The house in Ovstug, that is a museum today, was built by the poet’s father, Ivan Tyutchev, in 1830. One of the first pieces of furniture in it was a desk; it belonged to Nikolai Tyutchev, the poet’s brother, a colonel of the General Staff. Throughout their lives, the brothers were very close. In 1870, when Nikolai Ivanovich passed away, the publicist Ivan Aksakov wrote, “Nikolai Ivanovich Tyutchev, the only brother and, one might say, the only friend of Fyodor Ivanovich, died. The poet had numerous ‘friends’ outside the family, but none he preferred to the others and shared all the secrets of thought and heart with, with whom he would be in a relationship of exceptionally close, sincere friendship. Nikolai Ivanovich Tyutchev loved his brother not only with brotherly, but with paternal tenderness, and Fyodor Ivanovich was not so close with anyone, so closely connected by all his personal life from the very childhood on.’

The poet always remembered his Ovstug past. In 1846, in his office, he wrote in a letter to his wife, ‘I am surrounded by things that are for me the oldest acquaintances in this world… I am writing to you in my father’s office — in the very room where he died. Next to it is his bedroom, which he will no longer enter. Behind me, there is a corner sofa — he lay down on it so as not to get up again. On the walls are the old portraits that are so familiar since childhood… In front of me is an old relic — the house in which we once lived and from which only a skeleton remained, carefully preserved by my father, so that in time, upon my return to my homeland, I could find at least a small trace, a small fragment of our past life…” 

The poet’s daughter Anna wrote in her diary about the day when the poem was written, ‘Midnight struck. We hugged and drank champagne… Dad arrived today during the vigil. We did not interrupt the prayer, and I was very glad that my mother had a completely natural excuse to spend an hour with him alone. Later he went down to the living room. He talked a lot about Petersburg, about the Petersburg society, about the balls and receptions.’