By Life Tormented, Some doubts surround the exact date of birth but reports suggest that Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet was born on the 5th December 1820 which was two years before his Russian nobleman father Afanasy Shenshin married the divorcee Charlotta Foeth in Germany. He was therefore placed into the category known as a raznochinet, literally a person who does not belong to any particular class or state. He was not allowed to take his father’s name of Shenshin and, not surprisingly, all of this was a source of great distress to Fet for the whole of his life.
As soon as he was old enough he was sent away to a boarding school in Estonia and from there he moved to Moscow University in 1838 to study philology. He began writing poetry while at university and was able to publish his first collection in 1840, called The Lyrical Pantheon. Fet really came to the attention of the literary world in 1842 when his poems were seen regularly in magazines such as Moskovityanin and Otechestvennye zapiski, all of which received a great deal of praise from all quarters.
By Life Tormented by Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet
By Life Tormented
By life tormented, and by cunning hope,
When my soul surrenders in its battle with them,
Day and night I press my eyelids closed
And sometimes I’m vouchsafed peculiar visions.
The gloom of quotidian existence deepens,
As after a bright flash of autumn lightning,
And only in the sky, like a call from the heart,
The stars’ golden eyelashes sparkle.
And the flames of infinity are so transparent,
And the entire abyss of ether is so close,
That I gaze direct from time into eternity
And recognize your flame, universal sun.
Motionless, encircled by fiery roses,
The living altar of the cosmos smolders
And in its smoke, as in creative slumber,
All forces quiver, eternity’s a dream.
And all that rushes through the abyss of ether,
And every ray, embodied or ethereal,-
Is but your reflection, O universal sun,
It is but a dream, but a fleeting dream.
Through the worldly breath of these reveries
I fly like smoke, involuntarily disperse,
And in this vision, in this delirium,
I can live with ease and breathe without pain.
In the darkness and still of a mysterious night
I see a fond and welcoming spark,
From the chorus of spheres, familiar eyes
Shine upon a grave forgotten in the steppe.
The grass has faded, the desert is grim,
A lonely tomb dreams an orphan’s dream,
And only in the sky, like an eternal idea,
The stars’ golden eyelashes sparkle.
And I dream you’ve risen from the dead,
Unchanged since you departed the earth,
And I dream a dream: we both are young,
And you’ve looked at me as you did back then.
