Afanasy Fet

• 1. Introduction

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  Afanasy Fet died on the 21st of November 1892 with a paper knife in his hand and a suicide note on the table. His secretary had just wrestled the blade away from him, cutting her own hand in the struggle. Moments later, chased through the rooms of his Moscow house, he fell into a chair and died, his eyes wide open, his arm raised. The cause was ruled a heart attack. But the note was real, signed in a firm hand: "I willingly chose to do what would be inevitable anyway."

  Fet was 71. He had spent decades as one of the most celebrated lyric poets in Russia, compared in the same breath as Pushkin by Nekrasov himself, and called a musician rather than a poet by Tchaikovsky. He had also spent those decades tormented by a name that was not his own, a birthright stripped from him at the age of fourteen, and the memory of a woman who died because he left her.

  How did a boy born illegitimate on a provincial Russian estate become the poet Osip Mandelstam would call the greatest Russia ever produced? And what was the cost of that transformation? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Name He Was Given

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  Afanasy Shenshin was born on the 5th of December 1820 at the Novosyolky estate, the son of a 44-year-old Russian landlord and a 22-year-old German woman named Charlotte Becker. The circumstances of that birth were complicated from the start. Charlotte had followed Afanasy Shenshin from Germany to Russia while pregnant, divorcing her previous husband, a Darmstadt court official named Johann Foeth, and leaving behind a one-year-old daughter named Carolina. The marriage to Shenshin was registered in Germany. In Russia, it turned out, that registration meant nothing.

  Fourteen years passed before the legal void was discovered. When it was, the boy who had been raised as Afanasy Shenshin learned by letter, while studying at a German boarding school in the Estonian town of Võru, that his name was now Foeth. He later described the feeling as being "like a dog that had lost its master." His biological father, Johann Foeth, added a further wound: he refused to acknowledge the boy as his son.

  The name as it appeared in print shifted slightly. In 1841, when the poem "Poseidon" was published in the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski under the author's full name, the Russian letter ё in Foeth had become the plain e of Fet. Whether this was a typesetter's error or something else, biographer Tarkhov noted that in that single moment the surname of "a Hesse-Darmstadt citizen" became the pseudonym of a Russian poet.

  The wound never closed. In 1873 Fet wrote to his wife: "You cannot even imagine how I hate the name Fet. I implore you never to mention it. If someone would ask me to give one single name to all the trials and tribulations of my life, I'd say without hesitation, this name is 'Fet'." That same year Tsar Alexander II granted him the return of the Shenshin surname, along with the rights and privileges of Russian nobility. Turgenev greeted the news with sarcasm. Leo Tolstoy praised Fet's patience and courage in seeing it through. The poet kept Fet as his nom de plume.

• 3. The Literary Circle

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  Moscow University in the autumn of 1838 was where Afanasy Fet enrolled to study law and philology, and where he found, almost immediately, the friendships that would shape his writing life. In his first year he met Apollon Grigoriev, a fellow student and aspiring poet. The two became close friends and Fet moved into Grigoriev's house in Zamoskvoretchye, settling into a small room on the upper floor. Yakov Polonsky and Sergey Solovyov were frequent visitors.

  Fet had already begun writing poetry by then, citing Goethe, Heine, and Yazykov as early influences. When he showed some of his poems to the historian Mikhail Pogodin, who ran the boarding school where Fet had studied before university, Pogodin forwarded them to Nikolay Gogol. Gogol's verdict was brief: "undoubtedly gifted." That was enough. Fet published his first collection, Lyric Pantheon, in 1840, signing it only "A.F."

  The collection was praised by professor Pyotr Kudryavtsev in Otechestvennye Zapiski and then by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky, who would later say plainly that "of the living Russian poets Fet is the most gifted." By 1842 and 1843 Fet's poems were appearing regularly in both Otechestvennye Zapiski and Moskvityanin, where editor Stepan Shevyryov became his mentor. One poem from those years, "Don't wake her up at dawn...", was set to music by Alexander Varlamov and became a popular Russian romance.

  Grigoriev, watching his friend in those years, saw something darker beneath the literary success. "Never in my life have I known a person so tormented by depressions," he wrote in his autobiographical novella Ophelia. "The possibility of him committing suicide horrifies me greatly."

• 4. Maria Lazich

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  In the autumn of 1848 Fet fell in love with Maria Lazich. She was 20 years old, well-educated, and she loved him back. Fet was stationed with the Imperial Cuirassier regiment near Kherson, a posting he had joined in early 1845 hoping to recover the Shenshin name and its attendant privileges of nobility. He described the experience there as "life amongst monsters."

  Maria was the daughter of a poor Kherson landowner. Fet saw no way to marry her. He left. In 1851 Maria died, having set her dress on fire. Those who knew her were divided: some called it an accident, others read it as the final act of "a proud and desperate girl who decided life was not worthwhile without the man she loved." She died from her burns four days later. Her last words, as they were passed down, were: "Do not blame him for this."

  Fet carried this the rest of his life. Maria's image returned again and again in his later verses. It is hard to read his poetry of longing, of loss, of beauty that cannot be held, without the shadow of what happened near Kherson in 1851 falling across it.

• 5. Sovremennik and the Rupture

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  In 1853 Nikolai Nekrasov invited Fet to join the literary journal Sovremennik, where Fet reconnected with Ivan Turgenev and Vasily Botkin. It was in Turgenev's house that Fet first met Leo Tolstoy, then a young officer recently returned from the Crimean War. The friendship between Fet and Tolstoy would last the rest of their lives.

  Nekrasov championed Fet's work actively, and the preface he wrote for Fet's 1856 collection, Poems by A.A. Fet, was generous to the point of audacity. "Not a single poet since Pushkin has managed to give such delight to those who understand poetry," Nekrasov wrote, while carefully adding that the comparison was one of quality in a particular field, not of scale. Behind the scenes, the compilation of that book had involved a dispute: Nekrasov wanted minimal editing, Turgenev insisted on drastic cuts, and Turgenev's argument won.

  The relationship between Fet and the Sovremennik circle was already fracturing along ideological lines. By 1856 Fet and Nekrasov's collections appeared almost simultaneously, but the personal rapport between them had cooled. In his 1859 essay on Fyodor Tyutchev, Fet stated his position plainly: "The notion that poetry's social mission, moral value, or relevance could be superior to its artistic aspects, is nightmarish to me." The staff of Sovremennik, now dominated by Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Nikolay Dobrolyubov, moved in the opposite direction. Fet left the journal later that year.

  Tolstoy, watching all of this, expressed his bafflement at the gap between the man and the verse. "What the source of this miraculous poetic daring could be, the true characteristic of a great poet, coming from this good natured, plump officer, is beyond me," he wrote.

• 6. The Farmer Poet

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  In 1857 in Paris, Fet married Maria Petrovna Botkina, the daughter of a wealthy tea-trader and sister of his friend the literary critic Vasily Botkin. The following year he retired from army service and returned to Moscow. A year after that he purchased a desolate khutor called Stepanovka in the Mtsensk region of Oryol gubernia and moved there in 1860.

  What followed surprised everyone who knew him. Over fourteen years Fet transformed a bare stretch of land into a productive estate: a flourishing garden, a horse-breeding farm, a mill. He contributed articles on agricultural commerce and economy to Russky Vestnik from 1862 onward. For eleven years, from 1867 to 1877, he served as a Justice of the peace in his district and earned the respect of peasants and fellow landowners alike. Vladimir Semenkovich recorded that local peasants called him "a proper kind of barin" who would tell them the truth plainly, to their faces, without flinching.

  He largely stopped writing poetry. Turgenev reported to Polonsky in a letter dated May 1861 that Fet had "turned into an agronomist, a 'landlord in desperation', let his beard grow... and only damns all periodicals enthusiastically." Tolstoy, who had himself retreated to his Yasnaya Polyana estate, approved of the decision. But unlike Tolstoy, who went to the country seeking better working conditions, Fet went in silence.

  Fet himself was unapologetic. In a letter to his army friend Reveliotti he wrote: "Once I was a poor man, a regimental adjutant, now, thank God, I am an Oryol, Kursk and Voronezh landowner, and live in a beautiful manor with a park. All this I've achieved by hard labour, not by some machinations." The pragmatism was not incidental to him. It was, in his own philosophy, the very foundation of artistic freedom.

• 7. Evening Lights

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  In 1873 Fet purchased a second village, Vorobyovka, near Kursk. He returned to writing poetry. In a letter to Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov dated the 25th of August 1891, he described the effect: "At Vorobyovka my muse awoke from many years of sleep and started visiting me as often as she used to at the dawn of my life."

  The result was Evening Lights, a series of four poetry collections released in 1883, 1885, 1888, and 1891. Reviewers sometimes dwelt on the contrast between the affluent, somewhat pompous landowner and his elegant verse. Fet argued the opposite: that the financial security he had built was precisely what gave him the artistic freedom to write without compromise.

  His audience had narrowed, though. Evening Lights sold poorly. The circle of admirers had contracted to close friends: Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolay Strakhov, Polonsky, Aleksey K. Tolstoy, and Tchaikovsky. In a letter of November 1890, Polonsky wrote with characteristic warmth and regret: "I await eagerly for your Evening Lights... I wish I could add 'like the rest of our intelligentsia does', but sadly that is not the case."

  Two volumes of Fet's memoirs, My Memories: 1848-1889, appeared in 1890. On the 28th of January 1892, a banquet at the Moscow Hermitage restaurant celebrated fifty years of his literary career. Fet seemed pleased with the grandeur of it. But in the poem he wrote about the occasion, On My Muse's 50th Birthday, he called it a "requiem." On the 26th of February 1892 he was granted the title of kamerger by a monarch's decree. His final poem was dated the 23rd of October 1892. Less than a month later he was dead.

• 8. The Poet's Reach

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  Vissarion Belinsky ranked Fet alongside Mikhail Lermontov. Vasily Botkin, writing in 1843, said that "such lyrical insight into the very core of the Spring and human emotion risen by it was hitherto unknown in Russian poetry." Tchaikovsky's assessment pushed further still: Fet, he wrote, "leaves the boundaries of poetry altogether and boldly ventures into our field," the field of music. "When I think of Fet, often Beethoven comes to mind," Tchaikovsky continued, "Like Beethoven, he is endowed with the power to touch upon those strings of our souls which are out of reach for poets, no matter how strong, who rely on words only."

  Osip Mandelstam considered Fet the greatest Russian poet of all time. The Russian Symbolists took direct sustenance from his work: Innokenty Annensky and Alexander Blok both fell under his influence, with Blok calling him his "great teacher." Sergey Yesenin and Boris Pasternak followed. The line from Fet into twentieth-century Russian poetry runs wide and deep.

  Yet during his own lifetime he was never a popular poet. Botkin noted that even in the 1860s, when his reviews were largely positive, the general public treated the praise skeptically and Fet's success was confined mainly to literary men. Soviet scholar Dmitry Blagoy identified the structural reason: unlike Nekrasov, who rode the mood of his era, Fet refused to "re-tune his lyre's strings." He stayed committed to what he called the "ideal sphere," the space where beauty, love, and moments of harmony between the human soul and the infinite cosmos became the only subjects worth the trouble of verse.

  In his personal life Fet was, by many accounts, closed off, self-centered, and indifferent to the inner lives of others. Tatyana Kuzminskaya, Leo Tolstoy's sister-in-law and the subject of one of his most admired poems, wrote that she could not remember him ever showing genuine interest in another person's inner world. Sergei Tolstoy noted that the man Tchaikovsky compared to Beethoven was, in private, "indifferent to music" and had been heard describing it as "nothing but unpleasant noise." The gap between the artist and the man was, for those who knew both, almost impossible to reconcile.