Nikolay Nekrasov

• 1. Introduction

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  Nikolay Nekrasov was the Russian poet who turned a funeral into a political uprising. On the 8th of January 1878, four thousand people followed his coffin to the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. The procession did not stay solemn for long. When Fyodor Dostoyevsky delivered his eulogy and named Nekrasov the greatest Russian poet since Pushkin and Lermontov, one faction of the crowd erupted with a counter-chant: "No, he was greater!" Members of the revolutionary group Land and Liberty marched with wreaths reading "From the Socialists." A poet's burial had become a rally.

  How does a man who began his adult life in a homeless shelter end up inspiring a revolution at his own funeral? The answer runs through a traumatic childhood on a provincial estate, a Dickensian decade of near-starvation in Saint Petersburg, a genius for literary politics that contemporaries called miraculous and ruthless in the same breath, and poems about peasants so raw that censors banned them and radicals learned them by heart. The questions worth carrying into what follows are these: what made Nekrasov's poetry so combustible, and how did a man his enemies called "an outright communist" also hold Orthodox Christianity in genuine high esteem?

• 2. A Wounded Childhood

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  Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov was born in Nemyriv, in what is now Vinnytsia Oblast in Ukraine. His father, Alexey Sergeyevich Nekrasov, was a military officer from landed gentry stock. In January 1823 the elder Nekrasov retired from the army, ranked major, and moved the family to his estate in Greshnevo, Yaroslavl province, near the Volga River. It was there, among five siblings, that young Nikolay spent his formative years.

  The estate was no idyll. Early retirement and a job as a provincial inspector left the father chronically frustrated, and that frustration found release in drunken rages directed at his peasants and his wife. Dostoyevsky, who knew something about scarring childhoods himself, wrote that Nekrasov's was "a wounded heart, and this wound that never healed served as a source for his passionate, suffering verse for the rest of his life." The images of serfdom Nekrasov witnessed at Greshnevo were not abstractions. They were the bedrock on which every peasant poem was later built.

  His mother offered the counterweight. She loved literature and passed that love to her son. The uncertainty about her own origins would dog Nekrasov's biographers for generations: church records and the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary could not agree on whether she was a Polish noblewoman named Alexandra Zakrzewska or the daughter of a Ukrainian state official named Alexander Semyonovich Zakrevsky. Scholar Korney Chukovsky, writing in 1967, favored the Ukrainian reading. Literary historian D. S. Mirsky suggested that Nekrasov himself had something to do with the confusion: the poet, he argued, "created the cult of his mother, imparted her with improbable qualities and started worshipping her after her death." That cult would surface repeatedly in his verse, most directly in the poem "A Knight for an Hour," written in 1862 after a visit to her grave.

• 3. Petersburg Tribulations

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  In September 1832 Nekrasov entered the Yaroslavl Gymnasium, but his schooling unraveled quickly. His father pulled him out in July 1837, citing health problems, and for a year Nekrasov did nothing but accompany his father on provincial excursions. The gymnasium had taught him one thing clearly: he admired Byron and Pushkin, especially Pushkin's "Ode to Freedom." By the time he was fifteen, as he later recalled, "the whole notebook of verses has taken shape, which was the reason why I was itching to flee to the capital."

  His father had other plans. Outraged by his son's refusal to enroll in the Cadet Corps, Alexey Sergeyevich cut off all financial support. What followed was what Nekrasov himself called his "Petersburg tribulations" - three years of extreme privation that included at least one night in a homeless shelter. He survived by giving private lessons, contributing to the Literary Supplement to Russky Invalid, compiling ABC-books and versified fairytales for children, and writing vaudevilles under the pseudonym Perepelsky.

  In October 1838 his poem "Thought" appeared in Syn Otechestva, marking his debut as a published poet. He attempted university study at the Saint Petersburg University's Eastern languages faculty in 1839, failed the entrance exams, and joined the philosophy faculty as a part-time student, attending irregularly until July 1841. In February 1840 he published his first poetry collection, Dreams and Sounds, under the initials "N. N." - a precaution suggested by his patron Vasily Zhukovsky, who warned that the young author might later feel embarrassed by the juvenilia. The collection drew a favorable notice from Pyotr Pletnyov but was dismissed by Vissarion Belinsky. Within months Nekrasov tracked down the unsold bulk and destroyed it; the copies that survived have since become rarities.

  Years later, detractors would accuse him of an obsessive hunger for money. Dostoyevsky put it sharply: "A million was his demon." But his colleague Pyotr Yakubovich defended the record: "For eight years, from 1838 to 1846, this man lived on the verge of starvation. Should he have backstepped, made peace with his father, he'd have found himself again in total comfort."

• 4. Belinsky and the Realist Turn

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  In 1843 Nekrasov met Vissarion Belinsky and was drawn into a circle that included Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Panayev, and Pavel Annenkov. The encounter reshaped him. Belinsky was consumed by French Socialist ideas, and in Nekrasov he found a man for whom the horrors of serfdom were still a living memory from his father's estate. Two of Nekrasov's early realistic poems, "On the Road" from 1845 and "Motherland" from 1846, delighted Belinsky so completely that, according to Panayev, he learned "Motherland" by heart and sent it to his friends in Moscow.

  Nekrasov later credited those early conversations with changing his life. He commemorated Belinsky in multiple poems across the following decades: "In the Memory of Belinsky" in 1853, "V. G. Belinsky" in 1855, and "Scenes from The Bear Hunt" in 1867. Before his death in 1848, Belinsky granted Nekrasov rights to publish articles and other material originally intended for an almanac to be called the "Leviathan."

  The mid-1840s saw Nekrasov working as both poet and impresario of a new literary generation. He compiled and published two influential almanacs: The Physiology of Saint Petersburg in 1845 and the Saint Petersburg Collection in 1846. The second of these introduced Fyodor Dostoyevsky to the reading public by featuring his debut novel, Poor Folk. Around the same contributors - Ivan Turgenev, Dmitry Grigorovich, Vladimir Dal, Alexander Herzen - both almanacs helped launch what became known as the natural school of Russian realism.

  His poem "When from the darkness of delusion..." from 1845 - which critics would later call arguably the first Russian poem about a woman driven to prostitution by poverty - moved Chernyshevsky to tears. Of a different poem, "Whether I ride the dark street though the night..." from 1847, a harrowing account of a broken family and a wife forced to sell her body to afford a tiny coffin for a dead child, Turgenev wrote to Belinsky on the 14th of November: "Please tell Nekrasov that... it drove me totally mad, I repeat it day and night and have learnt it by heart." Mirsky later called that early verse "truly timeless... recognized by many as something so much more important than just a verse."

• 5. The Editor's Empire

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  In November 1846 Nekrasov and Panayev acquired Sovremennik, a magazine that had been founded by Alexander Pushkin but had stagnated under Pyotr Pletnyov. Most of the staff of the rival Otechestvennye Zapiski, including Belinsky, abandoned that publication and followed Nekrasov to Sovremennik. Within months he had assembled what Mirsky described as "the best literary forces of Russia."

  The magazine's roll of published authors over the following years reads like a syllabus of Russian literature: Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, Dmitry Grigorovich's Anton Goremyka, Ivan Goncharov's A Common Story, Alexander Herzen's Magpie the Thief. One of the young authors Nekrasov discovered personally was Leo Tolstoy, who made his debut in Sovremennik with his trilogy Childhood, Boyhood and Youth.

  Keeping the magazine alive was not simply an editorial task - it was a political survival game. The period from 1848 to 1855, known as the "Seven years of darkness," placed Sovremennik on the verge of closure while Nekrasov himself was under surveillance by the secret police. To fill the gaps left by censorial interference, he wrote long serialized novels co-authored with his common-law wife Avdotya Panayeva. He also cultivated censors by inviting them to weekly literary dinners. Gambling, a habit shared by male ancestors on his father's side - his grandfather had lost most of the family estate through it - proved another instrument of influence; as a member of the English Club he built relationships with useful men.

  In 1854 Nekrasov brought Nikolai Chernyshevsky onto the staff, and in 1858 Nikolai Dobrolyubov became a major contributor. This radicalized the magazine and fractured its liberal wing: in 1859 Dobrolyubov published a review that outraged Turgenev and drove him out. In 1858 Nekrasov and Dobrolyubov also founded Svistok, a satirical supplement to Sovremennik; the first two issues were compiled by Dobrolyubov, and from the third issue onward Nekrasov served as editor and regular contributor.

  In June 1862 Sovremennik was shut down following a series of arsons in Petersburg blamed on radical students. A month later Chernyshevsky was arrested. Nekrasov managed to get the magazine reopened by December and in 1863 published Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? while the author sat in prison. The final closure came in May 1866, after the poet, in a desperate bid to save the publication following Dmitry Karakozov's attempt on the Tsar's life, wrote two poems with overt loyalist gestures. Neither saved Sovremennik. At the end of that year Nekrasov purchased Otechestvennye Zapiski and made it his new literary headquarters, drawing in writers including Alexander Ostrovsky and, eventually, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin as a deputy editor.

  Mirsky's verdict on Nekrasov the editor was double-edged: "a genius editor... his gift for procuring the best literature and the best authors at the height of their relevancy bordered on miraculous," but also "first and foremost, a ruthless manipulator, for whom any means justified the end" who "shamelessly exploited the enthusiasm of his underpaid authors."

• 6. The Panayeva Years

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  Nikolay Nekrasov met the already-married Avdotya Panayeva in 1842. She was a promising writer and a popular literary hostess; he was twenty years old and fell in love immediately. For several years she was, in Chernyshevsky's phrase, "struggling with her feelings." At least once during that period, if one of the Panayeva Cycle poems is to be believed, Nekrasov came close to suicide. In 1847 she yielded, and Nekrasov later wrote: "This was the lucky day I count as my whole life's beginning."

  The arrangement that followed was conspicuous: Nekrasov moved into Panayev's house, completing a triangle that many observers read as a Russian take on the French idea of unfettered love associated with socialist moral values. The reality was more complicated. Ivan Panayev, a gifted journalist and writer, was what contemporaries called "a family man of bachelor habits": by the time Nekrasov arrived, the marriage had already collapsed. Avdotya considered herself free from marital obligations but unwilling to sever a friendship. The Panayev home soon doubled as the unofficial Sovremennik headquarters.

  The poems Nekrasov wrote about and for Avdotya form the Panayeva Cycle, described by one biographer as amounting "in its entirety to a long poem telling the passionate, often painful and morbid love story." The correspondence between them was destroyed by Panayeva in a fury; Nekrasov reproached her for it in a poem called "The Letters." One verse from the cycle, "Forgive! Forget the days of the fall...," was set to music by no fewer than forty Russian composers, beginning with Cesar Cui in 1859 and including Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky.

  In 1849 Panayeva gave birth to a son who died young. Ivan Panayev's death in 1862 pushed the couple further apart, but the decisive break was attributed by biographer Vladimir Zhdanov to Nekrasov's character: fits of depression, anger, and hypochondria that could leave him "sprawling on a couch in his cabinet, greatly irritated, telling people how he hated everybody but mostly himself." In 1863, while still with Panayeva, Nekrasov met the French actress Celine Lefresne, who was performing at the Mikhaylovsky Theatre. She became his lover; when he was in France he stayed at her Paris flat, and she visited his estate at Karabikha in 1867. He eventually bequeathed her 10,500 rubles. In 1870 he fell in love with Fyokla Anisimovna Viktorova, a nineteen-year-old country girl he renamed Zinaida Nikolayevna, personally educated, and married at home on the 7th of April 1877, less than a year before his death.

• 7. The Poetry Itself

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  On the 15th of October 1856, The Poems by N. Nekrasov was published. Chernyshevsky, writing to the poet from abroad on the 5th of November, declared: "The rapture is universal. Hardly Pushkin's first poems, or Revizor, or Dead Souls could be said to have enjoyed such success as your book." Turgenev wrote that Nekrasov's poems "brandish like fire." Memoirist Elena Stakensneider recorded: "Nekrasov is an idol of our times, a worshipped poet, he is now bigger than Pushkin."

  The collection was built as an elaborate structure, divided into four parts. It opened with the manifest-poem "The Poet and the Citizen" and moved outward from portraits of real people's lives through satires of "enemies of the people" to "friends of the people, real and false." Its centerpiece was Sasha from 1855, an ode to the politically minded new generation that critics linked to Turgenev's novel Rudin.

  Nekrasov responded to the 1861 emancipation of the serfs with a curt private verdict: "Is that freedom? More like a fake, a jibe at peasants." His public response was the poem Korobeiniki, the tragicomic story of two traveling basket-men, Tikhonych and Ivan, who cross Russia selling goods and gathering news. One fragment became a popular folk song. Mirsky called it "the most melodious of Nekrasov's poems." The poem was published in a cheap series called the Red Books, distributed by vagrant traders specifically to reach peasant readers; censors banned the series after its second issue.

  His satire "Musings By the Front Door" from 1858 was banned inside Russia and appeared in Alexander Herzen's journal Kolokol in January 1860. "The Song for Yeryomushka" from 1859 was adopted by the radical youth as a revolutionary hymn. The poem Russian Women, a two-part work from 1872 to 1873 based on the real stories of Ekaterina Trubetskaya and Maria Volkonskaya, told of aristocratic wives who followed their Decembrist husbands into Siberian exile.

  His last and greatest work, Who Is Happy in Russia?, occupied him from 1863 until 1876, the year his illness overtook his ability to work. Seven peasants travel across Russia asking whether anyone is truly happy; no answer satisfies. The poem's rhyme scheme - several unrhymed iambic tetrameters ending in a Pyrrhic, succeeded by a clausule in iambic trimeter - mimics a traditional Russian folk song. Its final part, "The Feast for All the World," was banned by censors and spread across Russia in handwritten copies. Mirsky called it "one of the most original Russian poems of the 19th century" and praised its "extraordinary verbal expressiveness, energy and many discoveries."

• 8. A Divided Legacy

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  Faddei Bulgarin reported Nekrasov to the Russian secret police chief in 1846 as "an outright communist... openly crying out for the revolution." Liberal critics like Vasily Botkin and Alexander Druzhinin were appalled that "ugly, anti-social things creep into his verse." Boris Almazov wrote in 1852: "The way he pushes such prosaic subject matter down into poetic form is just unthinkable." Stepan Dudyshkin announced flatly in 1861: "Nekrasov most definitely is not an artist."

  The attacks from the right only entrenched Nekrasov's standing with the radical young. Vladimir Lenin treated his poetry as a quotation book, habitually deploying verses to flay political opponents. Soviet scholars elevated him as the archetypal "social democrat poet." Yet as Mirsky observed, this ideological sorting prevented fair assessment: "Even his admirers admired the matter of his poetry rather than its manner, and many of them believed that Nekrasov was a great poet only because matter mattered more than form."

  The counter-tradition, represented by Afanasy Fet, described his verse as "tin-plate prose" next to Pushkin's "golden poetry." Vasily Rozanov formulated a more elaborate charge in a 1916 essay: that Nekrasov had functioned as an "alien who came from nowhere" and used his powerful but artless verse to destroy the harmonious tradition Pushkin had built. Korney Chukovsky spent an entire book, Nekrasov the Master, rebutting that charge, tracing what he called the "ideological genealogy" from Pushkin through Gogol and Belinsky to Nekrasov.

  Mirsky, writing in 1925, gave the most measured verdict: Nekrasov was "essentially a rebel against all the stock in trade of 'poetic poetry' and the essence of his best work is precisely the bold creation of a new poetry unfettered by traditional standards of taste." Modern Russian scholars describe him as a trailblazer who "explored new ways of development in such a daring way that before him was plain unthinkable." The Modernists who came after him - Zinaida Gippius, Valery Bryusov, Andrey Bely, Alexander Blok - all named him an influence. Vladimir Mayakovsky suggested in the early 1920s that Nekrasov, as "a brilliant jack-of-all-trades," would have fitted perfectly into the new Soviet poetry scene.

  His estate at Karabikha, his Saint Petersburg home, and the Sovremennik office on Liteiny Prospekt are now national cultural landmarks. The Central Universal Science Nekrasov Library in Moscow carries his name. Two lines of his verse became commonplace aphorisms in Russian public life, quoted across the political spectrum in all kinds of argument: "To sow the seeds of all things sensible, kind, eternal..." and "You're endowed with the best of intentions, yet unable to change anything."