Leo Tolstoy highly appreciated Tyutchev’s poetry and knew many of his poems by heart. “Silentium! ” was his favorite poem, included in the “Circle of Reading” — a collection of aphorisms and quotations from writers of different times, which corresponded to his own religious and philosophical pursuits. “What an amazing thing! ” said Tolstoy. “I don”t know a better poem.”

Tolstoy spoke of Tyutchev “with amazement and delight” and even put his poetry above Pushkin’s. He considered the poet’s lyrical poems to be particularly close to his own views. Having read the first edition of Tyutchev’s poems, Tolstoy, in his words, ‘simply swooned at from the greatness of his poetic talent.’ He complained more than once that the poet’s lyrics did not receive due recognition and that critics often “forgot” about him.

It is also interesting to learn about the notes that Tolstoy made in his collection of the poet’s poems. He marked the poems he liked with letters: ‘T — Tyutchev, that is, thought and form characteristic of Tyutchev alone’, ‘D — depth’, ‘B — beauty’, ‘F — feeling’, and also underlined the passages that were especially important for him.

Tolstoy recalled his first meeting with Tyutchev,

However, Tyutchev did not approve of all Tolstoy’s works. The poet responded to the story “Cossacks” with an incisive epigram:

Tyutchev also did not fully approve of the novel ‘War and Peace’. Literary critic Vasily Botkin wrote to Afanasy Fet in March 1868, ‘The success of the novel is extraordinary. However, criticism is heard from literary people and military specialists. The former find that the speculative element of the novel is weak, the philosophy of history is shallow and superficial. Yesterday I had dinner, and Tyutchev was also there, and I am giving the opinion of the company.’

Tolstoy wrote about Tyutchev’s poem “There is a fleeting, wondrous moment…” the following, “The word “empty” <furrow> seems not to make any sense, one cannot put it like this unless this is poetry, and yet this word indicates right away that all the works have been completed, everything has been harvested and you get a full impression. The ability to find such images is the art of writing poetry, and Tyutchev was a great master at this.’

At the same time, Tolstoy understood that the society to which Tyutchev, a well-known diplomat, belonged, was in many ways alien to him. ‘I love him, ’ he wrote in 1873, when he learned about Tyutchev’s illness, “and I consider him one of those unfortunate people who are immeasurably higher than the crowd in the midst of which they live, and so they are always lonely.”