The talented poet Athanasius Fet was one of those whose poems are capable of touching even the most callous soul to tears. The soulful lyrics, deep and sensual, but without a gram of falsehood – that’s what his poems are. In addition, Fet was noted in history as a great translator of foreign poetry.
Athanasius was the son of a German, whose wife, while pregnant, fled with her lover, a Russian nobleman. Stepfather bribed a priest to hide the secret of the stepson’s origin, but when he was 14 years old, the secret became public knowledge, and the future poet lost his noble title, surname and inheritance. In documents and papers, because of his indefinite social status, the poet was usually referred to as “foreign Fet”. His name, under which he became famous, Athanasius got when his mother managed to beg his biological father to recognize the child as his son. In general, his name sounded like “Fet”, but the poet himself preferred to speak and write “Fet”.
Being in a cramped financial position, Fet was married according to the calculation in order to receive a dowry. The latter, however, still was not enough to solve all the problems of the poet. Fet’s verses were first published in 1840. Many years later, the noble rank and surname of his stepfather, Shenshin, was returned to the poet. But in the history of Fet still remained under the name under which we know it. One of the poet’s phobias was a panic fear of falling into a psychiatric hospital. Fet wrote not only poetry, but also prose, and all his prose was written in the realism genre.
Fet died as a result of a heart attack a minute before he tried to commit suicide. Nekrasov wrote that among all Russian poets only Fet can be put on a par with Pushkin. It was Fet who authored the translation of Goethe’s famous “Faust”. Athanasius Fet dedicated many of his poems to Maria Lazich, the tragically dead girl he was in love with. For many years the poet devoted to military service, since literary activity did not bring him significant income. For the first two decades of creativity Fet sold less than one thousand books. The poet was close friends with Turgenev and Tolstoy. Afanasy Fet left no descendants behind.
