When You Were Reading Those Tormented Lines, 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.
When You Were Reading Those Tormented Lines by Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet
When You Were Reading Those Tormented Lines
In which the heart’s resonant flame sends out glowing streams
And passion’s fatal torrents rear up,-
Didn’t you recall a single thing?
When, in the midnight mist a premature dawn,
Transparent, lovely as a miracle,
Broke in the distance before youAnd your unwilling eye was to this beauty drawn
To that majestic glow beyond the realm of darkness,-
How could it be that nothing whispered to you then:
A man has perished in that fire!
