Afanassi Afanassjewitsch Fet

Portrait of Fets by Ilya Repin .

Afanassi Afanassjewitsch Fet ( Russian Афанасий Афанасьевич Фет ; * 23 November ^July / 5 December  1820 ^greg. Near Mzensk , Russian Empire ; † 21 November ^July / 3 December  1892 ^greg. In Moscow , Russian Empire), also Foeth , later Shenschin ( Шеншин ), was a Russian poet who helped shape Russian poetry during the last quarter of the 19th century.

biography

Fet was the child of a German named Charlotte Elisabeth Becker from Darmstadt , whose first husband was Johann Foeth. She married a rich Russian landowner named Schenschin in 1822, two years after Fet was born in 1820. It is not known whether Fet is the son of Foeth or Schenschin. The Holy Consistory in Oryol decided that he should receive the name of his German father, since his mother's marriage to Shenschin did not take effect early enough. This decision remained traumatic for Fet throughout his life, as he never identified with Foeth, but completely with Schenschin.

Fet graduated from Moscow University and served in the army until 1856 . In 1850 Maria Lazitsch, a young woman who fell in love with Fet but could not marry him for financial reasons, killed herself by getting burned. Fet addressed this event in numerous poems, some of them late. Fet was influenced by the stigma of the illegitimate son throughout his life and was only able to use the prestigious name of his Russian father from 1876, after years of litigation preceded. Access to the Russian nobility was also granted to him because of his services in the army after serfdom was abolished in 1861 .

Fet was ridiculed by the radicals for his reactionary political views, but believed that a poet's life had little to do with his poetry - an artist didn't have to be serious. In the army he made the acquaintance of Lev Tolstoy , whom he greatly admired. When he later settled on the Stepanowka estate in the Mtsensk region, he often visited his neighbor Tolstoy and was the only writer among his friends at the time.

In the later years of his work, Fet also wrote literary reminiscences, translated parts of the Aeneid , Faust I and Die Welt as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer . Fet tried to commit suicide at an old age but was prevented from doing so by his family. Fet died of a heart attack after another suicide attempt.

German text editions

• Poems by AA Feth. Authorized Germanization in meter of the Russian original by Friedrich Fiedler. Reclam, Leipzig around 1905
• Poems (Russian-German). Retouched by Uwe Grüning, ed. by Klaus Müller. Reclam, Leipzig 1990. ISBN 3-379-00563-0
• Myriads of stars flicker. Selected poetry in German translation (Russian-German). Zentr Knigi Rudomino, Moscow 2012. ISBN 978-5-905626-17-3

Literature on Fet

• Klenin, Emily: The Poetics of Afanasy Fet. Böhlau, Cologne 2002 (= building blocks for Slavic philology and cultural history, 39). ISBN 978-3-412-16901-5

Web links

• Literature by and about Afanassi Afanassjewitsch Fet in the catalog of the German National Library
• Poems Fets (Russian)
• Original works and secondary literature on Fet (Russian)