Nikolay Nekrasov

Nikolay Nekrasov (born 1821 in Nemyriv, died 1877 or early 1878 in Saint Petersburg, depending on the calendar used by the sources) was a Russian poet, dramatist and, above all, a journal editor in nineteenth-century Russia. He is credited with introducing ternary meters and the dramatic monologue into Russian poetry. His work, centred on the peasantry and on social criticism, made him a key figure for the radical intelligentsia of his time.

He was born into a family of landowners and grew up along the Volga, a landscape that later recurs in his verse. His home life was harsh: his father, a retired army officer, lived a life of hunts and heavy drinking, and treated his serfs and family with cruelty. The young Nekrasov studied without distinction at several schools and, after failing to get into university, spent years in poverty in Saint Petersburg, writing letters for people in exchange for food and sleeping in shelters for the homeless.

His first book of verse, Dreams and Sounds (1840), passed almost unnoticed, and he later withdrew the unsold copies. While searching for his own voice, he wrote vaudevilles and satires that were staged and well received. Around 1847 he acquired the rights to The Contemporary, a journal he would direct for decades. Under his leadership it brought together writers of different outlooks and gradually moved toward thinkers with social and revolutionary leanings, such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Nikolay Dobrolyubov, who were his friends and collaborators.

His poetry is varied, ranging from intimate lyric and civic verse to, above all, poems about peasant life, always carrying a critical stance toward injustice. In Who Is Happy in Russia? (1877), his most ambitious work, he travels across rural Russia in verse with a popular flavour. He also wrote poems honouring the wives of the Decembrists who followed their husbands into Siberian exile, and a series of poems for children. In his last years, ill and weary, he wrote elegies with an autobiographical tone.

His personal life was turbulent. For years he had a complicated relationship with Avdotya Panayeva, the wife of his friend Ivan Panayev, and out of this experience came a cycle of poems that critics regard as among the most personal parts of his output. His legacy lies in giving literary voice to the peasantry, in his decisive work as an editor, and in the wide circulation of his poems, which inspired many composers. He is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg.