The best-known works of Afanasii Fet are short lyric poems on traditional themes. Most often on a miniature scale and in simple language, his work celebrated individual and private responses to the phenomenal world. Fet's contemporaries often failed to appreciate his work, and the poet himself met with rejection and abuse because of what is often considered his "art-for-art's-sake" aesthetics and his conservative social views. The finest Russian poet of his generation, he prided himself on keeping alive essential traditions of the earlier Golden Age of Russian poetry during an era largely inimical to them. Fet's pride in this role is all the more striking because his own life and work are rooted only partly within the Russian tradition. Born in Russia but of German heritage, Fet introduced into Russian poetry formal and aesthetic tendencies that he assimilated through his German-oriented schooling. He translated both poetry and prose--not...