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Chapter 5. Tjutchev’s Lyrics of 1850–64
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Chapter 5 Tjutchev’s Lyrics of 1850–64 Tjutchev’s interest in proper names, their sound and graphic symbolism, is encountered as frequently in the period 1850–64, also known as the Denis’eva period, as earlier in his creative career, and subsequently. This chapter ana-‐‑ lyzes Tjutchev’s most famous poems, concatenated biographically within the Denis’eva period. Many poems within this timeframe carry the name of the heroine, Elena Aleksandrovna Denis’eva, Tjutchev’s “last love,” secreted in lines and rhymes. To the best of my knowledge, scholars, although obviously recognizing the role of Denis’eva in Tjutchev’s life and creative works, have never paid serious attention, or consistently focused on his anagrammatic use of her name. With respect to anagrams, there are two irreconcilable groups of scholars. The first group recognizes and interprets anagrams, while many in the second group question the appropriateness of such a subjective “interpretation.” They believe rather in the objectivity of extensive statistical methods in versi-‐‑ fication theory. For both groups the facts, substantiated in writings, such as the poet’s letters, are more valuable than his poems. A poem is seen as the product of artistic imagination, and not as an authorized factual document. While examining anagrams in Tjutchev’s poetry, I try to combine the methods of the two opposing approaches, namely, “subjective” interpretation and “ob-‐‑ jective” data. Unfortunately, the degree of “ob-‐‑/subjectivity” is disputable. I based my research from the start on Tjutchev’s letters and archives. First, I investigated his biography and paid attention to the established fact of Denis’eva’s importance in Tjutchev’s life. Then I found and interpreted many anagrams just in the process of reading Tjutchev. Independently, I found deviations in the frequency of stressed vowel distribution in Tjutchev’s poetry as described in chapter 3 of part 1. Vowel sound deviations from the norm were found in the poems of 1850 to 1864 only. A consonantal deviation might be discovered there as well, in contrast to the statistically “normal” surround-‐‑ ing periods. I assume that among many reasons that possibly caused the strik-‐‑ ing sound differences in the Denis’eva years compared to other periods could be a certain lexical peculiarity, some frequently used names and words. In my initial division of all of Tjutchev’s poetry into three periods, I sin-‐‑ gled out the years 1850–64, when Denis’eva came into the poet’s life (1850) and then died (1864), as the central period. While examining the stressed vowel sound constructions in Tjutchev’s lyrics of the middle period (Ginz-‐‑ 156 TJUTCHEV’S LYRICS burg 2000), I detected a high frequency of the SVs O and E in a limited group of iambic poems with X-‐‑crossings.1 In Ginzburg 2003a, I explored this fre-‐‑ quency through extended data encompassing all iambic lyrics plus all poems with assonant rhymes written by Tjutchev within the same period. The marked similarity between the early and late periods in contrast to the middle one helped me realize the significance of sound preferences in the poetry of the middle period. If asked whether Tjutchev’s vowel sound consistency in the early and late period poems was made consciously, I could not give a sat-‐‑ isfactory answer. The poetry of the middle years is significantly different, with the [o] and [e] phonemes often paired in rhymes. Both of the phonemes are compact and opposed to the lower compact [a], usually the most fre-‐‑ quently stressed phoneme in Russian, which is also the case in Tjutchev’s lyrics of the early and late periods, in contrast to the middle years. The pho-‐‑ nemes [o] and [e] predominate in paired rhymes and in assonances outside rhymes (including consistent repetitions in X-‐‑crossings), at the expense of the RV A. The high statistical frequency of the paired rhymed stressed vowels O and E, discussed in chapter 3, may be explained by the biographical and tex-‐‑ tual analysis in this chapter. In explaining the unexpected frequency of O and E, which does not correspond to the predicted frequency in Russian speech, I develop a close analysis of the Denis’eva period poems, in particular focusing on the anagram of her name. Denis’eva’s name, Elena, and the stem of her family name, дeнь, “den’,” stress the [e] phoneme. The name of Tjutchev’s “last love,” ЕlЕna Aleksandrovna, or LjOlja, became an idée fixe of his middle period poetry. In Ginzburg 2000, I established an indirect...