A brilliant conversationalist and the author of Slavophile pamphlets, known also for a few anthologized lyrics about nature, Fedor Tiutchev rose to the prominence of a central figure of the Golden Age of Russian literature. His poetry was admired by Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Afanasii Afanas'evich Fet, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Even Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobroliubov, with their demand that poetry serve as the mouthpiece of liberal ideas and their contempt of “art for art's sake,” could not resist the charm of Tiutchev's lyrics. Yet, Tiutchev's poetry never enjoyed the popularity that was Aleksandr Pushkin's and Mikhail Iur'evich Lermontov's. With the emergence of superb prose, lyric poetry lost its prestige in Russia; Tiutchev's 1868 collection sold miserably. He was rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century by the Russian Symbolists, who treated him as their precursor, researched his biography...