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January

What grief!... Afanasy Afanasevich Fet

What grief! The alley's end

Is lost in snow again today,

And once again, the silver snakes

Are crawling through the snow.


The sky's without a patch of blue,

The steppe's completely smooth and white,

A single crow is struggling hard

To beat its wings against the storm.


My soul is frozen as the land,

There is no sign of dawning there.

My languid thought drops off to sleep

Above my slowly dying work.


But in my heart still glows a hope

That accidentally, perhaps,

My soul will once again grow young

And see its native home once more,


A land where storms may come and go,

Where thought is passionate and pure,-

And where a chosen few can see

How spring and beauty bloom.


Early 1862

Born in 1822 and denied his right to be a hereditary nobleman because his parents were then not married, Afanasy Afanasevich Fet struggled through his seventy years failing to achieve recognition of his literary talent.  Fet’s early work such as ‘The Lyrical Pantheon’ was not well received. The concern of the time was with social and ideological questions; issues which Fet evaded in favour of discussions of nature and love.
By 1864 Fet described himself as "tortured by life and the perfidy of hope," taking solace only in the beauty of nature, in the emergence of the bright, fresh spring from gloomy winter. In later life, Fet cultivated a firm friendship with Tolstoy and was eventually, in 1889, given his due appointment at the Imperial Court.
Since his death in 1892, Fet has been praised for his limited, unconventional rhymes and melodic rhythm, inspiring a generation of Russian symbolists. His treatment of nature, as here in ‘What Grief’ renders him as one of the all-time Russian greats.