Afanasy Fet
Afanasy Afanasievich Fet (Афанасий Афанасьевич Фет, December 5, 1820 — December 3, 1892), or Foeth, later changed his name to Shenshin (Шеншин), was a poet who dominated the Russian poetry during the last quarter of the 19th century.
Life
Afanasy was the child of a German woman named Charlotta who was initially married to Johann Foeth. She remarried a rich Russian landlord named Shenshin in 1822 after Afanasy's birth in 1820. It is unclear if Afanasy was the son of Foeth or Shenshin, but the decision was made by the Holy Consistory in Orel that he would go by his German father's name because the marriage between his mother and his Russian father was not legitimized soon enough. This was quite traumatic for him as he completely identified himself with Shenshin and not Foeth. He spent his youth studying at the Moscow University, and serving in the army (until 1856). The stigma of illegitimacy haunted him all through his life, and after years of litigation he obtained the right to use the prestigious name Shenshin (1876). Promotion in the army ranks helped him to secure the longed-for admission to Russian nobility as well, just in time when the serfdom was abolished.
Fet was despised and ridiculed by the radicals as a mean personality of reactionary political views, but this doesn't concern his poetry. He held the view that a poet's lifestyle has little bearing to his art, and that artist doesn't have to be sincere. While in the army, he made friends with another officer, Leo Tolstoy, whom he always admired. Later he settled at the Stepanovka manor in his home district of Mtsensk and visited his illustrious neighbour as often as possible. Among Tolstoy's friends, he was the only professional man of letters.
In his later years, he also wrote literary reminiscences and translated the Aeneid and The World as Will and Representation. At an old age, when his suffering became unbearable, Fet attempted to follow Schopenhauer's advice and commit suicide but was stymied by his family. He died from a heart attack during another suicide attempt.
Poetry
When Fet first published his poetry in 1842, he was timid enough not to trust his own artistic taste. He therefore submitted his verse to the examination of Ivan Turgenev, whom he respected as an arbiter of literary tastes. This tradition continued for many years, until Fet understood that Turgenev had expurgated from his verse the most personal and original elements of his artistic vision.
Subjects of Fet's poetry are far from being original: unhappy love, modest nature of Central Russia, perfection of Greek statuary, and majesty of God. But he treated them in an impressionistic manner, always trying to catch a moment of volatile change. He could write a poem consisting of nouns only and yet making an impression of restless dynamism.
His last pieces, arguably influenced by Baudelaire, are intricate and obscure: the images are meant to evoke (rather than to record) subtle associations of half-forgotten memories. He once said that the most important thing in poetry is a thread that would bind all the rambling associations into a tightly structured short poem.
Fet was never a popular poet during his lifetime. But he had a profound influence on the Russian Symbolists, especially Innokenty Annensky and Alexander Blok, and as such is firmly established among all-time Russian greats.
Sample
- A sample of Fet's poem, with rhymes dropped
- When you were reading those tormented lines
- In which the heart's resonant flame sends out glowing streams
- And passion's fatal torrents rear up,-
- Didn't you recall a single thing?
- I can't believe it! That night on the steppe
- When, in the midnight mist a premature dawn,
- Transparent, lovely as a miracle,
- Broke in the distance before you
- And your unwilling eye was to this beauty drawn
- To that majestic glow beyond the realm of darkness,-
- How could it be that nothing whispered to you then:
- A man has perished in that fire!
- 15 February 1887