Nikolay Nekrasov - Life and Career

Life and Career

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 Fyodor 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 Vasily Zhukovsky expressed a favorable opinion of the beginner's work, it was promptly dismissed as Romantic doggerel by Vissarion Belinsky, the most important Russian literary critic of the first half of 19th century, in. Nekrasov personally went to the booksellers and removed all the copies of his first collection.