Maria Tyutcheva, the daughter of Fyodor Tyutchev and his second wife Ernestina, collected and rewrote the scribal copies of her father’s poems and participated in the process of preparing his works for publication. She kept a diary, which became a kind of chronicle of the poet’s private life. ‘I love my father’s poems so much that I cannot get tired of them, I feel them like others feel music without being professional musicians, ’ she wrote in one of her letters to her brother Ivan.

In 1865, Maria Tyutcheva married Nikolai Birilyov, a famous naval officer and hero of the Sevastopol Siege, and six years later she opened a school for peasant children in the village of Ovstug. She not only restored the school building, but expanded it almost twice. The poet himself contributed to starting the Ovstug school. Thanks to the efforts of Fyodor Tyutchev and his daughter, a flagship school with a five-year term of study appeared in the village. It was the largest rural school in the Bryansk district. Maria was very fond of her father’s family estate in Ovstug and visited it more often than her brothers and sisters. Also in 1870, she joined the Society of St. George for the Care of the Wounded and Sick Warriors as a nursing sister.

To celebrate Maria’s name day, Tyutchev presented his daughter with a newly published edition of Turgenev’s works in five volumes. She wrote in her diary that day, ‘Solemn divine liturgy, my mother gave me 100 rubles. Dad gave me Turgenev’s new edition.’

Tyutchev dedicated several poems to Maria. One of them called “On this day of the Orthodox East” was written on Sunday and sent to Reichenhalle, where the poet’s daughter was dying of consumption:

The poem was written in 1872. A year later, Maria died. She was buried in St. Petersburg at the cemetery at the Novodevichy Resurrection Convent, where her husband Nikolai Birilyov was later buried next to her.