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Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov (Russian: Никола́й Алексе́евич Некра́сов, December 10 [O.S. November 28] 1821, Nemyriv – 8 January 1878 [O.S. 28 December 1877]) was a Russian poet, writer, critic and publisher, whose deeply compassionate poems about peasant Russia won him Dostoevsky's admiration and made him the hero of liberal and radical circles of Russian intelligentsia, as represented by Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. He is credited with introducing into Russian poetry ternary meters and the technique of dramatic monologue (V doroge, 1845). As the editor of several literary journals, including Sovremennik, Nekrasov was also singularly successful. Nikolai A. Nekrasov was born in the town of Nemyriv (now in Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine), Podolia Governorate. His father, Alexei Nekrasov, was a descendant from Russian landed Gentry, and an officer in the Imperial Russian Army. His mother was a Polish noblewoman named Aleksandra Zakrzewska, who was from Warsaw and belonged to szlachta. Young Nekrasov grew up on his father's ancestral estate, Greshnevo, Yaroslavl province, near the Volga River. There he observed the hard labor of the Volga boatmen, Russian barge haulers. This image of social injustice, so similar to Dostoevsky's childhood recollections, was compounded by the behavior of Nekrasov's tyrannical father. His father's early retirement from the army, and his public job as a provincial inspector, caused him much frustration resulting in drunken rages against both his peasants and his wife. Such experiences traumatized the young poet and determined the subject matter of Nekrasov's major poems — a verse portrayal of the plight of the Russian peasants and women. Nekrasov
admired his mother and later expressed his love and empathy to all
women in his writings. Nekrasov's mother played a pivotal role in his
development; her love and support helped the young poet to survive the
traumatic experiences of his childhood. He attended the classic Gymnasium in
Yaroslavl for five years, but showed little interest in formal studies.
In 1838 his father, bent on a military career for his son, sent the
16 year old Nekrasov to a military academy in St. Petersburg.
There
Nekrasov switched to St. Petersburg
University as a
part time student, he was also able to audit classes, which he did from
1839 to 1841.
Nekrasov's
father stopped supporting him after he quit the army in favor of
university studies, so Nekrasov lived in extreme conditions, briefly
living in a homeless shelter. Shortly thereafter Nekrasov authored his
first collection of poetry, Dreams
and
Sounds, published under the name "N. N." Though his patron poet V. A. Zhukovsky
expressed a favorable opinion of the beginner's work, it was promptly
dismissed as Romantic doggerel by V.G. Belinsky,
the
most
important Russian literary critic of the first half of 19th
century. Nekrasov personally went to the booksellers and removed
all the copies of his first collection. Ironically,
Nekrasov
joined the staff of Отечественные
Записки (Notes of the
Fatherland)
under his critic Belinsky, and became close friends with the critic.
Soon Belinsky recognized Nekrasov's talent, and promoted him to
position as a junior editor. From 1843 - 46 Nekrasov edited various
anthologies for the magazine, one of which, "A Petersburg Collection,"
included Dostoevsky's first novel, Poor Folk.
At
the end of 1846, Nekrasov acquired a popular magazine The Contemporary (also known as "Sovremennik")
from Pyotr Pletnev.
Much
of the staff of the old NoF,
including
Belinksy, abandoned Pyotr
Krayevsky's magazine, and joined "Sovremennik" to work with
Nekrasov. Before his
death in 1848, Belinsky granted Nekrasov rights to publish various
articles and other material originally planned for an almanac, to be
called the Leviathan. Together with Stanitsky, Nekrasov wrote and
published two very long picturesque novels: Three Countries of the
World and Dead Lake. By the
middle of 1850s Nekrasov had become seriously ill. He left Russia for
Italy to recover. It was around this time that Chernyshevsky and Nikolai
Dobrolyubov,
two of the most radical and unabashedly revolutionary writers of the
time, had joined the staff and became the major critics for the
magazine. Nekrasov was attacked by his old friends for allowing his
journal to become the vehicle for Chernyshevsky's sloppy and often
poorly written broadside attacks on polite
Russian society. By 1860 I.S. Turgenev,
the
naysayer of
nihilism,
refused to have any more of his work published in the journal. After the
closure of the Contemporary in 1866, Nekrasov made
peace with his old enemy Kraevsky, and obtained from his ownership of
Отечественные Записки (Notes of the
Fatherland). He achieved new success with the journal over
the next ten years. Nekrasov's
earlier
works from the 1850s, such as his first big poem Саша (Sasha),
deal with the challenges of Russian life, describing intellectuals and
their never-ending conflicts with reality. His works of the 1860s, such
as folk poems and poems for children, are among his best written works,
such as Коробейники, Крестьянские дети (also translated as
"Peasant children") and Мороз
Красный
Нос (also
translated as "Grandfather Frost-the Red Nose" - a Russian version of
Santa Claus). Some of
his deeper and philosophical poems are written in the style of
confession, such as Рыцарь на час (also translated as "A
Knight for an Hour"), as well as Влас (Vlas) and Когда из мрака
заблуждения я душу падшую воззвал (also
translated
as "When from the darkness of my delusions, I called my
soul"). Among his
other important works are his later poems: Русские женщины ("Russian women"), written
in 1871 - 1872, Кому
на Руси жить хорошо? (Who
is
Happy in Russia?)
(1863 - 1876). The eloquent poem, "Russian women", is devoted to a
noble
woman, Volkonskaya, who loves her husbands so much, that she follows
her heart no matter what; the final scene of their last date in Siberia
is among the most touching and poetic scenes in Russian literature.
Who is Happy in Russia? (1863
-
76)
tells the story of seven peasants who set out to ask various elements
of the rural population if they are happy, to which the answer is never
satisfactory. The poem is noted for its rhyme scheme: "several unrhymed
iambic tetrameters ending in a Pyrrhic are succeeded by a clausule in
iambic trimeter" (Terras 319). This rhyme resembles a traditional
Russian folk song. Nikolai
A. Nekrasov suffered from a chronic lung condition, for which he had to
spend months in the warmer climate, mainly in the Mediterranean coast of Italy. In 1875
Nekrasov, never very healthy, was diagnosed with intestinal
cancer. His friends paid for the surgery performed by the
leading doctor of that time, Dr. Bilroth, who was invited from Vienna.
However, the surgery did not cure the illness, but only prolonged his
agony, and Nekrasov suffered for another two years. At that time he
wrote his Last Songs,
filled
with the wisdom and sadness of the shrivelled and now dying poet. Nekrasov's
funeral
at Novodevichy
Cemetery in St. Petersburg was attended by many. Dostoevsky gave
the
keynote eulogy, noting that Nekrasov was the greatest Russian poet
since Pushkin and Lermontov.
A
section
of the crowd, youthful followers of Chernyshevsky, who
connected some verses of the deceased poet with the revolutionary
cause, chanted "No, he was greater!" During
his time, Nekrasov was best remembered as the first editor of Dostoyevsky in 1845, and the long
standing publisher of Sovremennik (The Contemporary) (from
1846 until July 1866, making it the leading Russian literary magazine
of his time. Sovremennik was originally founded by Pushkin,
and Nekrasov continued the legacy. During its 20 years of steady and
careful literary policy, Sovremennik evolved into a literary
salon and served as a cultural forum for all Russian writers. Sovremennik published the works of Fedor
Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev,
and Leo Tolstoy,
as
well as Nekrasov's own poetry and prose, among many other writers.
During the 1850s and 1860s, Sovremennik had
the largest circulation of all Russian literary magazines, it was also
distributed among Russian expatriate communities in Europe. The success
of Sovremennik was mainly attributed to
Nekrasov's talent as a publisher, as well as to the circle of talented
writers in Russia and abroad. Sovremennik was one of the very few Russian
magazines to publish the works of leading European authors, such as Flaubert and Balzac,
translated into Russian. However, the lack of real political freedom in
Russia, coupled with financial difficulties, led to the end in 1866,
when the magazine was closed by the tsar's
government in connection with the arrest of its radical editor, revolutionary Nikolai
Chernyshevsky). Nekrasov's
estate
in Karabikha,
his St. Petersburg home, as well as the office
of Sovremennik magazine on Liteyny Prospekt,
are
now national cultural landmarks and public museums of Russian
literature. |