position of half-wife - half-lover, Elena Alexandrovna was spared only by a short stay with Tyutchev abroad - several months a year, and even then - not every summer. There she did not need to hide from anyone, there she freely and proudly called herself: Madame Tutchef, in the hotel registration books without hesitation, with a firm hand, in response to the polite question of the receptionist, she wrote down: “Tutchef avec sa famille” (Tutchev with his family - French)
Before the birth of his third child, Feodor Ivanovich tried to dissuade Lelya from this risky step. And quite rightly so, for illegitimate children do not have any rights of estate and will be equated to peasant children. But she, this loving, kind, and generally adored Lelya, flew into such a frenzy that she grabbed him desk The first bronze dog she came across was a bronze dog on malachite and with all her strength she threw it at Feodor Ivanovich, but, fortunately, it did not hit him, but into the corner of the stove, and knocked off a large piece of tile in it.
Over time, the crack, the breakdown in the relationship between Tyutchev and Denisyeva intensified, and it is unknown how their fifteen-year suffering would have ended if not for the sudden death of Elena Alexandrovna from transient consumption in August 1864, at the age of 37 years!
So fourteen years passed. Towards the end, Elena Alexandrovna was ill a lot (she had tuberculosis). Her letters to her sister dating back to the last year and a half of her life have been preserved. In them she calls Tyutchev “my God,” and in them she compares him to the unentertainable French king. It is also clear from them that in the last summer of her life, her daughter, Lelya, went with her father to ride on the Islands almost every evening. He treated her to ice cream; they returned home late. This both pleased and saddened Elena Alexandrovna: she remained in a stuffy room alone or in the company of some compassionate lady who volunteered to visit her. That summer Tyutchev especially wanted to go abroad and was burdened by St. Petersburg; We know this from his letters to his wife. But then the blow befell him, from which he never recovered until his death.
During Elena Alexandrovna’s life, she was the victim of their love; after her death, Tyutchev became the victim. Perhaps he loved her too little, but he could not live without her love.
Elena Alexandrovna died in St. Petersburg or at a dacha near St. Petersburg on August 4, 1864. She was buried at the Volkov cemetery. On her grave stood a cross, now broken, with an inscription consisting of the dates of birth and death and the words: “Elena - I believe, Lord, and I confess.” The poems speak about her dying days and hours and Tyutchev’s despair:
All day she lay in oblivion -
And shadows covered it all -
The warm summer rain was pouring - its streams
The leaves sounded cheerful.
And slowly she came to her senses -
And I started listening to the noise,
And I listened for a long time - captivated,
Immersed in conscious thought...
And so, as if talking to myself,
She said consciously:
(I was with her, killed but alive)
“Oh, how I loved all this!”
You loved, and the way you love -
t, no one has ever succeeded -
Oh Lord!.. and survive this...
And my heart didn't break into pieces...
Fet visited Tyutchev in those days and spoke about it this way in his memoirs: “Silently shaking hands, Tyutchev invited me to sit next to the sofa on which he was reclining. He must have been feverish and shivering in the warm room from sobbing, since he was all His head was covered with a dark gray blanket, from under which only one exhausted face was visible. There was nothing to say at such a time. After a few minutes, I shook his hand and quietly left.”
It was impossible to stay in St. Petersburg. Tyutchev wanted to go to the Georgievskys in Moscow, but changed his mind, perhaps due to the call of his wife (Ernestina), and at the end of the month he went to her abroad. Through Germany, stopping several times along the way, he went to Switzerland, and from there to the French Riviera. Turgenev, who saw him in Baden, wrote to Countess Lambert: “I saw F.I. Tyutchev here, who was very sad that he did not meet with you. His condition is very painful and sad. You probably know why.”
Remembering this time, Anna Feodorovna Tyutcheva, maid of honor to Empress Maria Alexandrovna and teacher of the little crown princess, wrote in her diary: “I took communion in Schwalbach. On the day of communion, I woke up at six o’clock in the morning and got up to pray. I felt the need to pray with a special zeal for my father and for Elena D. During the mass, the thought of them again appeared to me with great vividness. A few weeks later I learned that it was on this day and at this hour that Elena D. died again with my father in Germany. He was in a state close to insanity. What days of moral torture I experienced! Then I met him again in Nice, then he was less excited, but still plunged into the same painful sorrow, into the same despair from the loss of earthly joys. , without the slightest glimpse of desire for anything heavenly, he was chained with all the strength of his soul to that earthly passion, the object of which was gone. And this grief, ever increasing, turned into despair, which was inaccessible to the consolations of religion and brought him, by nature, affectionate. and fair, to the point of irritation, barbs and injustice towards his wife and towards all of us. I saw that my younger sister, who was now with him, was suffering terribly. How many memories and difficult impressions of the past have been resurrected in me! I felt overwhelmed by hopeless suffering. I could no longer believe that God would come to the aid of his soul, whose life had been wasted in earthly and illicit passion."
Tyutchev really tried to have fun. In Lausanne, in Ouchy, in Montreux he visited friends, went to lectures and to the theater, and from Geneva he traveled with a large company to Ferney. The shores of Lake Geneva have long been dear to him. But it was not so easy to forget about it. One day, returning home from a sermon by Bishop Mermillot, he dictated verses to his youngest daughter, Maria, to whose diary we owe information about Tyutchev’s time abroad:
The biz has calmed down... He can breathe easier
The azure host of Geneva's waters -
And the boat floats on them again,
And again the swan rocks them.
All day long, like in summer, the sun warms,
The trees shine with diversity -
And the air is a gentle wave
Their splendor cherishes the old.
And there, in solemn peace,
Unmasked in the morning, -
The White Mountain shines,
Like an unearthly revelation.
Here the heart would forget everything,
I would forget all my flour,
Whenever there - in my native land -
There was one less grave...
A new loss was soon to befall him. Elena Alexandrovna's eldest daughter, Lelya, who bore her father's surname, like her two brothers, fell ill with tuberculosis, inherited from her mother (all three were adopted by Tyutchev with the consent of his wife Ernestina Feodorovna). The girl was fourteen years old. In the winter, when Tyutchev was abroad, something bad happened that had a serious impact on her health. At a reception at the famous boarding house Madame Truba, where she was brought up, some lady unfamiliar with Tyutchev’s family circumstances asked her how her maman was doing, meaning Ernestina Fedorovna. When Lelya Tyutcheva realized the reason for the misunderstanding, she ran home to A.D. Denisyeva and announced that she would not return to the boarding house. She had a nervous attack, and by spring, transient consumption was discovered; on May 2 she died, and on the same day her little brother Kolya, who was not yet three years old, died. Only five-year-old Fedya survived and outlived his father by many years. He studied at a prestigious institution - the Katkov Lyceum, and for a long time was in the care of the poet’s eldest daughter, Anna Feodorovna Tyutcheva and her husband Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov.
In July 1869, five years after Denisyeva’s death, Tyutchev decided for the first time to visit the homeland of his beloved - Kursk. The city delighted him. On the day of departure for Kyiv, he writes in a letter to his second wife Ernestine: “... However, I do not regret my long stop in Kursk.” And at the end of the letter he adds:
“In a word, I will take away the most favorable impression from Kursk, and it will remain so unless repeated, because in essence only in the very first minutes is the poetic side of any locality felt.”
Tyutchev admired everything about our city: its location, reminiscent of Florence, the Kur River, and “music in the public garden.”
The letter to Ernestine allows us to establish the exact time of her stay in Kursk - Saturday, July 26, 1869.
It seems to me that many Russian cities would consider it an honor to host the great Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev. Kursk was lucky.
No matter how hard the last hour is -
That one that is incomprehensible to us
The languor of mortal suffering, -
But it’s even worse for the soul
Watch how they die out in it
All the best memories.
Another St. Petersburg winter passed, then spring... In June Tyutchev wrote:
Again I stand over the Neva,
And again, like in years past,
I look, as if alive,
To these slumbering waters.
There are no sparks in the blue sky,
Everything calmed down in pale charm,
Only along the pensive Neva
A pale glow flows.
Am I dreaming about all this in a dream?
Or am I really looking
Why, under this same moon?
Did we see you alive?
This should be taken literally. He didn't have enough life, and he didn't have long to live. He died in July 1873...
The romantic story began in 1850, when the mature author was already 47 years old. His chosen one was a young graduate of the Institute of Noble Maidens, Elena Aleksandrovna Denisyeva. The love affair was long and had a rather tragic end. The beloved woman of Fyodor Tyutchev passed away at a fairly young age due to a fatal illness.
However, despite such sad events at the end of the relationship, the poet had something to remember... The affair with his beautiful chosen one was fantastic, filled with tender feelings of mutual love, passion and madness. They were condemned by those around them for the illegality of the relationship, and these slander made Elena Denisyeva unhappy. Fyodor Ivanovich tried in every possible way to protect his beloved from evil tongues, but all his aspirations were in vain...
During a long-term relationship, Elena Denisyeva gave birth to three children. Tyutchev, without hesitation, recognized paternity and legally adopted them, but even such a responsible step could not change the opinions of others. They did not want to see the poet’s chosen one in society; all doors were closed to her person. She existed in a terrible exile, and this attitude towards her personality did not allow her to plunge headlong into the pool of happiness and love with her chosen man.
The negative influence of society led to serious changes in the character of Elena Alexandrovna. There is no trace left of the once sweet and friendly girl. Now her behavior was dominated by hot temper, resentment and irritation. But even such characteristic changes in the image of his beloved did not affect the poet’s sincere feelings of love.
Soon, misunderstandings, frequent scandals, reproaches and unrest began to appear in the relationship between the lovers. It is not known how this story of forbidden love would have ended, but by the will of fate they were presented with a terrible separation. Denisyeva died of tuberculosis (then still an incurable and fatal disease) in the arms of Tyutchev.
Analysis of the “Denisevsky cycle”
All these intense events and changes in personal relationships between Denisyeva and Tyutchev formed the basis for a fascinating and rather romantic collection of poems - “The Denisyev Cycle”. This book was dedicated to the last love of the great Russian poet. This magnificent collection contains the most dramatic and romantic stories based on the real feelings of the author. Tyutchev quickly conveyed his worries and feelings about what happened, and at the same time, he told his reader about great love, unshakable by numerous difficulties and misunderstandings on the part of others.
These wonderful poems have deep meaning. They clearly show destructive passion, a mad struggle for justice, emotional tension and a challenge to a misunderstanding community. With all his love for Elena Alexandrovna, the great poet could not enter into a legal relationship with his chosen one, but he showed the public in every possible way his sincere attitude towards the young girl chosen by his heart and soul.
Since the poet was a fairly public person, his stormy romance with Denisyeva was instantly criticized by the public. These condemnations gave rise to numerous traumas in the souls of the poet and his mistress, and the author conveyed all the events experienced in his lyrical works, published in the unique collection “Denisevsky Cycle”.
Many poems from this book are filled with romantic notes and passion. The poet sings of his love, comparing these extraordinary feelings with some natural phenomena.
Each work from the cycle carries a certain meaning. Some poems are filled with tragic feelings and hopelessness, while others glorify the beloved woman and reveal to the world the real feelings that struck the hearts of two people doomed to misunderstanding.
Tyutchev carefully examines the problem of human guilt, lies and the falsity of friendly relations. His characters seem to be confronting the whole world, which wants to destroy the tender and reverent relationship of lovers.
To summarize, we can draw a very obvious conclusion. “The Denisiev Cycle,” unlike other works by Tyutchev, is based on real events and experiences of the author. In these poems, Fyodor Ivanovich independently analyzes his life and relationship with Elena Alexandrovna. These magnificent poems are filled with philosophical and psychological meaning, sound reasoning and the poet’s personal thoughts regarding the events that took place.
O my prophetic soul!
Oh heart full of anxiety
Oh, how you beat on the threshold
As if double existence!..
So, you are a resident of two worlds,
Your day is painful and passionate,
Your dream is prophetically unclear,
Like a revelation of spirits...
Let the suffering chest
Fatal passions excite -
The soul is ready, like Mary,
To cling to the feet of Christ forever.
A novel in verse about great and sincere love
Many literary critics call the “Denisevsky cycle” a real novel in verse. All works from this collection can be divided into chapters, which tell about the most beautiful and unhappy feelings of the protagonist and heroine. Their stormy romance was doomed to malicious condemnation, but, by the will of fate, all the most painful slander fell as an insurmountable burden on the fragile female shoulders of the poet’s beloved. In the Denisiev cycle, love is unhappy in its very happiness, the heroes love and in love itself remain enemies. But there is another meaning in this novel: the strong seek salvation from the weak, the protected from the defenseless.
N. Berkovsky
In Tyutchev's poetic novel there is a psychological twist that reminds the experienced reader of the appearance of the often suffering heroine from Dostoevsky's magnificent novels.
Denisyeva’s cycle is almost entirely devoted to the experiences of her beloved woman. In some poems, the writer speaks from Elena Alexandrovna herself. Already from the first lines, one can feel the comparison of sincere and mutual love with an evil fate that destroys the life of a young girl. In many poems the epithet “fatal” is repeated - day, gaze, passion, merger and meeting.
The woman prayed with all her soul and took care of her feelings and passionate relationship with her beloved, but fate prepared a terrible sentence for her, and everything that was built with reverent and sincere love turned into dirt and condemnation of the crowd. Denisyeva perfectly understood, and even felt with all her heart, deep and crazy love on the part of Fyodor Ivanovich, but this love brought not happiness and serenity, but sorrow and painful tears.
The sun is shining, the waters are sparkling,
Smile in everything, life in everything,
The trees tremble joyfully
Bathing in the blue sky.
The trees sing, the waters glisten,
The air is dissolved with love,
And the world, the blooming world of nature,
Intoxicated with the abundance of life.
But also in excess of rapture
There is no stronger rapture
One smile of tenderness
Of your tormented soul.
"Oh, how murderously we love..."
The poetic novel in verse begins with the delightful work “Oh, how painfully we love...”, based on a high and rather tragic note. When reading this poem, sometimes it even seems that with these words the poet is trying to make a final part. However, it is precisely with these loud lines that the story of great and unrecognized love begins, which entailed the most painful consequences for the couple in love. This lyrical work consists of ten quatrains, and at the very beginning and at the end of the verse the poet repeats the same phrase, the most emotional, reflecting main idea the entire poem. When writing, the author uses various epithets and many punctuation marks, focusing the reader’s attention on important nuances. With the help of an oxymoron, the author skillfully expresses the lyrical concept.
If we analyze this work according to its meaning, we can distinguish three main parts. In the first, the poet points to his memories, trying to find the answer to numerous questions that often torment the soul and thoughts of a man in love. In the second part, he already finds the answer and tells the reader about how such an unforeseen event occurred in his fate, which radically changed his entire subsequent life. The last part is final; the result of these relationships is already clearly visible in it. As it becomes clear from the first lines of the poem, the main characters of the lyrical work are Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev himself and his last love, Elena Aleksandrovna Denisyeva.
Oh, how murderously we love,
As in the violent blindness of passions
We are most likely to destroy,
What is dear to our hearts!
How long ago, proud of my victory,
You said: she is mine...
A year has not passed - ask and find out,
What was left of her?
Where did the roses go?
The smile of the lips and the sparkle of the eyes?
Everything was scorched, tears burned out
With its flammable moisture.
Do you remember, when you met,
At the first fatal meeting,
Her magical gaze and speech,
And the laughter of a child is alive?
So what now? And where is all this?
And how long was the dream?
Alas, like northern summer,
He was a passing guest!
Fate's terrible sentence
Your love was for her
And undeserved shame
She laid down her life!
A life of renunciation, a life of suffering!
In her spiritual depths
She was left with memories...
But they changed them too.
And on earth she felt wild,
The charm is gone...
The crowd surged and trampled into the mud
What bloomed in her soul.
And what about the long torment?
How did she manage to save the ashes?
Pain, the evil pain of bitterness,
Pain without joy and without tears!
Oh, how murderously we love,
As in the violent blindness of passions
We are most likely to destroy,
What is dear to our hearts!
In the cycle dedicated to Elena Denisyeva, philosophical issues are visible, clearly focused on clarifying the meaning of human life. The hero of lyric poetry is immersed in special dreams; he constantly reflects on what is happening, compares some facts and draws reasonable conclusions.
The reality surrounding the main character proves the opposite meaning of true love. Now, the hero understands that this feeling is built not only on joyful and pleasant things for the soul. Love often presents numerous trials and tormenting experiences, which were clearly felt by the author of the brilliant novel in verse - Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev.
All day she lay in oblivion,
And all of it was already covered with shadows.
The warm summer rain was pouring - its streams
The leaves sounded cheerful.
And slowly she came to her senses,
And I started listening to the noise,
And I listened for a long time - captivated,
Immersed in conscious thought...
And so, as if talking to myself,
She spoke consciously
(I was with her, killed but alive):
“Oh, how I loved all this!”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You loved, and the way you love -
No, no one has ever succeeded!
Oh my God!.. and survive this...
And my heart didn't break into pieces...
ELENA ALEXANDROVNA DENISIEVA. "THE TRUE STORY OF THE LAST MUSE."
(1826-08/04/1864. St. Petersburg)
About Elena Alexandrovna Denisyeva, the last, ardent, secret and painful love of F.I. Tyutchev, a poet and a brilliant wit - a diplomat, who was often whispered - they did not dare to speak loudly - Fyodor Ivanovich was too absent-minded about his magnificent Gift - they called him "the heir of Pushkin's traditions", almost nothing is known... and too much is known!
She is the addressee of more than fifteen of his poems, which became the most precious masterpieces of Russian poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century. This is a lot for a Woman who loved selflessly. And - too little for a heart that has torn itself with this Love. For almost two hundred years now we have been reading lines dedicated to her, admiring the painful and burning power of Tyutchev’s feeling for her, in general, a very secretive person who despises all “sentimental nonsense”, we are thinking about whether such a sinful passion was justified, Is she a sinner at all? We ask ourselves these questions, we try lines familiar from school to our own lives, but we extremely rarely think about who this Woman was, what She was and how She could bewitch, attract, “bewitch” for 14 long years. "to oneself such a fickle nature, thirsting for novelty and change of impressions, a harsh nature, quickly disillusioned, draining itself with sharp and often fruitless, merciless, endless introspection?: Let's try to leaf through the pages of a few memories, half-forgotten letters, yellowed sheets of other people's diaries: carefully, unobtrusively .
Let's try to recreate the hitherto hidden outline of the short, painfully bright life of what the Poet called “my living soul.”
Elena Aleksandrovna Denisyeva was born in 1826, into an old but very impoverished noble family. She lost her mother early, and her relationship with her father, Alexander Dmitrievich Denisyev, an honored military man, and his second wife did not work out almost immediately. Rebellious and hot-tempered for the new “mother”, Elena was hastily sent to the capital, St. Petersburg, to be raised by her aunt, her father’s sister, Anna Dmitrievna Denisyeva, the senior inspector of the Smolny Institute.
The privileged position occupied by the oldest of the teachers, Anna Dmitrievna, in this educational institution, famous throughout Russia, allowed her to raise her half-orphan niece on a common basis with the rest of the “Smolyans”: the girl acquired impeccable manners, slender posture, excellent French-German accent, full a jumble of science and mathematics courses in his head, a solid knowledge of home economics and cooking, and an excessive ardor of imagination, developed by reading sentimental novels and poetry at night, on the sly from classy ladies and pepinieres*. (*on-duty mentors for younger girls from graduating classes - author.)
Anna Dmitrievna, overly strict and dry with her subordinates and students, became passionately attached to her niece, in her own way: she spoiled her, that is, she early began to buy her outfits, jewelry, ladies’ trinkets and take her out into the world, where she was seen as an elegant, graceful brunette , with an extremely expressive, characteristic face, lively brown eyes and very good manners - both seasoned ladies' men and ardent "archival youths" (students of the history and archival faculties of St. Petersburg and Moscow universities, representatives of ancient noble, often impoverished, families) quickly drew attention.
This nickname became a household name in general for young people who had a good, solid reputation as a person inclined to science - author), who were seriously looking for brides.
Elena Alexandrovna, with her natural intelligence, charm, deep thoughtfulness, seriousness - after all, the life of an orphan, whatever you say, leaves an imprint on the soul and heart - and very refined, elegant manners, she could count on a very good arrangement of her destiny: Smolny Institute was under tireless guardianship of the Imperial Family, and the niece, almost an adopted daughter, of the honored teacher was going to be appointed a maid of honor of the Court upon graduation!
And then a marriage, quite appropriate for her years and upbringing, would have awaited Helen
(* Hélène - French - author) a well-deserved reward, and the old lady - auntie could indulge with pleasure (in the shadow of her niece's family hearth) in her so beloved game of piquet, with some impeccably mannered and extremely polite guest from a huge number of secular acquaintances !
Naturally, at first Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev also belonged to such “completely secular” acquaintances.
His eldest daughters from his first marriage, Anna and Ekaterina Tyutchev, graduated from Smolny’s graduating class together with Elena. They were even very friendly with each other, and at first Mlle Denisyeva gladly accepted an invitation to a cup of tea at the hospitable, but slightly strange house of the Tyutchevs. Strange because everyone in it lived their own life, despite reading aloud in the evenings in a brightly lit living room, frequent tea parties together, noisy family trips to theaters or balls.
Internally, everyone in this brilliantly intelligent, deeply aristocratic - in spirit, views, worldview - family was closed and carefully hidden in their own shell of deep experiences and even “lost” in them.
A certain inner coolness always reigned in the house and the flame of love, hidden under the cover of restraint and aristocratic coldness, never flared up in full force.
Particularly confused and restless in this “half-icy atmosphere” seemed to Elena the wife of the most kind, always slightly selfishly absent-minded Fyodor Ivanovich, the delicate, very reserved Ernestina Feodorovna, whose maiden name was Baroness Pfefel, a native of Dresden.
She always tried to be inconspicuous, winced when they paid too much attention to her, in her opinion, but the thin, graceful features of her face, huge brown eyes, always seemed to “chill” from the spiritual “draft” that reigned in the house, begging for the extra a glance or a warm word fleetingly addressed to her. She immensely adored her Theodora and even encouraged his passion for the graceful and lively friend of her adopted but sincerely beloved daughters, which greatly surprised Elena at first.
True, then, much later, she unraveled Ernestina Feodorovna’s skillful “secret” - she simply, simply, did not take her seriously!
Wise with brilliant social experience, Mrs. Tyutcheva*
(*Her father, brother and first husband - Baron Dernberg - spent their whole lives in the service of the Bavarian royal court, and in general, their whole family was heartily friends with the surname of the King of Bavaria himself, Ludwig, at whose court balls “dear Nesterle” always shone as a bright star ", as she was called in the family. - author.) it was thought that the passionate romance - the infatuation of her "piitic" husband with the naive young beauty - Smolenka, although stormy, would be short-lived, and that it would be much safer than all the previous reckless ones " whirlwinds of passions" ee Theodora with high-society aristocratic beauties. Any of these hobbies threatened to develop into a loud scandal in one minute, and could cost her husband his court and diplomatic career.
And this could not be allowed to happen!
But if only the wife of a diplomat and poet, experienced in high-society “customs,” could only imagine what kind of fire would “ignite” from a small spark of ordinary secular flirtation!
The novel developed frighteningly - rapidly!
Alexander Georgievsky, the husband of Elena's half-sister, Maria Alexandrovna, recalled in 1861 when from the first - and fatal! - meeting of lovers in the reception hall of the Smolny Institute - the Tyutchevs came there to visit their daughters on their day off - ten years had passed: “Worship of female beauty and the charms of female nature was the ever-present weakness of Feodor Ivanovich from his earliest youth - worship that was combined with a very serious, but, usually, a short-lived and even very quickly passing infatuation with one or another person. But in this case, his infatuation with Lelya* (*Elena Alexandrovna’s home name - author.) aroused on her part such deep, such selfless, such passionate and energetic love. , that she embraced his entire being, and he remained forever her prisoner, until her very death! And then Alexander Georgievsky adds with a certain amount of bitterness, already on his own behalf: “Knowing his nature, I don’t think that during this long time he was not carried away by someone else, but these were fleeting hobbies, without any trace, but Lelya is undoubtedly tied him to herself with the strongest ties":..
Elena Alexandrovna was twenty-five years old at that time, Tyutchev was forty-seven. Their stormy relationship soon became known to the manager of the Smolny Institute, who got on the trail of an apartment rented nearby by Tyutchev for secret meetings with Elena Alexandrovna. The scandal erupted in March 1851, almost before graduation and court appointments. At that time, Smolyanka Denisyeva was already expecting a child from the poet-chamberlain! Elena Denisyeva's eldest daughter from Tyutchev was born on May 20, 1851 - author.) All hopes for her career as a maid of honor at the Court, and for Aunt Anna Dmitrievna as a cavalry lady, of course, were immediately forgotten!
Anna Dmitrievna was hastily escorted out of the institute, albeit with an honorary pension - three thousand rubles annually, but poor Lelya was “abandoned by everyone.” (A. Georgievsky)
She has almost no friends left whom she doesn’t know in the world. In her new apartment, where she lived with her aunt and her newborn daughter, also Elena, only two or three friends visited her, the most devoted of them: Varvara Arsentievna Belorukova, a classy lady from Smolny, who took care of the children and elderly aunt after Elena’s death, Yes, a few relatives.
Alexander Georgievsky wrote about Elena Alexandrovna and her Fate as follows: “It was the most difficult time in her life, her father cursed her and did not want to see her anymore, forbidding all other relatives to see her.
Only her deep religiosity, only prayer, acts of charity, donations to the icon of the Mother of God in the cathedral of all educational institutions near the Smolny Monastery, for which all the few decorations she had, were saved from complete despair.”
It seems that Alexander Ivanovich Georgievsky is somewhat mistaken in his memories, speaking about the only consolation of the unlucky woman (in the secular sense) - Elena: God and Orthodox prayers! She had another “God” - Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev and one more consolation: his Love and affection for her! She called him that: “My God.” She forgave him absolutely everything: frequent absences, permanent living with two families*, (*he did not intend to, and could not, leave Ernestina Feodorovna, who was devoted and knew everything, and her ladies-in-waiting - daughters, his service as a diplomat and chamberlain - author) selfishness, hot temper, frequent, absent-minded inattention to her, and in the end - even semi-coldness - and even the fact that she often had to lie to the children, and to all their questions:
“Where is daddy and why does he only have lunch with us once a week?” - answer hesitantly that he is at work and very busy.
Free from sidelong glances, contemptuous pity, alienation, and everything that accompanied her false position of half-wife - half-lover, Elena Alexandrovna was spared only by a short stay with Tyutchev abroad - several months a year, and even then - not every summer. There she did not need to hide from anyone, there he freely and proudly called himself: Madame Tutchef, in the hotel registration books without hesitation, with a firm hand, in response to the polite question of the receptionist, she wrote:
"Tutchef avec sa famille"* (Tutchev with his family - French - author).
But - only there!
For the circle in which Elena Aleksandrovna Denisyeva lived in Russia, until the end of her life she was a “pariah,” an outcast, a stumbler.
Of course, Elena Alexandrovna, very smart, sensitive and understanding of everything, knew perfectly well that she was engaged in self-deception, but her torn, too ardent heart carefully built her own “theory”, thanks to which she lived all her difficult and at the same time selfless lives. , fourteen long years.
To Alexander Ivanovich Georgievsky, in the hour of frank and bitter confessions, shedding tears, she said this: “But I have nothing to hide and there is no need to pretend from anyone: I am more his wife than all his former wives, and no one in the world has ever treated him like that.” loved and did not appreciate him, as I love and appreciate him, no one has ever understood him as much as I understand him - every sound, every intonation of his voice, every expression and fold on his face, every look and smile, I live his life; , I am all his, and he is mine: “and the two will become one flesh,” and I am with him and the spirit is one: Isn’t it true,” she turned to me, A. Georgievsky continues in shock, “after all, you agree with me? After all, this is what marriage is about, blessed by God himself, to love each other as much as I love him and he loves me, and to be one being, and not two different beings. Isn’t it true that I am in a real marriage?! " How could I tell her to this - Georgievsky exclaims - yes, but in a marriage that is not recognized by either the church or civil society, and in this blessing and in this recognition there is great strength, and all the falsehood, all the burden of your situation comes from this, that there is no recognition of this. I was deeply shocked by the conversation, and was dead silent... Lelya continued: “His previous marriage has already been dissolved by the fact that he entered into this new marriage with me, and the fact that he does not ask for a church blessing for his marriage is because he I’ve been married three times already, and the church doesn’t solemnize a fourth marriage, according to some canonical rule!” *(*This is, indeed, true: he does not marry, but, in fact, Tyutchev was married only twice, only the wedding ceremony took place in both cases, too - twice - according to the Catholic and Orthodox rites. Both of his wives were of the Catholic-Lutheran faith. It is quite possible that Fyodor Ivanovich misled Elena Alexandrovna about his complicated family circumstances quite deliberately!
And with stunning, heart-piercing sincerity, Elena Alexandrovna ended that difficult conversation, memorable to Georgievsky, with these words: “God was pleased to exalt and at the same time humble me with such a marriage, depriving us of the opportunity to ask for a church blessing for this marriage, and now I am doomed for the rest of my life.” to remain in this pitiful and false position, from which even the death of Ernestina Feodorovna could not save me, for the fourth marriage is not blessed by the church. But this is how God pleases and I humble myself before his holy will, not without.
at times it is bitter to mourn one’s fate!”
But sometimes this restrained, quiet and deeply religious nature still could not withstand the cross of “humility and submission to God’s will”, the temperament, bright and stormy, but suppressed by the bitter circumstances of life, from time to time “boiled” in her, and then in the Tyutchev family - Denisyev, scenes similar to the one described by Al took place. Georgievsky in his unpublished memoirs:
“Before the birth of his third child, Feodor Ivanovich tried to dissuade Lelya from this risky step,
*(And quite rightly, for he knew for sure that illegitimate children did not have any rights of fortune and would be equated to peasants. Feodor Ivanovich had a lot later, after the death of his beloved, to beat the doorsteps and raise a whole crowd of high-society acquaintances to their feet before he managed to place orphans in educational institutions of the nobility; documents preserved in the archives of the Muranovo estate speak about this - the author.) but she, this loving, kind, and generally adoring Lelya, went into such a frenzy that she grabbed the first one she came across from the desk! hand a bronze dog on malachite and with all her strength threw it at Feodor Ivanovich, but, fortunately, it did not hit him, but into the corner of the stove, and broke off a large piece of tile in it: there was no end to Lelya’s repentance, tears and sobs. .
Obviously, the jokes with Lelya were bad,” A. Georgievsky continues. - Feodor Ivanovich himself reacted very kindly to her weakness to fall into such a frenzy out of love for him; This story horrified me; in my right mind and strong memory, such violent acts are hardly possible, and I would never have expected anything like this from such a sweet, kind, educated, graceful and highly cultured woman as Lelya..
However... The author of the memoirs quoted here so often is mistaken again! And the quietest stream can, at least for a while, become a stormy river. Over time, the crack, the breakdown in the relationship between Tyutchev and Denisyeva intensified, and it is unknown how their fifteen-year suffering would have ended if not for the sudden death of Elena Alexandrovna from transient consumption in August 1864, at the age of 37 years!
Vladimir Veidle, a historian and publicist who was very involved in researching both Tyutchev’s creativity and biography, wrote in his brilliant psychological essays - sketches analyzing the lyrical world of poetry and the very soul of the Poet:
“Tyutchev was not a “possessor,” but he could not be possessed either. Elena Alexandrovna told him: “You are my own,” but probably precisely because he was neither hers nor anyone else’s, and by his very nature It couldn’t be. Hence that captivating, but also that “terrible and restless” thing that was in him: in passion itself there is an unlost spirituality, and in tenderness itself there is still something like the absence of a soul.”
As if to confirm what Veidle said, in the poem “Don’t believe, don’t believe the poet!”, written back in the thirties, we read:
Your shrine will not be violated
The poet's clean hand
But inadvertently life will strangle
Or it will carry you beyond the clouds.
Some distance must always be felt, some alienation, isolation. And at the same time, Tyutchev himself had a huge need for love, but the need was not so much to love as to be loved. Without love there is no life; but to love for him is to recognize, to find himself in someone else’s love. In the poem of the 30th year “This day, I remember, for me was the morning of the day of life...” the poet sees a new world, a new life begins for him not because he fell in love, as for Dante - incipit vita nova *, ( *the beginning of a new life - author) - but because
Golden declaration of love
It burst out of her chest,
that is, the world was transformed the minute the poet found out that he was loved. With such an experience of love, it is not surprising that those who loved Tyutchev remained dissatisfied with his love; It is also not surprising that for him there was fidelity, which did not exclude betrayal, and betrayal, which did not exclude fidelity. Once realized, intimacy no longer disappeared from his memory and imagination, but the need for love, for someone else’s love for him, was so inexhaustible, so insatiable, that Tyutchev was looking for more and more new intimacy. The theme of unfaithful fidelity and the love of others for him runs through his entire life and is reflected in his poetry." V. Veidle. "Tyutchev's Last Love" But the crisis of the Poet's relationship with his last Love is best outlined in Tyutchev's bitter confession to the same A. I. Georgievsky, sent a few months after the death of Elena Alexandrovna:
“You know how, with all her highly poetic nature, or, better to say, thanks to it, she did not value poetry, even mine, and only those of them she liked, where my love for her was expressed, expressed publicly and for all to hear . That's what she treasured to the whole world I found out what she [was] for me: this was her highest not only pleasure, but a spiritual demand, the vital condition of her soul... I remember once in Baden, while walking, she started talking about her desire that I seriously began the secondary edition of my poems, and so sweetly, with such love, I confessed that how gratifying it would be for her if her name stood at the head of this publication (not the name, which she did not like, but she), and what - will you believe this? - instead of gratitude, instead of love and adoration, I, I don’t know why, expressed some kind of disagreement, dislike to her, it somehow seemed to me that such a demand on her part was not entirely generous, that, knowing to what extent I was all her (“You are my own,” as she said), she had nothing, there was no need to wish for other printed statements that could upset or offend other individuals. This was followed by one of those scenes, all too familiar to you, which undermined her life more and more and brought us - her to Volkov Field, and me - to something for which there is no name in any human language. ABOUT! How right she was in her most extreme demands, how correctly she foresaw what was inevitably going to happen given my stupid lack of understanding of what constituted a vital condition for her! How many times did she tell me that the time for terrible, merciless, inexorably desperate repentance would come for me, but that it would be too late. I listened and did not understand; I probably believed that just as her love was boundless, so was her vitality inexhaustible, and so it was, so vilely, to all her cries and groans, I answered her with this stupid phrase: “You want the impossible!” Whether Elena Alexandrovna was right or wrong, the torment was undeniable.
So fourteen years passed. Towards the end, Elena Alexandrovna was ill a lot (she had tuberculosis). Her letters to her sister dating back to the last year and a half of her life have been preserved. In them she calls Tyutchev “my God,” and in them she compares him to the unentertained French king. It is also clear from them that in the last summer of her life, her daughter, Lelya, went with her father to ride on the Islands almost every evening. He treated her to ice cream; they returned home late. This both pleased and saddened Elena Alexandrovna: she remained in a stuffy room alone or in the company of some compassionate lady who volunteered to visit her. That summer Tyutchev especially wanted to go abroad and was burdened by St. Petersburg; We know this from his letters to his wife. But then the blow befell him, from which he never recovered until his death.
During Elena Alexandrovna’s life, she was the victim of their love; after her death, Tyutchev became the victim. Perhaps he loved her too little, but he could not live without her love. We definitely hear him say: “Your love is yours, not mine, but without this yours there is no life, there is no me.” J. Keats had an insight that it is common for a poet to be deprived of a clearly defined, prominent personality; This applies to Tyutchev more than to any other Russian poet.
Back in 1851, he complained to his wife: “I feel that my letters are the most vulgar and sad. They say nothing and are like windows covered in summer, through which nothing can be seen and which indicate departure and absence. That’s what it is a misfortune to be so completely devoid of personality.” Much later, three years after Elena Alexandrovna’s death, he wrote to another correspondent: “Thanks to my low-energy and unstable personality, it seems to me that there is nothing more natural than to lose sight of me.”
And two months after her death, in a letter to Georgievsky, he gave the key to his entire fate: “Only with her and for her was I a person, only in her love “...” did I recognize myself.”
Elena Alexandrovna died in St. Petersburg or at a dacha near St. Petersburg on August 4, 1864. She was buried at the Volkov cemetery. On her grave stood a cross, now broken, with an inscription consisting of the dates of birth and death and the words: “Elena - I believe, Lord, and I confess.” The poems speak about her dying days and hours and Tyutchev’s despair:
All day she lay in oblivion -
And shadows covered it all -
The warm summer rain was pouring - its streams
The leaves sounded cheerful.
And slowly she came to her senses -
And I started listening to the noise,
And I listened for a long time - captivated,
Immersed in conscious thought...
And so, as if talking to myself,
She said consciously:
(I was with her, killed but alive)
“Oh, how I loved all this!”
You loved, and the way you love -
t, no one has ever succeeded -
Oh Lord!.. and survive this...
And my heart didn't break into pieces...
On the day after the funeral, Tyutchev wrote to Georgievsky: “It’s all over... Yesterday we buried her... What is this? What happened? What am I writing to you about - I don’t know... Everything in me is killed: thoughts, feelings, memory , everything... I feel like a complete idiot. Emptiness, terrible emptiness. And even in death I don’t foresee relief. Oh, I need it on earth, not somewhere else... My heart is empty, my brain is exhausted even to remember. her, to evoke her vividly in my memory, how she was, looked, spoke, and I can’t do this. It’s scary, unbearable... I can’t write anymore, and what can I write?..”
Five days later he wrote to him: “Oh, come, come, for God’s sake, and the sooner the better. Thank you, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Perhaps “...” you will be able, even for a few minutes, to lift this terrible burden , this burning stone that crushes and suffocates me... The most unbearable thing in my current situation is that with all possible tension of thoughts, relentlessly, unrelentingly, I keep thinking about her, and yet I cannot catch her... Simple madness would be more gratifying... But... I still can’t write about this, I don’t want to express such horror..."
An excerpt from a letter to an unknown addressee, reported at one time by F.F., probably dates back to the same time. Tyutchev, the son of Elena Alexandrovna: “My state of mind is terrible. Day after day I languish more and more in a dark bottomless abyss... The meaning of my life is lost, and nothing exists for me anymore. What I feel cannot be expressed in words , and if my last day came, I would greet it as a day of liberation... My dear friend, life here on earth is impossible for me And if “she” exists somewhere, she should take pity on me and take me. me to your place..."
Fet visited Tyutchev in those days and spoke about it this way in his memoirs: “Silently shaking hands, Tyutchev invited me to sit next to the sofa on which he was reclining. He must have been feverish and shivering in the warm room from sobbing, since he was all His head was covered with a dark gray blanket, from under which only one exhausted face was visible. There was nothing to say at such a time. After a few minutes, I shook his hand and quietly left.”
It was impossible to stay in St. Petersburg. Tyutchev wanted to go to the Georgievskys in Moscow, but changed his mind, perhaps due to his wife’s call, and at the end of the month he went abroad to see her. Through Germany, stopping several times along the way, he went to Switzerland, and from there to the French Riviera. Turgenev, who saw him in Baden, wrote to Countess Lambert: “I saw F.I. Tyutchev here, who was very sad that he did not meet with you. His condition is very painful and sad. You probably know why.”
Remembering this time, Anna Feodorovna Tyutcheva, maid of honor to Empress Maria Alexandrovna and teacher of the little crown princess, wrote in her diary: “I took communion in Schwalbach. On the day of communion, I woke up at six o’clock in the morning and got up to pray. I felt the need to pray with a special zeal for my father and for Elena D. During the mass, the thought of them again appeared to me with great vividness. A few weeks later I learned that it was on this day and at this hour that Elena D. died again with my father in Germany. He was in a state close to insanity. What days of moral torture I experienced! Then I met him again in Nice, then he was less excited, but still plunged into the same painful sorrow, into the same despair from the loss of earthly joys. , without the slightest glimpse of desire for anything heavenly, he was chained with all the strength of his soul to that earthly passion, the object of which was gone. And this grief, ever increasing, turned into despair, which was inaccessible to the consolations of religion and brought him, by nature, affectionate. and fair, to the point of irritation, barbs and injustice towards his wife and towards all of us. I saw that my younger sister, who was now with him, was suffering terribly. How many memories and difficult impressions of the past have been resurrected in me! I felt overwhelmed by hopeless suffering. I could no longer believe that God would come to the aid of his soul, whose life had been wasted in earthly and illicit passion."
At the beginning of October, from Geneva, Tyutchev wrote to Georgievsky: “...The memory of her is that feeling of hunger in the hungry, insatiably hungry. I can’t live, my friend Alexander Ivanovich, I can’t live... The wound festers, it doesn’t heal. Be it cowardice, be it powerlessness, I don’t care. Only with her and for her was I a person, only in her love, her boundless love for me, did I recognize myself... Now I am something meaninglessly living, some kind of living, painful thing. insignificance. It may be that in some years nature in a person loses its healing power, that life loses the ability to be reborn, to renew itself; all this can happen; but believe me, my friend Alexander Ivanovich, only those who are able to appreciate my situation. out of a thousand, one had a terrible fate - to live for fourteen years in a row, hourly, every minute, with such love as her love, and to survive it... Now everything has been known, everything has been decided; now I am convinced from experience that this terrible emptiness in me is nothing. will fill. Whatever I have tried during these last weeks: both society, and nature, and, finally, the closest family attachments; Sasha (Prince A.M. Meshcherskaya), her participation in my grief. I am ready to accuse myself of ingratitude, of insensitivity, but I cannot lie: it was not easier for a minute as soon as consciousness returned. All these opium treatments dull the pain for a minute, but that’s all. The effect of opium will wear off, and the pain will still be the same..."
Tyutchev's state of mind, as can be seen from the notes of his eldest daughter, could not but upset and irritate members of his family. However, Daria Feodorovna was hardly right when she wrote in November from Nice to her younger sister in Moscow: “Dad looks healthy. He leaves home for the whole day. When he doesn’t think about it, he has fun. However, he wants to seem sad ..." Tyutchev really tried to have fun. In Lausanne, in Ouchy, in Montreux he visited friends, went to lectures and to the theater, and from Geneva he traveled with a large company to Ferney. The shores of Lake Geneva have long been dear to him. But it was not so easy to forget about it. One day, returning home from a sermon by Bishop Mermillot, he dictated verses to his youngest daughter, Maria, to whose diary we owe information about Tyutchev’s time abroad:
The biz has calmed down... He can breathe easier
The azure host of Geneva's waters -
And the boat floats on them again,
And again the swan rocks them.
All day long, like in summer, the sun warms,
The trees shine with diversity -
And the air is a gentle wave
Their splendor cherishes the old.
And there, in solemn peace,
Unmasked in the morning, -
The White Mountain shines,
Like an unearthly revelation.
Here the heart would forget everything,
I would forget all my flour,
Whenever there - in my native land -
There was one less grave...
On the road from Geneva to Nice, Tyutchev visited Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, and Cannes. In Nice I tried to have fun, as in Geneva, I rode around the area, saw many acquaintances and friends. But on December 8th he wrote to Polonsky: “My friend Yakov Petrovich! You asked me in your letter to write to you when it would be easier for me, and that’s why I didn’t write to you until today. Why am I writing to you now, I don’t know, because everything is the same in the soul, but what it is is the same - there are no words for it. Man was given a cry for suffering, but there is suffering that even a cry does not fully express... From the moment I met you last summer. in the Summer Garden and for the first time spoke to you about what was sickening to me, and to this very moment, if a year ago everything I had experienced and felt had been dreamed of with some vividness, then, it seems to me, without waking up, I would immediately on the spot and died of fright. There was, perhaps, no human organization better designed than mine for the fullest perception of a certain kind of sensations, even during her life, when I happened to remember something vividly in front of her. from our past, I remember with what terrible melancholy my whole soul was poisoned then, and then, I remember, I told her: “My God, it could happen that all these memories are all this, which is now, already now so “It’s scary,” one of us will have to repeat to the lonely one, having outlived the other,” but this thought penetrated the soul and immediately disappeared. And now? My friend, now everything has been tried, nothing has helped, nothing has consoled her, she can’t live, she can’t live... Only one need is still felt, to hurry to you, to where there is still something left of her, her children, her friends, all her poor home life, where there was so much love and so much grief, but it was all so alive, so full of it, so that for that day spent with her, my life at that time, I would willingly buy it, but at a price - at the price of what? This torture, every minute torture, this destiny, what life has now become for me... Oh, my friend Yakov Petrovich, it’s hard, terribly hard, I know, you have experienced some of this yourself, some, but not all. You were young, you are not fourteen years old... (Tyutchev’s text is not completed. - ed.) Once again I am drawn to St. Petersburg, although I know and have a presentiment that it will be there too... but at least there will not be that terrible split in the soul, what is here. There’s not even anywhere to shelter my grief... I would almost like to be asked to go to St. Petersburg in the name of our committee, for which, it seems, there is a reason - due to Komarovsky’s ill health - what is he, poor? It will be very, very pleasant for me to see you, my dear Yakov Petrovich. Say the same for me and Maikov. I thank you both from the bottom of my heart for your friendship and I value it much, much... The Lord is with you. Sorry and see you soon. F. Tyutchev."
Two days later he writes to Georgievsky: “My friend Alexander Ivanovich! That moment was fatal for me when I changed my intention to go with you to Moscow... With this I completely ruined myself. What happened to me? What [have] I become? now? Has anything survived from the former me, whom you once, in some other world, there, with her, knew and loved - I don’t know, some kind of burning, vague memory remains about all this, but also. It often changes, one thing is inherent and persistent - this feeling of boundless, endless, suffocating emptiness. Oh, how scared I am of myself... But wait... Now I’m not able to continue. How long have I been rushing around and struggling with the thought, whether to write to you or not... Grief like mine is the same leprosy. And you need people and you involuntarily feel that it is impossible, it should not, it is not permissible to approach them, to count on their compassion, that there are such people. diseases that simply repel participation and must close themselves off and complete their process within a person..."
At the end of November or December the following poems were written:
Oh, this south, oh, this Nice!..
Oh, how their brilliance alarms me!
Life is like a shot bird
He wants to get up, but he can’t...
There is no flight, no scope -
Broken wings hang -
And all of her, clinging to the dust,
Trembling from pain and powerlessness...
Tyutchev sent this and the two previous poems to Georgievsky at the beginning of December. “You know,” he wrote, “how I have always abhorred these pseudo-poetic profanations of inner feelings, this shameful exhibition of my heart ulcers. My God, my God. But what do poems, prose, literature, the whole external world and that have in common... terrible, inexpressibly unbearable, what is happening in my soul at this very moment - this life, which I have been living for five months now and about which I have as little idea as about our afterlife existence, and this - remember, remember her, she is my life, with whom it was so good to live, so easy and so joyful, but she has now doomed me to these unspeakable hellish torments..."
At the end of January, Tyutchev was, according to his daughter, unwell and full of sad forebodings. The Mediterranean Sea could not heal his sadness. At the beginning of February, he married off his daughter, and a month later he and his wife left for Russia. On the way, he stopped for ten days in Paris, saw friends there, dined with Herzen (who wrote to Ogarev: “Tyutchev is even more honey and milk”) and once again spoke about his grief with Turgenev, who later recalled: “We, to talk , went into a cafe on the boulevard and, out of decency, asked for ice cream, sat down under a trellis of ivy. I was silent the whole time, and Tyutchev spoke in a painful voice, and at the end of the story the chest of his shirt turned out to be wet from the tears falling on it ... "
In the last days of March, still in a very depressed state of mind, he returned to St. Petersburg. Here they demanded poems from him on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Lomonosov’s death, which was celebrated on April 4, and on the eve of this day he sent them to Maikov with a note: “Here for you, my friend Apollo Nikolaevich, a few poor rhymes for your holiday, in my current state of mind I can do more."
A new loss was soon to befall him. Elena Alexandrovna's eldest daughter, Lelya, who bore her father's surname, like her two brothers, fell ill with tuberculosis, inherited from her mother (all three were adopted by Tyutchev with the consent of his wife Ernestina Feodorovna). The girl was fourteen years old. In the winter, when Tyutchev was abroad, something bad happened that had a serious impact on her health. At a reception at the famous boarding house Madame Truba, where she was brought up, some lady unfamiliar with Tyutchev’s family circumstances asked her how her maman was doing, meaning Ernestina Fedorovna. When Lelya Tyutcheva realized the reason for the misunderstanding, she ran home to A.D. Denisyeva and announced that she would not return to the boarding house. She had a nervous attack, and by spring, transient consumption was discovered; on May 2 she died, and on the same day her little brother Kolya, who was not yet three years old, died. Only five-year-old Fedya survived and outlived his father by many years. He studied at a prestigious institution - the Katkov Lyceum, and for a long time was in the care of the poet’s eldest daughter, Anna Feodorovna Tyutcheva and her husband Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov.
Two years later, on a completely different occasion that did not concern him personally, Tyutchev wrote to his wife: “Here is the difference between physical and spiritual wounds: the former add up to one another, while the latter most often exclude each other.” Perhaps this thought was the fruit of his own experience, what he experienced that spring, after returning from Nice to St. Petersburg. It can be assumed that this new double loss did not so much become a new grief for Tyutchev, but rather deepened and prolonged the old one. These days he wrote “There is melodiousness in the waves of the sea...”. P.V. Bykov, who saw him at the same time, recalled half a century later: “Tyutchev at that time was terribly depressed by the losses of his daughter and the person he dearly loved. I expressed my condolences to him. He thanked me almost in tears and said: “There are no limits to my suffering, and there is no higher love for me for the one who gave me so much happiness. Have you experienced such a state when your entire being is permeated, every vein, with this all-encompassing feeling? “And if an afterlife is given to us,” as Baratynsky says, I console myself only with an afterlife meeting... But this consolation still does not reconcile with reality...” At the same time he wrote to Polonsky in response to his poems:
There is a dead night in me and there is no morning for it...
And soon it will fly away - unnoticed in the darkness -
The last, meager smoke from the extinguished fire.
True, a week after these lines a madrigal poem was written dedicated to N.S. Akinfieva, but it only testifies to the need for society, especially for women, which Tyutchev never left. Under this cover of tenderness, sociability, and talkativeness, complete emptiness continued to gape, which received its deepest expression in the verses “There is also in my suffering stagnation...”. The deadness of the soul, dull melancholy, the inability to realize oneself are contrasted in them with burning but living suffering, just as during Elena Alexandrovna’s life the power of her love was contrasted with the inability to love that the poet experienced when he recognized himself as “a lifeless idol of your living soul.” .
At the end of June he writes to M.A. Georgievskaya: “I must admit that since then there has not been a single day that I did not begin without some amazement at how a person continues to live, although his head was cut off and his heart was torn out.” He commemorated two anniversaries that summer with mournful verses: on July 15 in St. Petersburg he wrote “Today, friend, fifteen years have passed...”, and on August 3 in Ovstug:
Here I am wandering along the high road
In the quiet light of the fading day,
It’s hard for me, my legs are freezing...
My dear friend, do you see me?
It's getting darker, darker above the ground -
The last light of the day has flown away...
This is the world where you and I lived,
My angel, can you see me?
Tomorrow is a day of prayer and sorrow,
Tomorrow is the memory of the fateful day...
My angel, wherever souls hover,
My angel, can you see me?
This month was especially difficult for Tyutchev. Those close to him noted his irritability: he wanted them to show more concern for his grief. On August 16 he writes to M.A. Georgievskaya: “My vile nerves are so upset that I can’t hold a pen in my hands...”, and at the end of September she from St. Petersburg: “A pitiful and vile creation is a man with his ability to survive everything,” but he himself six months later in verses to gr. Bludova will say that “to survive does not mean to live.” “There is not a day when the soul does not ache...” written in the same year in late autumn. The following spring, Tyutchev did not want to go abroad and wrote to the Georgievskys: “It’s even emptier there. I’ve already experienced this in practice.” In the summer of the same year, he complained from Tsarskoe to his wife: “I am becoming more and more unbearable every day, my usual irritation is contributed in no small part by the fatigue that I experience in pursuit of all means to have fun and not see the terrible emptiness in front of me.”
Of course, time, as they say, “did its job.” Another year has passed. The mention of Elena Alexandrovna in correspondence disappears. But it is known that in the fall of this year, at one of the meetings of the Council of the Main Directorate for Press Affairs, of which he was a member, Tyutchev was very upset and drew or wrote something with a pencil on a piece of paper lying in front of him on the table. After the meeting, he went off into thought, leaving the piece of paper behind. One of his colleagues, Count Kapnist, noticed that instead of business notes there were poetic lines. He took the piece of paper and kept it as a memory of Tyutchev:
No matter how hard the last hour is -
That one that is incomprehensible to us
The languor of mortal suffering, -
But it’s even worse for the soul
Watch how they die out in it
All the best memories.
Another St. Petersburg winter passed, then spring... In June Tyutchev wrote:
Again I stand over the Neva,
And again, like in years past,
I look, as if alive,
To these slumbering waters.
There are no sparks in the blue sky,
Everything calmed down in pale charm,
Only along the pensive Neva
A pale glow flows.
Am I dreaming about all this in a dream?
Or am I really looking
Why, under this same moon?
Did we see you alive?
This should be taken literally. He didn't have enough life, and he didn't have long to live. He died in July 1873 (In the essay about Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, I erroneously indicated: April 1873 - author!)
Even in his latest hobbies: romantic letters to Baroness Elena Karlovna Uslar-Bogdanova, madrigals to Nadezhda Akinfieva-Gorchakova, half-joking poetic lines to Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, there is only a “glimmer”, the light breath of Tyutchev’s last Love, its flashes and shadows: This is - only an attempt to fill the heartfelt void that formed in the Poet’s soul after the departure of his Beloved Woman. This is so natural for the Poet... So understandable. But it’s so sad!
*In one of the recent periodical publications, I came across a note that a chapel was built next to the grave of Elena Alexandrovna Denisyeva at the Volkov cemetery.
It was not reported whether the cross with the date of birth of the Last Muse of the Poet was restored on her.. I still don’t know when she was born...
"Copyright: Svetlana Makarenko (Princess), 2007