You Will Not Grasp Her With Your Mind by Fyodor Tyutchev

You will not grasp her with your mind

or cover with a common label,

for Russia is one of a kind –

believe in her, if you are able…

 

by Фёдор Иванович Тютчев (Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev)

(1866)

translated by Anatoly Liberman

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Fun Facts:

The poet Igor Guberman retorted to this:

High fucking time that someone tried

to grasp our Russia with their mind

(translated by Boris Dralyuk)

Counted amongst the admirers of Tyutchev’s works were Dostoevsky and Tolstoy along with Nekrasov and Fet then later Osip Mandelstam who, in a passage approved by Shalamov, believed that a Russian poet should not have copy of Tyutchev in his personal library – he should know all of Tyutchev off by heart.

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