Sphinx, nature - here we meet with the dual Tyutchev, well acquainted with Greek mythology and conceptualizing being. The poet in his philosophical thoughts reflects on topics that concern very many. Often he is aphoristic and invites the reader to continue his thoughts himself, to be a “co-author,” so to speak. Later, the poem "Nature-Sphinx" Tyutchev offers as a new mystery, in which there may not be any sense, as evidenced by stinging bitterness.
Riddle of the sphinx
In Greek mythology, the sphinx was presented as a monster with a female head, having the body of a lioness, the wings of an eagle and a snake tail.
He guarded the entrance to Thebes. Each passerby was asked a riddle: “Which creature can be four-legged, two-legged, or have three legs?”. Everyone who did not answer correctly, the sphinx devoured. Only one Oedipus escaped this fate. He replied: "As a child, a person crawls on four limbs, becoming an adult, walks with two legs, and uses a cane in old age." The monster, defeated by the answer, rushed from the cliff and died.
Sphinx and Masons
In the 1920s, Russian Masons in St. Petersburg had a box under the significant name “The Dying Sphinx”. That is, they believed that their wisdom and literacy allowed them to solve puzzles. This, of course, was well known to F.I. Tyutchev, when he thought that there is a sphinx. His nature always appeared in a different capacity. Nevertheless, the sphinx, grandiose in its loneliness, a relic of Egyptian antiquity, stands solemnly and quietly in the presence of a terrible desert as a symbol of eternity.
He looks only forward, into the future, while we and everyone who preceded us lived their short lives and disappeared forever. And he always was and always will be. That is the sphinx. Nature, its cosmogony, is even more magnificent, cold and rational, and inevitable rock always accompanies it.
Tyutchev's world
The world in which the poet existed is always twofold: he strives for loneliness, but he is attracted to the wonderful world of God, where streams ring, fragrant and roses bloom and where the firmament is transparent. Here he almost does not feel loneliness, merging with the universe.
Early landscape lyrics
In his youth, in the 20s, F.I. Tyutchev perceived nature as a living creature, which has both a soul and a language. He could personify a thunderstorm as a goblet from which Hebe, laughing, spilled thunder and downpours on the ground. Sphinx, nature were not opposed and not compared by the poet.
In his student years, in the circle of interests and reading, he included two rulers of thoughts of that time, completely different from each other, in many ways even opposite to each other - Pascal and Russo. They both were not completely forgotten by Tyutchev. Much later, after Pascal, the poet will call a man "a murmuring thinking reed." And Russo’s ideas that nature speaks a language that is understandable to all people were attractive to Tyutchev, which was expressed in the fact that he wrote that in nature there is love and freedom. But the poet was looking for his own ways in the knowledge of the world, combining in a single love, philosophy and nature. But the path to the idea that nature is the sphinx will be long.
Characteristic features of nature in the youth of the poet
Romanticism gained dominant positions, and this could not but leave a mark on Tyutchev's poetry. For a month he has a luminous god, mountains are deities of his own, his day was shining by the will of the high gods over the abyss of the fateful world. All poetic images are sublime and extremely romantic, and very often jubilant. Not so will late Tyutchev.
The lyrics of a mature poet
In the 30s and 40s, alarming motifs increased in the poet's works, especially when he reflects on love and nature. So, “Spring Waters” can stand next to them with their bright bright joyful coloring, and at the same time he can see a secret and ambiguous smile of nature, and a mysterious “Silence” when feelings and thoughts should be silent, like stars at night, because the poet knows how impossible it is to say in a word exactly what worries and worries him.
Late period
In the 50-70s, the anxiety that always accompanied F. Tyutchev's worldview deepens. Life is becoming gloomy and hopeless. He discusses the two fatal forces that participate in every fate from birth to the grave, about Death and the Judgment of men. And even when he admires how the clouds melt in the sky, how the honey aroma blows from the fields, he cannot finish this warm picture solemnly and seriously: centuries will pass, we will leave, but the river will also flow and the fields will lie under the heat. In these years the lines “Nature - Sphinx” will be written, the poem is short and aphoristic. Like many other works that came from the pen of the poet-philosopher.
"Nature is the Sphinx"
Thinking philosophically about the secrets of being, the 66-year-old poet in 1869 came to the conclusion that all secrets are empty fabrications.
The mysteries of the sphinx-nature are not riddles at all. They have nothing to solve, they just need to be accepted. This desire to simply merge with something huge from his youth pursued the poet, because he knew that man could not change the cataclysms. The believer in him questions the secret of the creation of the world by the Creator. There may never have been puzzles in nature, it doesn’t even ask, but the author claims. To perceive as nonsense, as empty, as the fact that nature is a sphinx, Tyutchev can only completely disbelieve in the Creator’s intention. A bitter series of losses will pass by this time: E. Denisieva died in 1864, their children - daughter Elena and son Nikolai - in 1865, their mother - in 1866, and much earlier - the wife of Eleanor. And nothing can be changed. In gloomy despair, with absolute calm, he prints on paper the aphoristic lines “Nature - Sphinx” by Tyutchev. The quatrain is written in solemn measured five-footed iambic.
Comment Turgenev
Loving and appreciating the poetry of F. Tyutchev I.S. Turgenev will write almost ten years later two poems in prose - “The Sphinx” and “Nature”. He does not refute the poem "Nature - the Sphinx." Tyutchev presented, as never before, nature as a destroyer, and the sphinx as its personification. Turgenev, on the other hand, recognized the sphinx as either a Yaroslavl or a Ryazan cunning peasant whom no Oedipus could unravel. I. Turgenev’s nature is extremely severe and majestic, and there is no difference between the flea and the “king” of all living things - man. She knows neither good nor evil, she equally cares about everyone and destroys everyone. The law for her is only reason.
Both Russian geniuses, who infinitely loved and understood nature and knew philosophy, each approached the development of a theme in their own way, giving the reader a look at it from different angles.