2 Roubles F. I. Tyutchev

Fyodor Tyutchev spent much of his adult life as a Russian diplomat in Munich, where he moved in the circles of Schelling and Heine and wrote poetry almost as a private hobby — publishing so infrequently that Pushkin famously printed a batch of his poems in Sovremennik without most readers knowing who had written them. The 2003 issue marks the bicentennial of his birth.