Love on the Final Slopes of Life: Fedor Ivanovich Tiutchev and “The Denis’eva Cycle”

Abstract

Old age represents a serious contemporary social issue. With the greater incidence of longevity also literary approaches to ageing have emerged, and “Ageing and literature” is now established among literary scholars as a critical perspective in its own right, with a perspective usually marked by an interdisciplinary stance.What insights can literature offer when it comes to old age that other kinds of knowledge cannot? As my article aims to show, literature is and remains (inter alia) highly relevant as a unique access to individual ageing, enabling us to grasp the ambivalences and intricacies connected to growing old more distinctly then quantitative, statistical sociological studies and medical reports can do. And most notably, literature can investigate the domain of ageing senses and sensations and widen our understanding of how elderly people experience sensual attractions, love and desire.To concretize these assumptions, I will focus on the so called “Denisieva cycle”, by Feodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, one of the greatest poets in the classical Russian tradition. The cycle has an autobiographical context: it retells in lyrical verse how the married Tyutchev, at 50, an advanced age at that time, fell in love with Elena Aleksandrovna Denisieva, a noblewoman of 22 and a school-friend of his daughters. While not divorcing, the poet kept up an illicit relationship with Denisieva for 15 years and she bore him three children. The affair ended in utmost tragedy, when Denisieva, ostracized by both family and former friends, died in 1865, followed closely by the death of two of their children. These events brought the elderly lover into a spiral of endless despair, but also resulted in a sublime body of poems which constitutes a remarkably testimony of the senescent subject in love, questioning, as I will demonstrate, a number of prevalent stereotypes about passions in the winter of a man’s life. Moreover, the manner in which Tyutchev in these poems builds his final love into an utterly moving narrative, making bearable through its sheer literary and poetical magnetism the real sufferings it is based on, reminds us in a meaningful way of the words once uttered by Karen Blixen: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story”.