Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nikolay Nekrasov died on the 8th of January 1878. Four thousand people attended his funeral, and the procession to the Novodevichy Cemetery turned into a political rally. When Dostoyevsky called Nekrasov the greatest Russian poet since Pushkin and Lermontov, followers of Chernyshevsky chanted that he was greater still, while members of the revolutionary group Land and Liberty marched with wreaths reading "From the Socialists."
Nekrasov's most celebrated poem is Who Is Happy in Russia?, written between 1863 and 1876 and left unfinished at his death. It follows seven peasants who travel across Russia asking various people whether they are truly happy, with no answer ever satisfying. Its final part, "The Feast for All the World," was banned by censors and circulated in handwritten copies.
Nekrasov's most influential role was as editor of Sovremennik, which he and Ivan Panayev acquired in November 1846. He transformed it into the leading Russian literary magazine of its era, publishing Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Ivan Goncharov, among others. After Sovremennik was permanently closed in May 1866, Nekrasov acquired and edited Otechestvennye Zapiski.
Nekrasov grew up on his father's estate in Greshnevo, Yaroslavl province, where he witnessed his father's drunken rages against both his wife and his serfs. Dostoyevsky wrote that Nekrasov had "a wounded heart, and this wound that never healed served as a source for his passionate, suffering verse for the rest of his life." Those firsthand experiences of serfdom became the bedrock of his peasant poems.
Vissarion Belinsky was the single most formative influence on Nekrasov's literary direction after they met in 1843; Nekrasov later commemorated him in multiple poems. Nikolai Chernyshevsky joined Sovremennik in 1854 and became a close ally. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Ivan Turgenev were major contributors whose debuts or major works Nekrasov published, though both relationships were complicated and at times bitter.
Nekrasov is credited with introducing ternary meters and the technique of dramatic monologue to Russian poetry, with "On the Road" from 1845 as the landmark example. He also imported elements of satire, folk song, feuilleton, and realistic sketch into verse forms that previously excluded them. His dramatic method placed the narrator close to his subject rather than above it, using self-exposing monologue and irony rather than the traditional moralistic stance.