Academic Studies Press

Chapter Title: Intimations of Mortality: Fyodor I. Tyutchev’s “In Parting there is a Lofty
Meaning”

Book Title: Close Encounters

Book Subtitle: Essays on Russian Literature
Book Author(s): Robert Louis JACKSON
Published by: Academic Studies Press. (2013)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1zxshr0.23

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0

International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Funding is provided by Knowledge
Unlatched.

Academic Studies Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Close Encounters

This content downloaded from 77.243.23.179 on Thu, 19 Mar 2020 19:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 P oet ry of P a rt i ng

This content downloaded from 77.243.23.179 on Thu, 19 Mar 2020 19:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Intimations of Mortality:
Fyodor I. Tyutchev’s
“In Parting there is a Lofty Meaning”1

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is
rounded with a sleep.
—Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV. I

V razluke est’ vysokoe znachen’e—

Kak ni liubi, khot’ den’, khot’ vek,
Liubov’ est’ son, a son—odno mgnoven’e,
I rano l’, pozdno l’ budet probuzden’e,
A dolzhen nakonets prosnut’sia chelovek.

[In parting there is a lofty meaning—

However much you love be it one day, be it a century,
Love is a dream, and a dream is one moment,
And sooner or later there will be an awakening,
And man must finally wake up.]

“Here are some bad verses expressing something even worse,” Fyodor
I. Tyutchev (1803–1873) wrote to his wife with reference to his poem
of August 6, 1851.2 The poem is in no sense a bad one; on the contrary,
it is a masterpiece in miniature. Whether it expresses something on
the somber or pessimistic side is a question. In any case, Tyutchev’s
subjective reaction to his poem does not alter the poem’s independence
or its rich poetic and philosophical texture.
“In Parting there is a Lofty Meaning” (“V razluke est’ vysokoe
znachen’e,” 1851) is a philosophical poem about the pathos of parting

1
From Text and Context: Essays to Honor Nils Ake Nilsson, ed. Peter Alberg
Jensen, et al. Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 23 (Stockholm, 1987):
38-41.
2
F. I. Tiutchev, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestven-
naia literatura, 1984), Pis’ma, 2:169.

This content downloaded from 77.243.23.179 on Thu, 19 Mar 2020 19:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Intimations of Mortality: Fyodor I. Tyutchev’s “In Parting there is a Lofty Meaning” 319

and time. The poet perceives the parting of lovers as a prefiguration

of man’s ultimate parting from life. The dream of love stands for
the dream of life. Life, like love, is a dream from which there is an
inevitable awakening. The awakening is to time and mortality. Yet the
awakening also carries intimations of immortality. The poem, however,
seems finally to suggest that immortality lies in the dream of love and
life, that is, in the timeless realm of poetry, all that man must return to
eternity. What is certain is that the act of parting is laden with “lofty
meaning” (vysokoe znachen’e).
The poem consists of five lines and thirty-two words. Six words
are used twice, thus reducing the poem’s working vocabulary to twenty-
six words. The poem is marked by an extraordinary compression and
interaction of parts. It is a microuniverse, and as a poem, as a marvel of
compression, illustrates the paradox of the timeless dream embedded
in the timebound “moment.”
The core of the poem—lines 2, 3, and 4—asserts that love is
a dream from which there is an inevitable awakening. The two framing
lines of the poem—lines 1 and 5—stand in direct relationship to one
another. The opening line speaks of the “lofty meaning” (vysokoe
znachen’e) of parting—an allusion to death and resurrection—while the
final line discloses that meaning in the veiled metaphor of “waking
up” (prosnut’sia). The dash (-) at the end of the opening line establishes
the line’s privileged status as signaler of the poem’s, and man’s, solemn
concern.
Lines 2 and 4 use groups of words that stand in direct relation
to one another and give expression to the notion of noumenal time:
“khot’ den’ odin, khot vek / I rano l’, pozdno l’.” Line 3, the middle of
the poem, speaks of the paradox of the timeless dream (son), that is, of
phenomenal time, and has as its center of gravity the dream or sleep
(son / a son).
Lines 2, 3, and 4 break down into two syntactical-semantic units
separated by a caesura in the third line of the poem: Kak ni liubi, khot’
den’ odin, khot’ vek, / Liubov’ est’ son /caesura/, a son—odno mgnoven’e. /
I rano l’, pozdno l’ budet probuzhden’e. “However / long / one loves, be it
for a single day or for a lifetime, / Love is a dream”; that is, in loving,
or in love, one is plunged into a dream world that is timeless. “But the
dream is a moment. / And sooner or later there will be an awakening”;
that is, the dream of love is actually but an instant, a single moment in
man’s temporal existence: on awakening one is returned to noumenal
time. The abstract noun, “probuzhden’e,” means “awakening” in the

This content downloaded from 77.243.23.179 on Thu, 19 Mar 2020 19:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
320 Poetry of Parting

literal sense, but it carries the figurative meaning of “coming to one’s

senses,” waking up to the reality or hard truth.
A dolzhen nakonets prosnut’sia chelovek. In the final line of the
poem, the poet speaks unambiguously of man’s “waking up”: the
verb “prosnut’sia,” with its root “son,” means exactly to wake up from
a dream or sleep. Though seemingly a mere reiteration of the thought
contained in line 4, the closing line establishes its own independent
semantic field. The poet’s thought on the dreamlike character of love
has led him into an even more profound meditation on the inevitable
ending of the dream of life. Thus, the poem comes full circle back to the
first line that alludes to the “lofty meaning” of parting.
The notion of “parting” (razluka—with its root in “luchit’”—to
splinter) in the poem is both structural and thematic. The caesura in
line 3, falling between “son” and “a son,” evenly divides the poem
into two groups of sixteen words each. But the matter goes beyond the
poet’s obvious delight in formal symmetries; the poet has invested this
pivotal caesura, this nonverbal “space,” with metaphysical meaning,
indeed, with the poem’s most significant statement: falling between
two “sleeps” (son / a son) this caesura constitutes a ghostly Pascalian
embodiment of the transience of human life. Man’s existence is but
a “moment” between two sleeps of eternity. Thus, the poet has
converted poetic “space” into time.
One of the most brilliant accomplishments of the poet is the
manner in which he puts to use the word “son” with its alternate though
closely related meanings of “sleep” and “dream.” “Son” is certainly
intended to be understood as “dream” in the syntactic-semantic
context of line 3. But “son” as “sleep,” as a metaphor for death, is very
active in the poem’s subtext. The use of the words “probuzhden’e,” and
in particular, “prosnut’sia,” serve to bring out the meaning of “sleep”
in “son.” But the poet has laid the groundwork for this association in
the opening line of his poem where he poses in the reader’s mind the
question of the “vysokoe znachen’e” of parting. By line 3, the answer—
“son”—is advanced phonologically: the stressed vowel “o” and the
syllable “so” in “vysokoe” (certainly the most portentous word in
the line) recurs significantly in “son / a son”—the two sleeps between
which man lives out his lifetime. The “vysokoe znachen’e” of parting
is solemn and sonorous “son” (sleep), a fact made explicit only in the
poem’s final line. The dominant sense of “son” in line 3, however, is
that of “dream.” Man’s awakening from his dream of love (liubov’
est’ son), that is, his consciousness of his dream as “one moment,” is

This content downloaded from 77.243.23.179 on Thu, 19 Mar 2020 19:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Intimations of Mortality: Fyodor I. Tyutchev’s “In Parting there is a Lofty Meaning” 321

signalled phonologically by the unpleasant cluster of consonants

“mgn” in the word “mgnoven’e”; after the sonorous “son / a son” this
is indeed an unpleasant “awakening” (probuzhden’e). Thus, by line 3,
the poet has prepared the way phonologically for the harsh message of
lines 4 and 5.
The ultimate fact in man’s existence is his mortality. Does the poet
view man’s parting from earth, that is, death, in a completely gloomy
spirit? His conception of death as a “waking up” (prosnut’sia) argues
against all notions of final closure in human destiny. Too, it is only in
a religious sense that one can speak of death, mortality or parting from
earth as a “waking up.” The opening line of the poem would seem to
contain an allusion to resurrection. The “lofty” and “high” (vysokoe)
meaning that the poet attaches to parting may not only refer to man’s
final sleep (son) but also to his highest dream (son): the paradise of love,
the paradise where the dream of love achieves its highest and eternal
embodiment. In this interpretation the pathos of parting anticipates the
pathos of the heavenly reunion.
In this connection, the final rhyming words of lines 1, 3,
and 4—“znachen’e,” “mgnoven’e,” and “probuzhden’e”—deserve
consideration. On the surface, these words seem to sum up concisely
a view of the poem’s content as tragic. Yet the same sequence of words
seems to reveal a subtext that argues against a tragic interpretation. In
our sequence seen as subtext, the word “mgnoven’e” (rooted in the verb
“migat’,” “mignut’”—to wink, to blink) is pivotal in place and meaning
(as it is in the tragic interpretation of this same sequence). The awareness
of the dream as a moment (a son—odno mgnoven’e) here points not to
the unhappy “awakening” in consciousness, but to awakening in the
highest religious sense. “Mgnoven’e” in this interpretation is not only
“moment,” but movement, transition, as in the revelation of the loftiest
religious dream. Thus, we read in 1 Corinthians 15:51–52 in the Russian
version: “Govoriu vam tainu: ne vse my umrem, no vse izmenimsia /
Vdrug, vo mgnoven’e oka, pri poslednei trube; ibo vostrubit, i mertvye
voskresnut netlennymi, a my izmenimsia.”3 (my italics—RLJ). The
poem’s “lofty” Christian-religious subtext is unmistakable. But in the

3
“Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be
changed./ In a moment, in a twinkling of the eye, at the last trump: for the
trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we
shall be changed.” (King James Version).

This content downloaded from 77.243.23.179 on Thu, 19 Mar 2020 19:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
322 Poetry of Parting

poem, as a whole, is the poet really consoling himself with allusions to

an afterlife, or is he speaking of the illusion not only of the dream of
love and life, but also of the dream of immortality?
A dolzhen nakonets prosnut’sia chelovek. However, one interprets
the sequence “znachen’e,” “mgnoven’e,” “probuzhden’e,” this final
line strikes the reader with jarring force; it is terminal in position and
in meaning. An unpleasant sense of the inexorable, of compulsion, of
the idea of paying back a debt is carried by the word “dolzhen.” The
moment of parting no longer lies in some unspecified time in the future
(rano l’, pozdno l’): the poet speaks of man waking up “at last” (nakonets).
The end (konets) is at hand. In line 2, the poet alludes indirectly to man’s
lifespan: the maximum time one might love is for a lifetime, that is,
a century (vek). Line 5 makes it clear that the worm of time is at work in
man (chelovek), that is, mortality is the very definition of man.
Thus, to the ambiguous sequence “znachen’e,” “mgnoven’e.”
“probuzhden’e,” with its hints at the overcoming of time and space, the
poet opposes the unambiguous sequence “vek”—“chelovek,” with its
view of timebound man living out his earthly “moment” between two
sleeps. In this perspective, man’s inevitable awakening from the dream
of love and life preludes not resurrection and the kingdom of love, but
a reentrance into the dreamless world of eternity: “son” without “son.”
Here, it would seem, is Tyutchev’s eshche khudshee.
The poem’s allusions to two kinds of revelation, the one religious
and optimistic in character, the other agnostic and pessimistic, coexist
in the poem in a kind of creative tension. Yet the Christian “presence,”
though haunting, is passive; it does not fill the poem with a sense of
promise; the unmistakable and strange glow it gives to the poem seems
only to illuminate the darker, more somber colors.
Yet Tyutchev’s “even worse” is nonetheless a one-sided and
narrow appreciation of the poem. In the deepest sense “V razluke
est’ vysokoe znachen’e” is not a pessimistic poem. Man’s “moment”
in the universe is seen as infinitesimal, transient, even tragic. Yet this
moment as dream, illusion, poetry fills the universe. This paradox of
man’s presence is exemplified by the poet’s extraordinary achievement
in his microscopic poem: in a single “moment,” in a flash of poetry,
the poet reveals the landscape of the macrocosm—the infinity of man’s
universe and its endless dialectic of dream and reality, illusion and
disillusionment, of contraction and expansion into and out of time.
In this act of language and in the vision it contains, man is neither
earthbound nor timebound: he is the measure of his universe.

This content downloaded from 77.243.23.179 on Thu, 19 Mar 2020 19:53:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms