Fyodor Tyutchev (1803 - 1873) is one of Russia's best poets. To the Russians, Pushkin is the winner but Tyutchev comes in second. The text of this poem is in the wiki article about him:
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Vladimir Nabokov's statue sits in knickerbockers to just below the knee, tilting backwards on a cane chair in a park in Montreux. He is most famous for "Lolita". He nearly burned it but his wife Vera stopped him. It ranks number four in the best novels of the 20th century. Stanley Kubrick, who knew the public's taste very well, made it into a seminal movie: it's sex, but it's also literature, so that's all right then. That's true too of Ulysses by James Joyce which was one of his favourite books.

Get the December issue of Playboy this year, because they're going to print excepts from Nabokov's last unfinished work, "The Original of Laura." Nabokov is great fun as well as being literary and intellectual, so it's worth studying him:
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"Speech is silver but silence is golden" is a saying whose origins are lost in time. Aristotle, Pythagoras and Neratius have all be blamed for it. It is not particularly deep so many people must have said it. It invites the retort, "Well, shut up then".

This rejoinder also applies to this poem: however Brian Aldiss improved on the saying by adding, "Speech is silver, silence is golden, print is dynamite".

Poetry is golden too because some things are worth saying and worth hearing. That's not snappy enough. I'll have to work on it.

Fyodor Tyutchev's portrait was painted in 1876. He doesn't appear to realise that noses and external ears evolved specifically to support spectacles.

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