(1821–78). The work of Russian poet and journalist Nikolay Alekseyevich Nekrasov centered on the theme of compassion for the sufferings of the peasantry. He also sought to express the vitality of peasant life in his adaptations of folk songs and poems for children.
Nekrasov was born on December 10 (November 28 on the calendar used then), 1821, in Nemirov, Ukraine, Russian Empire. He studied at St. Petersburg University, but his father’s refusal to help him forced him into literary and theatrical hack work at an early age. His first book of poetry was published in 1840. In 1846 he bought the magazine Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), which had declined after the death of its founder, Aleksandr Pushkin. Nekrasov managed to transform it into a major literary journal in which both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy published their early works. After 1856, however, it began to develop into an organ of militant radicalism, and it was suppressed in 1866. Two years later Nekrasov, with Mikhail Saltykov (pseudonym N. Shchedrin), took over another radical periodical, Otechestvenniye zapiski (“Notes of the Fatherland”), of which he remained editor and publisher until his death on January 8, 1878 (December 27, 1877, Old Style), in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Nekrasov’s work is uneven because of its lack of craftsmanship and its sentimentality, but his major poems have lasting power and originality of expression. Moroz krasny-nos (1863; “Red-Nosed Frost”) gives a vivid picture of a brave and sympathetic peasant woman, and his large-scale narrative poem Komu na Rusi zhit khorosho? (1879; Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?, 1917), shows to the full his gift for vigorous, realistic satire.