Afanasy Fet

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet, later known as Shenshin (; – ), was a renowned Russian poet regarded as the finest master of lyric verse in Russian literature. Biography Afanasy Fet was born on 5 December 1820 to Afanasy Shenshin, a 44-year-old Russian landlord from Mtsensk, and Charlotte Becker, a 22-year-old daughter of Karl Becker, a German inn-keeper. While staying with them during his visit to Germany, Shenshin fell in love with Charlotte, who agreed to follow him to Russia. Pregnant with her second child, she divorced her husband Johann Foeth, a Darmstadt court official, and married her Russian suitor, but was forced to leave her one-year-old daughter Carolina behind. In November, at Shenshin's Novosyolky estate, she gave birth to a boy who was christened Afanasy Afansyevich Shenshin. Fourteen years later, as Shenshin and Becker's marriage, registered in Germany, proved to be legally void in Russia, Afanasy had to change his surname from Shenshin to Foeth, that of his biological father. This proved to be an exceptionally traumatic experience for the boy, aggravated as it was by the fact that back in Darmstadt Johann Foeth refused to acknowledge him as his son. According to Tatyana Kuzminskaya (Sophia Tolstaya's sister), Fet's "greatest grievance in life was the fact that he was not a legitimate Shenshin like his brothers (who treated him as an equal) but the out-of-wedlock son of Foeth, a German Jew. But he couldn't bring himself to admit that the name Fet was so much superior to that of Shenshin, and that he himself had made it so through his poetry, a fact which Leo Tolstoy tried in vain to convince him of." Education and literary debut