Afanasy Fet

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet (Афанасий Афанасьевич Фет) was a poet and a neighbour, and one of the people Tolstoy wrote to in the years of A Confession (1879–82). Fet is not named in the text of A Confession. He appears in the letters of the composition years and in the PSS commentary to the work.

Letters in the composition years

On 22 November 1879 (OS), in the weeks when the work was being drafted, Tolstoy wrote to Fet: “I am very busy. Nothing will come of my occupation except my own satisfaction, but I am very busy all the same.”¹ The same letter says he is going to Moscow the next day for two days, and asks Fet to visit in December: “There is very much I want to talk over with you.”² The PSS commentary to A Confession sets this letter beside two to Nikolai Strakhov of the same month, as evidence that the work was going on and was not for print.³

Earlier letters of 1879 to Fet, quoted in the dive’s sweep of PSS volume 62, touch the same ground. On 31 January Tolstoy wished that Fet would “recognise the necessity of relations to God”.⁴ On 25 March he wrote that he was doing “something that leaves no traces outside me”.⁵ On 27–28 July he wrote of needs “not natural, but artificially grafted”, and of wanting to be sure that he gives people more than he receives.⁶ A long letter of October 1880 sets out a reading of the Gospel.⁷ The same sweep notes that Strakhov visited Fet at Vorobyovka in the summer of 1879 and then came on to Yasnaya Polyana.⁸

In January 1878 Tolstoy told Strakhov that Fet was at his new estate, reached by the Moscow–Kursk railway at Budanovka station, and had sent a fine poem in his last letter.⁹

In the PSS commentary

The commentary to A Confession names Fet three times:

• Chapter II speaks of having “challenged men to duels in order to kill them”.¹⁰ The commentary gives two cases; the second is the challenge to Turgenev after their quarrel on 27 May 1861 at Fet’s house.¹¹
• On the death of the brother Nikolai Nikolaevich in 1860, the commentary notes that Tolstoy wrote to Fet about it on 17 October 1860 (PSS 60:357–358).¹²
• Chapter VI mentions what “Schopenhauer calls ‘professorial philosophy’”.¹³ The commentary points to Schopenhauer’s preface to the second edition of The World as Will and Representation “in the Russian translation of A. Fet”.¹⁴

Open questions

• The other 1879 and 1880 letters to Fet (PSS 62, Nos. 486, 498, 522; PSS 63, No. 31) are quoted only in the dive’s sweep note; their texts are not among the extracts. The quotes and dates need checking against the PSS.
• The dive’s commentary note dates the 22 November letter “around 2 November”; the PSS commentary itself and the letter extract give 22 November.
• The text of A Confession does not name him; whether any passage has Fet in mind is not shown by these sources.
• The two couplets in the January 1878 letter to Strakhov follow the mention of Fet’s poem, but the letter does not say whose lines they are.
• Birth and death years come from the dive’s visuals note, not from a primary source.

Dive provenance

• 1879-1882-a-confession — the letter of 22 November 1879 (PSS 62), the letter to Strakhov of January 1878, the PSS 23 commentary notes, and the dive’s sweeps of PSS 62–63, 2026-10-02.