Afanasy Fet

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (Russian: Афана́сий Афана́сьевич Фет), later known as Shenshin (Russian: Шенши́н) 5 December [O.S. 23 November] 1820 — 3 December [O.S. 21 November] 1892), was a Russian poet regarded as one of the finest lyricists in Russian literature. The circumstances of Afanasy Fet's birth have been the subject of controversy and some uncertainties still remain. Even the exact date is unknown and has been cited as either October 29 (old style), or November 23 or 29, 1820. Brief biographies usually maintain that Fet was the son of the Russian landowner Shenshin and a German woman named Charlotta Becker, and that at the age of 14 he had to change his surname from his father's to that of Fet, because the marriage between Shenshin and Becker, registered in Germany, was deemed legally void in Russia. Detailed studies reveal a complicated and controversial story. It began in September 1820 when a respectable 44-year-old landowner from Mtsensk, Afanasy Neofitovich Shenshin (described as a follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideas), returned to his Novosyolky estate from the German spa resorts where he had spent a year on a recreational trip. There he had rented rooms in the house of Karl Becker and fell for his daughter Charlotta Elizabeth, a married woman with a one-year-old daughter named Carolina, and pregnant with another child. As to what happened next, opinions vary. According to some sources, Charlotta hastily divorced her husband, Johann Foeth, a Darmstadt court official; others maintain that Shenshin approached Karl Becker with the idea that the latter should help his daughter divorce Johann and, when the old man refused to cooperate, kidnapped his beloved (with her total consent). One thing is certain: in the autumn of 1820 the 22-year-old Charlotta Foeth found herself at Shenshin's Novosyolky estate. In October (or November, depending on the source) she gave birth to a boy who was christened Afanasy Afansyevich Shenshin and registered in the local records as Shenshin's son (a statement which Shenshin had to concede several years later could not be true). The pair married in 1822.