Elena Denisyeva was the lover of Fyodor Tyutchev for fourteen years. Many of the poet’s works that are dedicated to her are based on a true story of their lives. These poems were called the “Denisyevsky Cycle”.

Elena was born into the family of Alexander Denisyev, a poor nobleman and participant of the Patriotic War of 1812. He became a widower quite early, married for the second time and entrusted his daughter to the care of his own aunt Anna Dmitrievna, who worked as an inspector at the Smolny Institute. In the second half of the 1840s, Tyutchev’s eldest daughters from his first marriage, Daria and Ekaterina, studied at the Smolny Insitute. The poet often visited them and became acquainted with the inspector and her niece.

‘In general, her education went very wrong and was most importantly limited only to the study of the French language; but nature endowed her with great intelligence and wit, great impressionability and liveliness, the depth of feeling and the energy of character, and when she was introduced to the high society, she herself changed into a brilliant young person who, with her great courtesy and amiability, with her natural cheerfulness and a very happy look always gathered many brilliant admirers around her. Our poet was among them, ’ the publicist Alexander Georgievsky wrote about Denisyeva.

When he met Denisyeva, Tyutchev was almost fifty years old. The declaration of love happened on July 15, 1850, a day that became the most important milestone in the poet’s life — he mentioned this day in numerous poems. A decade and a half later, in the middle of 1865, he commemorated this date with the lines:

Denisyeva’s love affair with a married man was condemned not only by the higher society in St. Petersburg, but also by her relatives, who disowned her. Due to the scandal, the girl’s aunt Anna Denisyeva had to leave the Smolny Institute, retire and move out of the apartment. Elena herself lost the opportunity to become a maid of honor and was expelled from high society, while the public reprimand that Tyutchev got was not so severe. In 1851, the poet described these difficulties in the poem ‘How we murder while we love! ’

In fourteen years, Denisyeva gave birth to the poet’s three illegitimate children — a daughter Elena and two sons Fyodor and Nikolai. In May 1864, after the third birth, her health began to deteriorate. Denisyeva died on August 4. Tyutchev was driven into complete despair, as Afanasy Fet said, “he was in a fever and chill in a warm room from sobbing.” Of the three children, only one son Fyodor survived. He became an officer and military writer.