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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Afanasii Fet was a poet profoundly interested in philosophy, and yet it seemed to some that his verse lacked depth of thought; a realistic and very practical man, he wrote poems remote from the concerns of daily life, immersed in the ephemeral world of nightingales and roses. The key to this apparent contradiction is the concept of beauty that is central to the work of Fet and that enables him to maintain a consistent outlook on life and on art. Fet himself described this outlook as follows: “As poetry itself is the re-creation not of the whole subject but only of its beauty, so poetic thought is only a reflection of philosophical thought, and again it is a reflection of its beauty; its other aspects are of no concern to poetry.” In other words, an artist may take into account the “whole subject” in his practical concerns and strive to comprehend all facets of philosophy in his intellectual endeavors, but his art fulfills itself only in speaking of the beautiful.
1 As B. Bukhshtab points out in his Introduction to A. A. Fet, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Leningrad, 1959), p. 51, not only did the “social critics” reproach Fet for empty aeslheticism, but even his friends, such as V. P. Botkin, noted that “his sphere of thought is quite narrow, his reflection is not distinguished either by breadth or profundity.“
2 Fet, “O stikhotvoreniiakh F. Tiutcheva,” as quoted in B. Bukhshtab (in a compilation of Fet's writings on poetry and aesthetics), Russkie pisateli o literature, XVIII-XIX xru., ed. S. Balukhatyi (Leningrad, 1939), I, 436; hereafter this source will be referred to as Russkie pisateli.
3 Gustafson, , The Imagination of Spring : The Poetry of Afanasy Fet (New Haven and London, 1966), p. 18.Google Scholar
4 ibid., p. 36.
5 All these devices are thoroughly discussed by Gustafson.
6 Fet, Polnoe sobranie, p. 208. Page citations in the body of the text for poems quoted or discussed refer to this book.
7 Gustafson, p. 152.
8 Moskovskie vedomosti, No. 302, 1891, quoted in Russhie pisateli, p. 444.
9 Once, in a letter to la. Pogodin, Fet described a poet who accomplishes this as a “mad and useless man, mumbling divine nonsense“; see Russkie pisateli, p. 438.
10 See Bukhshtab's discussion of this point in Fet, Polnoe sobranie, p. 77.
11 See Gustafson, pp. 165-214.
12 In this interpretation we have avoided the metaphysical notion of dukh as an absolute point of reference outside of the poet because Fet never committed himself to a religious faith. However, the idea of God is not excluded here, and for this reason Gustafson's analysis on pp. 220-22 of his book offers a perfectly valid alternative.
13 Russkie pisateli, p. 438.
14 See Gustafson, p. 120.
15 In his correspondence with Tolstoi, Fet explicitly stated that this poem amounted to “an epic, a fairy tale.” See Fet's letter to Tolstoi of February 3, 1879, in S. Rozanova, ed., L. N. Tolstoi, perepiska s russkimi pisateliami (Moscow, 1962), p. 384.
16 See Gustafson, p. 206.
17 Russkie pisateli, p. 438.
18 Bukhshtab in Fet, Polnoe sobranie, p. 38.
19 Gustafson, p. 162, gives an excellent analysis of this poem.
