Summer storms, sea, light, silence

Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73) is included in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry but his landscape poems are given rather faint praise: 'the themes of his nature poems are conventional - blazing sunsets, snow mountain peaks, etc. - but he presents these scenes from an unexpected point of view.' His greatest work according to the editors was his love poetry, although their selection is too small to give a good sense of these (and they miss out the one quoted at the end of Stalker, then turned into a song by Björk, 'The Dull Flame of Desire'). Charles Tomlinson, as you might expect, was keener to highlight the side of Tyutchev I'm interested in here. In his Translations (1983) he says 'Tyutchev's poetry, with its evocation of summer storms, sea, light, silence, is true to the quality of the present moment as it reveals itself in the landscape of the mind.'

As usual I won't quote whole poems, but here are some lines that illustrate what Tomlinson says, taken from the translations he made with linguistic help from Henry Gifford.

Summer Storm: 'Bursts out of ravaged clouds / To smear the blue, to charge / Impetuous on the wood'

Sea: 'Winds / Called to one another and the waves / Sang me to deafness'

Light: 'Beneath the sun-gold / Lake currents glint'

Silence: 'Entering autumn, there ensues / (Its beauty is in brevity) / A season of crystalline repose'

Although Tyutchev has been overlooked so far by the publishers of literary classics, you can find an online PDF of translations by John Dewey (not the philosopher). There is a section covering early poems on 'Nature' and another one of late 'Russian Landscapes'. Back in the day, when people still wrote blogs, there was a good one called Poetry in Translation that had a long post about this book, providing a summary of Tyutchev's life and work. Here's a section of it - Ovstug was the poet's family estate. 

Ovstug and the surrounding countryside inspired some of the finest of Tyutchev’s later nature poems, including the following:

There comes with autumn’s first appearance
A brief spell full of wonder and delight:
Whole days of crystalline transparence
And evenings luminously bright…

Where once the sickle strode through wheat-ears tumbling
An air of space and emptiness reigns now;
Only a wisp of cobweb, trembling,
Gleams on the idle furrow’s brow.

The empty skies fall still as birds forsake us,
Yet distant still is winter’s first unruly storm,
And, seeping from above, a blueness pure and warm
Is added to the drowsing acres…

This was another of Leo Tolstoy’s favourites. He particularly admired lines 7 – 8, where a few deft strokes (Tolstoy singles out the evocative use of ‘idle’) are sufficient to create a whole picture of rural tranquillity and repose following the hectic activity of the harvest. ‘The art of writing poetry lies in the ability to find such images, and Tyutchev was a great master of that,’ Tolstoy commented.

Charles Tomlinson translated this poem, written on 22 August 1857, as 'Entering Autumn.' He rendered Tolstoy's favourite lines thus: 'Cobweb on idle furrow / Stretches its gleam of subtle hair.' Another version by Anatoly Liberman makes it into the Penguin anthology, although the word 'idle' doesn't feature in it. You can still visit Tyutchev's estate in Ovstug, although of course I never will. Russia is off limits now, but some English-speaking traveller gave it a five star TripAdvisor review back in 2015 and said it is 'open from early morning (9 a.m.) even off season, pleasant staff, well-kept both house and grounds and you can buy the most poetic leaflet I've ever stumbled across.'

The temple’s firm towering

Years ago when I studied art history I was very taken with a particular passage in Heidegger's essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. He deliberately looks at a non-representational work of art: a Greek temple which 'portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley.' But it is through such a temple that 'the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.' He goes on to describe how the temple affects the landscape:  

Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea.  

This passage is quoted in Sarah Bakewell's 2016 history of existentialism and phenomenology, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails - one of the most off-putting titles for a book I have ever come across and one which (I'm sorry to say) stopped me picking it up until recently. Don't judge this book by it's cover - it's very good! She says of Heidegger's temple, 'I'm prepared for the possibility that someone else will find this boring or even odious. But Heidegger's idea that a human architectural construction can make even the air show itself differently has stayed somewhere behind my perceptions of buildings and art ever since I read the essay.'   

Heidegger had never seen a Greek temple when he wrote this but in 1962 he finally decided to go on an Aegean cruise, along with his wife and a centre right politician friend 'who had a past at least as embarrassing as Heidegger's since he'd joined the Nazi Party in 1937.' Cromwell describes Heidegger's disappointment with Olympus, ruined by 'hotels for American tourists', and also with Crete, Rhodes and Athens. Finally though, they encountered some gleaming white ruins on a headland - the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion.

The bare rock of the cape lifted the temple towards the sky. Heidegger noted how 'this single gesture of the land suggests the invisible nearness of the divine', then observed that even though the Greeks were great navigators, they 'knew how to inhabit and demarcate the world against the barbarous'. Even now, surrounded by sea, Heidegger's thoughts naturally turned to imagery of enclosing, bounding and holding in.

Edward Dodwell, Temple of Poseidon, 1821

In her concluding chapter Cromwell acknowledges the continuing interest in Heidegger's writing about technology and ecology but highlights again a claustrophobic quality in his writing - 'his dimly lit world of forest paths and tolling bells'. She prefers Simone de Beauvoir's enduring fascination with the world and quotes (twice) from Force of Circumstance in which de Beauvoir lists some of the experiences that have made up her life. I'll end with these, a sequence of condensed landscapes: 'the dunes of El-Oued, Wabanasia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert...'

Refulgent light in the Sonian Forest

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Vision of Saint Hubert, 1617-20

I have been reading Woodland Imagery in Northern Art c. 1500-1800 by Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, published with beautiful illustrations by Lund Humphries two years ago. It is written in a slightly eccentric, charmingly old-fashioned and accessible style with short chapters covering various artists and genres of sylvan imagery, from van Eyck to Rubens. The iconography of trees is linked to an interesting range of sources in Latin vocabulary, religious traditions, pastoral poetry and the wider influences of politics, patrons and print technology. A chapter on Dürer includes sketches made in Nuremberg and a linden tree on the bastion of the castle that I mentioned here last month, I could discuss this or other interesting topics I found interesting, but I'll focus here on a painting by the artist Leopoldine Prosperetti has specialised in, Jan Brueghel the Elder. 

The Vision of Saint Hubert (1617-20), now in the Prado, was one of Brueghel's collaborations with Rubens. It shows one of the two famous saints who had a conversion experience while out hunting - he is not to be confused with Saint Eustace, the Roman general who features in the Canterbury Cathedral wall hanging and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. Hubert (c. 656-757) was the 'Apostle of the Ardennes' and the two Flemish artists may have chosen this subject to please their patrons, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella. This quote is from Prosperetti's chapter that focuses on woodland imagery associated with the Sonian Forest on the edge of Brussels. The passage includes two words you don't often come across: reflexy-const and talud.

The finishing touches in these pictorial settings would be passages of light that enhanced the scenery. The term in art theory is reflexy const (the art of reverberated light), which assigns to bounced-off sunlight the function of bringing scenery to life. In classical paintings, these areas of luminosity appeared on the smooth facets of grottoes, rockeries or ruins, to scatter the light to neighboring surfaces. In a sylvan setting, where there would be no resplendent surfaces other than leaves, painters would focus their attention on patches of sand, which, with the right amount of sunlight falling through the gaps in foliage or the opening of a clearing, would create pools of refulgent light. One such opportunity is provided by the talud, the sloping shoulder of a sunken path that is typical of the traveled road in age-old forests. An example of this curious land formation rises above Saint Hubert, bearing a slanted oak barely holding on to the sandy soil. It pairs visually with an illuminated sandy patch below the group of oaks on the other side of the path, which serves as a platform for the stag. 

The deer's antlers and the broken branch on the highlighted patch of ground form another pair: forked forms which Prosperetti finds frequently in Brueghel's paintings and which suggest the forking path of a decision. The cross which Hubert will choose is hovering above the antlers, so small you probably can't see it on your screen... Prosperetti suggests that the hart (cf. heart) at the centre of the forest was like the ducal court at the heart of the Duchy. Isabella's grandfather Charles V, whose hunts in the Sonian Forest are depicted in tapestries that now hang in the Louvre, chose as his motto a verse from the Psalms: 'As the hart panteth after the water brooks, So panteth my soul after thee, O God!'

Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head

Emma Stibbon, Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head, 2023

We went to Eastbourne at the weekend for the Emma Stibbon exhibition 'Melting Ice | Rising Tides', which combined paintings of retreating ice in Svalbard and Antarctica with art made around the retreating chalk cliffs of East Sussex. Having studied the Seven Sisters a few years ago, I was taken aback to see how they have changed recently, with so much undercutting now that it looks like caves are forming in them, although of course the chalk will topple before that happens. Below you can see me posing in front of a rock fall sculpture in the gallery. Stibbon assembled old postcards to chart changes to the cliffs and re-sketched a view drawn in the nineteenth century by Elizabeth Smith Paget, allowing us to compare and contrast. She did something similar a few years ago at Chamonix, where Turner had painted the glacier and Ruskin (with Frederick Crawley) had produced a striking daguerreotype. While her predecessors 'observed the drama of a sea of ice almost at the level they stood, Stibbon looked down into an exposed deep valley with “a dark moraine-covered floor, almost completely devoid of ice.”' (Observer review)  

The drawing above, Cliff Crevice, was done in part with chalk found on the beach at Eastbourne. I always like the idea of some small element of the landscape directly entering the artwork. Here, in an interview for Studio International, she describes two more examples:

On the subject of mediums, I have also used seawater. There’s a big sea drawing, Breaker, done in Indian ink. Oddly, I haven’t tried using seawater before, and the pigments dispersed quite strangely, organising themselves into some other form. One of the galleries features a series of drawings of the sea which I made on the deck of a wooden boat, while we passed from the north of Norway to Svalbard, which took three days and was very rough. I made drawings not intended as a work to exhibit, but it became apparent the further north we got that the ice in the ink was taking over. I had 20 or so drawings, and when I laid them out, you could see that progression: it starts out as normal drawings, and then you can see the crystals formed in the ink. I like that as a document of weather taking over the drawing.

I'll end here with a photo of one of those ink sketches, in which you can clearly see the crystals.