SEER,Vol. 79,No. i, j_anuay 200 I Tiutchev and Amalie von Lerchenfeld: Some Unpublished Documents JOHN DEWEY INthe summer of I840 FedorIvanovich Tiutchev and his second wife Ernestinewere staying at the fashionableresortof Tegernsee south of Munich. Among the other guests was Amalie, the wife of Baron Alexander von Krudener, Tiutchev's former colleague at the Russian Embassy in Munich. On 2/I4 July Tiutchev wrote to his parents in Moscow: 'Vy znaete moiu priviazannost' k gospozhe Kriudener i mozhete legko sebe predstavit',kakuiuradost'dostavilomne svidanies neiu. PosleRossiieto moia samaiadavniaialyubov'.Eibylochetyrnadtsat ' let, kogda ia uvidel ee vpervye.' [You know my attachment to Madame Krudenerand may easilyimagine what ajoy it was forme to meet her. She is, after Russia, my most long-standing love. She was fourteenwhen I firstsawher.]' Amalie was born in I88, but exactly when has never been established. Some genealogical sources state that she was born in Regensburg, yet neither the Catholic nor Protestant church archives have any recordof herbaptismin thatcity. There is, however, an entry in the Protestantchurchregistersfor Regensburgof Amalie'smarriage on 3I August i 825.2 Unusually, this gives no date of birth for her, statingmerely that she was 'seventeen and a half years old'. Fromthis it is clear that she was born early in I8o8, and that Tiutchev (whose memory for dates was precise)firstsaw her at some time betweenJuly I822, when he arrived in Munich to take up his post as honorary attache at the RussianEmbassy,and Amalie'sfifteenthbirthdayin the firstfew months of I823.3 John Dewey taught Russian and German in schools and further education. Now retired from full-time teaching, he works as a freelance writer, researcher and translator. The author is most grateful to the present Count von und zu Lerchenfeld auf Kofering und Schonberg for permission to research in his archive and publish extracts in the following article; also to Herr Archivoberrat Fritsch of the Amberg State Archive for assistance in locating documents, as well as for helping to decipher and comment on some of the material. I F. I. Tiutchev, Sochineniia, ed. L. N. Kuzina and K. V. Pigarev, 2 vols, Moscow, I 984, II (volume I is entitled Stikhotvoreniia and volume II is entitled Pis'ma);L. N. Kuzina and K. V. Pigarev (eds), Pis'ma,pp. 52-54 (Russian translation of the inaccessible French original). 2 Kirchenbucharchiv Regensburg, Regensburg (Obere Stadt), 6-1 2, Seite 70, No. I 2. 3All dates in the article are New Style unless otherwise indicated. i6 JOHN DEWEY At least two poems by Tiutchev ('Iapomniu vremia zolotoe...' and 'K. N.' ['Tvoi milyi vzor, nevinnoi strasti polnyi ...']) are widely accepted by critics as having been inspired by his youthful love for Amalie;4 yet apart from the letter just quoted the only source of informationfor the affairto date has been oral accountshanded down in the familyand recordedby the poet's biographersI. S. Aksakov(his son-in-law)and K. V. Pigarev(hisgreat-grandson). Aksakovdoes not even name Amalie (shewas stillalive at the time), referringto her merely as 'a sixteen-year-oldsociety beauty (velikosvetskaia )', the addressee of 'Ia pomniu vremia zolotoe . . .', with whom Tiutchev had once exchanged watches as tokens of love. (Nikolai Khlopov, Tiutchev's peasant diad'kaor governor who accompanied him to Munich as manservant,informed the poet's mother of this in a letter, angrily complaining that in return for his watch with a gold chain Tiutchev had receivedone with a plain silkband.)5 Pigarev confirms that Aksakov's references are to Amalie von Lerchenfeld, and relates another oral tradition in the family that in January I825 Tiutchev's love for Amalie nearly embroiled him in a duel. Accordingto this account, the duel is referredto obliquelyin two of the notes writtenby Khlopov and stuckto the backof an icon which the old servant,who at thattime was retiredand livingin Moscow, had commissioned as a gift to bequeath to his former ward. These read: 'Genvaria I9 I825 goda Fedor Ivanovich dolzhen pomnit', chto sluchilos'v Minkheneot ego neskromnostii kakaiabyla opasnost'[. . .1 20 genvaria, to est'na drugoi zhe den', konchilos'blagopoluchno.' [I9 January I825 Fedor Ivanovich must remember what happened in Munich as a resultof his impropriety,and what dangertherewas [. . 20January, that is...