И время и место: Историко-филологический сборник к шестидесятилетию Александра Львовича Осповата

Fet retained some ties with the Baltic region and Baltic Germans in later years. For example, when serving as an army officer in the 1840s and 50s, he enjoyed the company of other officers who, like him, were German by background, and among these was a former classmate, Peter von Maydell, with whom he afterwards remained in touch and speaks of warmly. During the Crimean War Fet was posted near Reval (Tallinn), and he speaks with enthusiasm of the efficiency and attractiveness of the way of life he found there [Fet 1890:50–51]. He also has warm reminiscences of his renewed acquaintance with Dorpat in those years. Fet’s connections with the Baltic Germans were cultural and also linguistic: besides having lived in the region and gone to school with Baltic Germans, he was completely bilingual between Russian and German, his pre-university schooling was German in language and cultural orientation, and he aspired to the aristocratic class to which his Baltic German associates for the most part belonged. At the same time, in his memoirs, Fet always insists on his own Russianness, clearly differentiating “their” way of life in the Baltic provinces from, for example, “our Black Sea population” – even though the comparison works, in Fet’s own opinion, to the great advantage of the Baltic way of life. The result is to cast Fet as superior to “our” degraded “Black Sea population” in “Rus” (as he calls it), while at the same time distancing him from the attractive, but alien, Baltic culture, in relation to which he stands as an equal.

There is considerable evidence that Fet’s insistence on his Russianness was perceived as an oddity by Russians and non-Russians alike. When Fet was at school, Eisenschmidt (who came from Jena) found Fet’s attitude about Russianness extreme and even aggressive. Fet himself recalls having to earn acceptance among the German boys because of his Russianness, and he was proud both of being accepted and of being different. Crossing from Livland into the nearby Pskov region, he reports himself falling with relief onto his native Russian soil. The decade from 1848 through the mid-185os, the years of Fet’s military career, were in this regard pivotal. Fet’s early poetry was perceived as flawed by Germanisms, unsurprising in light of his educational background, and after Fet managed to have himself transferred to the vicinity of St. Petersburg he gratefully accepted the advice of successful literary colleagues, who undertook to russify his verse, revising poems previously published for a new collection and also advising him on his new poems. Fet also began to publish short stories and essays in St. Petersburg. Clearly he was hoping to settle into a career as a man of letters in the Russian capital. Even Fet’s Russian colleagues, however, and even considering that Fet was, after all, a Russian officer in wartime, were somewhat unpleasantly struck by Fet’s ardent expressions of Russian patriotism. His stolid Russianness dogged him also abroad, when he traveled to Western Europe in 1856: although he spoke French, he evidently did not speak it well enough, and he was patently ill at ease in France, where he was able to communicate only with Russians or such Russophilic Westerners as were happy to speak Russian with him.

It was at this time, in the mid – to latter 1850s, that Kreutzwald’s most important work began to become generally known. In 1854 the Mythische und magische Lieder derEhsten (with AH. Neus) was published in St. Petersburg, by the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and in 1857 the first 3 of the 20 parts of Kreutzwald’s quasi-mythological verse epic Kalevipoeg were published in Dorpat, in German and Estonian, with the other parts following in successive years, ending in 1861 [FRKB: 7-12]. By 1860, even before publication was complete, the work had won a prize [Laidvee: 356].