The lithograph features Friedrich Schelling, a German philosopher — Fyodor Tyutchev got acquainted with him while serving in Germany. Schelling’s philosophy had an impact upon the poet’s worldview and provided food for thought in his philosophical lyrics. Schelling wrote, ‘What seems to be inanimate in nature is actually alive and sleeping. Life is the breath of the universe, matter is the immobilized spirit.’ This thought and other ideas of the philosopher were very important for Tyutchev.

One of Tyutchev’s most famous philosophical poems mainly resulted from his acquaintance with German philosophy. This is the poem of 1836 “Nature is not what you think it is”:

Tyutchev was also interested in the philosopher’s views on the art of poetry. Schelling wrote that “every great poet is destined to transform the part of the world that has been revealed to him into something whole and to create his own mythology from this material; this world (the mythological world) is changing, and the poet”s contemporary era can only reveal a part of this world to him; this state will continue to that point, which is lying in an indefinite distance, when the world spirit itself finishes the poem it has conceived and turns the successive change of the phenomena of the new world into simultaneity.”

Friedrich Schelling was a very emotional person and, on occasion, he could get offensive. His communication with Fyodor Tyutchev often turned into heated disputes. His philosophical works are just as emotional. Schelling sometimes balanced on the verge of philosophy and poetry. In the eyes of his contemporaries, his works symbolized the eternal novelty of philosophical thought, the impossibility of solving everyday questions once and forever.

When he came to Germany, Tyutchev immersed himself in the culture created by people like Kant, Schiller, Novalis, Hoffmann and Mozart. He was also familiar with the works of his contemporaries: Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, Beethoven and Schubert. Tyutchev entirely mastered German poetry and philosophical thought and in the very first years of his stay in Munich translated Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ into Russian.