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.

[note 2] 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.

In his first year he started writing poetry, later citing Goethe, Heine, and Yazykov as influences,[4] and met Apollon Grigoriev, a fellow student and aspiring poet.

[4] It was praised first by professor Pyotr Kudryavtsev in Otechestvennye Zapiski, then by Vissarion Belinsky, who several years later maintained: "of the living Russian poets Fet is the most gifted.

"Don't wake her up at dawn..." (На заре ты её не буди) was set to music by Alexander Varlamov and become a popular Russian romance.

[6] Yet, in those years Fet was a miserable man: "Never in my life have I known a person so tormented by depressions… The possibility of him committing suicide horrifies me greatly," wrote Apollon Grigoriev in his autobiographical novella Ophelia.

In early 1845 he left the Novosyolky estate, went to Kherson, and in April, following the Shenshin family tradition, joined the Imperial Cuirassier regiment as a junior officer with the view of possibly retrieving his surname and all the privileges of nobility he'd lost with it.

"What the source of this miraculous poetic daring could be, the true characteristic of a great poet, coming from this good natured, plump officer, is beyond me," wondered Leo Tolstoy.

[12] According to writer and memoirist Avdotya Panaeva, Fet gave Nekrasov and Turgenev carte blanche in compiling this anthology and while the former was against extensive editing, the latter insisted on drastic cuts and, in the end, his argument won out.

[13] In the preface to the book, Nekrasov wrote: "Not a single poet since Pushkin has managed to give such delight to those who understand poetry and readily open their soul to it, as Fet does.

[2] In the course of the next fourteen years he turned a piece of bare (even if fertile) land into a flourishing garden, launched a horse-breeding farm, built a mill and embarked upon agricultural ventures which proved successful and lucrative.

"He turned into an agronomist, a 'landlord in desperation', let his beard grow, some improbable behind-the-ears curls as well is unwilling to hear of literature and only damns all periodicals enthusiastically," Turgenev informed Polonsky in a May 1861 letter.

From the Village and Notes on Civilian Labour, two collections of essays which were originally published by Russky Vestnik, Literaturnaya biblioteka and Zarya magazines in 1862–1871, featured some finely written novellas and short stories too.

In retrospect, the best example of Fet's prose is considered to be the short novel The Golts Family (1870) which told the tragic story of an alcoholic village doctor's social and mental decline.

[2] That same year Fet's greatest ambition was finally achieved: Tsar Alexander II granted him the return of his stepfather's surname with all the rights and privileges of the Russian nobility.

"At Vorobyovka my muse awoke from many years of sleep and started visiting me as often as she used to at the dawn of my life," Fet wrote to Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov on 25 August 1891.

[6] Fighting off hostile reviewers, who were making much of the contrast between an affluent and somewhat pompous landowner and his sublime, elegant poetry, Fet insisted it was his pragmatism that helped him get the absolute artistic freedom.

"Such lyrical insight into the very core of the Spring and human emotion risen by it was hitherto unknown in Russian poetry," wrote critic Vasily Botkin in 1843.

Fet, whose sensual and melancholic lyric was often imbued with sadness and tragedy, exerted powerful influence upon Russian Symbolists, notably Innokenty Annensky and Alexander Blok, the latter referring to him as his "great teacher."

There is no use to compare him to other first class poets, or go and analyze Pushkin, Lermontov, Al. Tolstoy and Tyutchev looking for similarities... For, in his finest moments, Fet leaves the boundaries of poetry altogether and boldly ventures into our field.

Vasily Botkin remarked that even in the 1860s when his books enjoyed mostly positive reviews, "the general public treated these praises skeptically… If he was successful at all, then mostly with the literary men.

"Unlike Nekrasov, who expressed zeitgeist perfectly, always going with the flow, Fet refused to 're-tune his lyre's strings'," the Soviet scholar Dmitry Blagoy argued.

[1] In his essay on Tytchev, published by Russkoye Slovo in 1859, Fet maintained that it was only 'pure love' (the concept introduced to the Russian literature by Vasily Zhukovsky) that 'pure art' was supposed to serve.

The process of regaining unity with nature leads man out of the corrupt real world and brings him ecstatic joy and total happiness, according to Fet.

"[24] "My father thought [Fet's] greatest asset was the ability to think independently: he always had his own ideas, never borrowed them from other people," remembered Ilya Lvovich Tolstoy.

Cut off a young fur-tree's crooked branches and you'll kill it… Wait for forty years and you'll see a straight and strong trunk with a green crown," Fet wrote in 1871.

[6][26] Yakov Polonsky often marveled at the duality of his friend's character and the way he managed to create the artistic world that would look like a perfect antidote to his own down-to-earth persona.

"Fet was one of the few people [in Russia] who could be described as 'classic' Europeans, in the best sense of this word; with his vast education and delicate manners he was reminiscent of the French marquises of better times," Semenkovich opined.

"Never, as far as I can remember, has he expressed any interest in any other person's inner world," wrote Tatyana Kuzminskaya, Leo Tolstoy's sister-in-law, to whom Fet dedicated one of his most beautiful poems ("The night was shining, trees were full of moonlight…").

[27] According to Sergei Tolstoy, Fet, whom Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky considered 'more a musician than a poet,' comparing him to Beethoven,[3] was "indifferent to music and has been heard referring to it as 'nothing but unpleasant noise'".