The Poetics of Afanasy Fet by Emily s> Klenin (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 32I solutions found by this group to those of earlierpoets (Kheraskova,Urusova, Bunina and others). Greene has mapped out a richfieldof enquiry,which shouldinspirefurther investigations. She has an unrivalledknowledge of the subject, and it is to be hoped that afterthis overview she will turn to more extensive comparisonsof the women poets amongst themselvesand with the non-canonical male poets. Department ofRussian andSlavonic Studies WENDY RoSSLYN University ofNottingham Klenin, Emily. ThePoeticsofAfanasyFet.Bausteine zur Slavischen Philologie und Kulturgeschichte, Neue Folge: Reihe A, SlavistischeForschungen, 39. Bohlau Verlag, Cologne, 2002. xii + 409 pp. Illustration. Tables. Notes. Bibliography.Indexes. ?49.90. No book-length study of Fet has been published in English for nearly thirty years, and Emily Klenin's ThePoetics ofAfana4y Fetis a long overdue new look at a major, but relativelyneglected poet. It is particularlywelcome because it is a work of exceptionally fine scholarship and great sensitivity towards its subjectmatter. Klenin's book is divided into three sections, each dealing with a different aspectof Fet'swork.In thefirst,shelooksatfactorsin Fet'slife and the cultural environment surroundinghim which informhis poetry. This is not a creative biography as such, but rather an attempt to isolate key influences on Fet's writing and his development as a poet. Of particularinterest is the history of Fet's upbringing and education: the tension between the Germanness of his origins and the German education he received at the Moravian Brothers' school in Werro on the one hand, and his heritage as the adoptive son of the Russian landowner Shenshin and the Russian education which he afterwards obtained at Moscow University, on the other. Indeed, a constant theme throughout Klenin's book is that Fetwas essentiallya German poet writingin Russian, or at any rate a Russianpoet who drewamply on the Germanpoetic tradition. Klenin also pays attention to the specificallyintellectual sources of Fet's psychologism, his focus on the visual, and his treatment of perception and memory. Goethe, Hegel and Schopenhauer are of course importanthere, but Klenin also explores Fet's interest in photography, astronomy and early psychiatricstudiesof consciousness. The second chapterlooks in more detail at the manipulation of perception in Fet'spoetry, considering in detail such matters as his portrayalof women, his hellenizing and anthological poetry, his use of the imagery of doors and windows to channel perception, and the general tendency of his verse to selfreflexivity to observing itself observing. Klenin returns to the original editions of Fet's books of verse to explore his use of typographical space to underlinepoetic meaning or to reproduceit iconically in concrete poems such as 'Vodopad'. She draws on a huge range of supporting material, from the painting of Caspar David Friedrichand the poetry of Friedrichde la Motte Fouque, to the Greek Anthology, to Pushkin and Tiutchev, in order to 322 SEER, 83, 2, 2005 illuminate Fet's poetry through a series of often strikinglyperceptive close readingsof individualpoems. Klenin's third and longest chapter is devoted to verse form and language. Here she meticulouslysurveysthe metresof both Fet'soriginalpoetry and his translationsagainstthe context of contemporaryRussianand to a lesserextent German verse. And although sometimes the level of detail given is not always commensuratewith the degree to which it ispossibleto correlatemetricaland thematic meaning, this is more than made up for by, for example, the incisivenessof Klenin's analysisof Fet'stranslationof Goethe's 'Aufdem See'. This isset alongsideversionsof the samepoem by SergeiAksakovandApollon Grigor'ev to show how Fet manages to convey the effect of the metrical peculiarities of the original using slightly different,but parallel techniques in ways not thought of by the other translators. The sections on rhyme and stanza structureare particularlylucidly focused on the relationshipbetween form and content. Here again Klenin's close readings are full of insights, as, to give one example in the context of poetic closure, when she readsthe verse epistle to A. L. Brzheskaia,'Dalekii drug, poimi moi rydan'ia',in the context of contemporary letter-writing manuals (p. 314). One theme that runs through all the chapters of the book relates to the periodization of Fet'spoetry. Klenin persuasivelyarguesthat in his earlyverse he persistently introduced features that, while common in the German tradition,were adventurousand even radicalin the context of contemporary poetry in Russian. During the I85os, Fet allowed...