Fyodor Tyutchev’s mother, Ekaterina Tolstaya, was descended from two prominent families: her father came from the Tolstoy family, and her mother was from the Rimsky-Korsakov clan. The poet’s future parents met in Moscow in the house of Ekaterina’s relatives — the Osterman-Tolstoys. After the wedding, the couple moved to the village of Ovstug, Oryol governorate, which Ivan Tyutchev had inherited from his father. The poet’s father was a Bryansk landowner, who had the family estate built and a new stone house erected instead of the old wooden one. The Tyutchevs lived most of their time on the estate.

The first biographer of Fyodor Tyutchev, his son-in-law Ivan Aksakov, characterized Ekaterina Lvovna as ‘a woman of a remarkable mind, with lean physique, nervous, with a tendency to hypochondria, with imagination overactive to the point of obsession. He wrote,

In addition, the poet’s mother was known for her conservative views shared by many noblemen in Moscow. She thought of her sons Nikolai and Fyodor as of true liberals even when they were not young any longer. The Tyutchevs were respectable and hospitable. In 1820, the publicist and publisher Mikhail Pogodin, who knew them well, wrote in his diary,

Although Ekaterina Tyutcheva was constantly worried about her health, she lived to old age. She died in 1866. She was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.