Poet-publisher who sang the peasants' suffering and turned Pushkin's Sovremennik into the center of revolutionary literature
"You may not be a poet, but you must be a citizen" — the line from Nekrasov's "The Poet and the Citizen" that defined the social mission of Russian literature.
The poet and publisher at the center of Russian realist literature, Nekrasov acquired Pushkin's Sovremennik and built it into the era's foremost literary journal, where the criticism of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov crossed paths with the fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. His verse, which gave voice to the serf in the peasant's own language and folk rhythms, became scripture for the revolutionary democrats; his epic masterpiece Who Is Happy in Russia? remains the most comprehensive verse inquiry into the contradictions of the Russian countryside. At his funeral in 1878, four thousand mourners turned the procession into a political rally, and when Dostoevsky eulogized him as 'the greatest poet since Pushkin,' young revolutionaries shouted back, 'No, greater!'
Career Timeline
- 1839–1841Auditor, Faculty of Philosophy, St. Petersburg University
- 1840Published first poetry collection, Dreams and Sounds
- 1840–1846Contributed to Otechestvennye Zapiski and other journals, wrote plays and vaudevilles
- 1845–1846Edited and published almanacs The Physiology of Saint Petersburg and Saint Petersburg Collection — featuring Dostoevsky's debut
- 1847–1866Publisher and editor of Sovremennik (The Contemporary)
- 1856Published The Poems by N. Nekrasov — sold out instantly, brought nationwide fame
- 1868–1878Publisher and editor of Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland)
- 1873–1876Wrote his masterpiece, Who Is Happy in Russia?