Translated material
About poets...
The first book of Fetov’s volume “Literary Heritage” has been published
“As for us poets, I have come to one indestructible conviction that Holy Rus' does not know or want to know any of us, that all our so-called admirers should be counted in dozens, many, many hundreds, and that all of them - - a drop in the ocean <...> Names and faces may still be of interest to our so-called intelligentsia - but not at all to the Russian people, for whom an acquired kulak or police officer has a hundred times more meaning than the Maykovs, Fetovs and even the Nekrasovs < ...> In Russia, the Tsar, the Grand Dukes, generals like Suvorov, Kutuzov or (lately) Skobelev may be popular - and even clergymen like Father John of Kronstadt - but not writers, much less poets <... > Travel around Russia, and you will pass hundreds of villages and villages where they have not heard of some Pushkin.” So on August 16, 1889, Yakov Petrovich Polonsky wrote to his longtime friend Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet, and the justice of his bitter lines is undeniable. For this letter, and hundreds of other letters from the great Fet and his by no means ordinary correspondents, came to the public only now, when more than a hundred years have passed since the death of Fet (1892). Alas, publications from Fet’s huge epistolary corpus and reprints of his wonderful prose (essays, memoirs, criticism) became more or less systematic only towards the end of the 1990s. The publication of the complete collected works and letters is proceeding quietly (only four volumes have been published since 1999) - and not through the fault of the researchers. Under Soviet rule, publications and serious study of the great poet’s legacy were hampered by politics and ideology, now “economic difficulties” that pleasantly mask public indifference. What kind of “spirituality”, “national pride” and “special attitude to culture” can we talk about if Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Fet, Polonsky, Bunin, Sologub (the list goes on) are simply not published with decent completeness?In a word, the release of the first book of the 103rd volume of “Literary Heritage” - “A.A. Fet and his literary circle" (M., Institute of World Literature RAS) - another sad holiday, when a burning feeling of shame is mixed with the delight of the revealed miracle. The “enlightened class” must bow at the feet of the responsible editor of the volume, the wonderful archivist, textual critic, historian Tatyana Georgievna Dinesman, who breathed and pulled out this grandiose book. (More of those that have already been awarded and will still be crowned with all sorts of colorful awards.)
The very first of the published letters is shocking - young Fet wishes Merry Christmas to his university professor, poet and critic S.P. Shevyreva: “Russians don’t leave cards, they just glorify Christ. So I cross myself on all sides and begin.” This is followed by a wonderful Christmas poem, “The night is quiet - in the unsteady firmament...”, and then the poet sighs: “Wonderful. But me? What am I? and so on.
“Look at the Hippopotamus in the forest!”
Confronting Christmas tenderness with a slightly modified line from Lomonosov’s “Ode Selected from Job,” Fet reveals the deep spiritual conflict that will run through his entire life—involvement in faith in poetic moments and rational (tragic) denial of God. This “duality” of Fet will be the subject of Polonsky’s thoughts in letters to a friend of his youth, and then will respond in numerous philosophical and philological debates.
Only four letters from Fet to Shevyrev have reached us. The other three publications are much longer. The book contains 56 letters to his closest friend (and then Fet’s sister’s husband) Ivan Petrovich Borisov; they were prepared by G.D. Aslanova (she had previously published Fet’s letters to his fiancée, Maria Petrovna Botkina, and she also began the work of returning the poet’s “village” prose to culture) and I.A. Kuzmina. 200 items in Fet’s correspondence with Vasily Petrovich Botkin, a subtle connoisseur of all arts, who was far from fully realizing his gift in writing, the author of the best lifetime article about Fet’s poetry, the poet’s brother-in-law. This most complex corpus was brought out of the archival darkness by Yulia Pavlovna Blagovolina (1928-2005), alas, who did not see her treasured work in print, equally admiring philological filigree and amazing tact, artistic insight into the mental makeup of each of the participants in many years of “written” conversations - Fet, his wife and Botkin. (Yu.P. also published two drafts of Fet’s letters to Turgenev, making important adjustments to the difficult history of relations between the correspondents.) Finally, the correspondence with Polonsky (it was prepared by T.G. Dinesman and M.I. Trepalina) totals 234 texts, a large part of which (218 letters) falls on the sunset: in 1874, former friends quarreled for thirteen years; after reconciliation (1887), epistolary communication acquired enviable regularity and rare semantic richness.
Early letters to Borisov (1846-1852) allow you to feel how military service was given to Fet: lack of money, strict performance of officer duties, poverty of communication in the provincial world (but also affection for his colleagues), isolation from the literary world, ordeals with the publication of a collection of poems, the hopeless love of a poor officer for the dowry-free Maria Lazic, cut short by her death (and for many years continued to torment Fet, echoed in many of his poems). In the correspondence with Botkin, the “domestic” subjects are equally interesting (not only Fet, but also his chosen one had a chance to experience a love tragedy, the future union of Fet and Maria Petrovna both pleased and worried her older brother, who later became very close to his son-in-law and strived - not quite successfully - to find “their home” in the Fet family) and literary (for example, the intentions of Fet and Leo Tolstoy to create in 1857 a full-fledged - free from politics and squabbles - literary magazine, the editor of which they hoped to see Botkin) - in In both cases, the precise placement of emphasis in the comments is very important. Correspondence with Polonsky is, first of all, a passionate conversation between dissimilar poets who value each other, but also jealously guard their own uniqueness. Fet judges Polonsky's poems with amazing accuracy, being able to isolate in the motley array of his friend's opuses - and even in some of his poems - the actual "Polonsky" principle and separate it from the general moves and frequent carelessness of Polonsky. Polonsky, admiring Fet, now and then warns him against lyrical “impudence”, and complaining about the lack of creative power, stubbornly adheres to his - generally eclectic - manner. These poetic inconsistencies clearly express the diversity of personalities - the integral, stubborn, madly passionate (even at rest) Fet and the visibly tolerant, meek and nervously narcissistic Polonsky.
Differences, however, do not negate commonality: both do not imagine themselves outside of poetry. And although there are no poets among Fet’s other correspondents presented in the volume, the same can be said about them. That is why quotes (often in a humorous manner) from Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev are so natural in all letters. Therefore, Fet, complaining to Borisov (October 24, 1858) about various troubles, uses a phrase from Chapter IX of “Dead Souls”: “... when nonsense, rubbish, Androns go, then spiritual work is goodbye.” Therefore, he can begin a letter to Polonsky (December 20, 1889) with a quatrain from the far from most famous madrigal by everyone (but not by poets!), then forgotten by Baratynsky (“An unpardonable mistake...”) and is sure that the addressee will recognize the lines about the “constant saint,” dreaming of “Easily being with you in the sofa room, / In the living room to be at your feet.”
This involvement in poetry is not at all the opposite of everyday life: Fet is a master, Fet is a publicist, Fet is a family man, Fet is a defender of classical education, Fet is a strict judge of modernity, Fet is proud of his chamberlainship (and all these incarnations open in his epistolary) do not close the great poet, but make one feel the unity of a fascinatingly grandiose personality. Reading Fet’s letters to and from Fet, you think not about the cheap antithesis of “everyday life” and “song,” but about their mysterious unity. That unity that we habitually ignore (the fate of Fet’s literary heritage is one evidence of this) and without an effective awareness of which all our “innovations” and “traditions” are worthless.
When the second book of Fetov’s volume (correspondence with L.N. and S.A. Tolstoy, Strakhov, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich) will be published, only God knows.