Poetry
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). "Russian women" tells the true story of two princesses, Ekaterina Trubetskaya and Maria Volkonskaya, who followed their husbands, participants in the failed Decembrist revolt of 1825, to exile in Siberia.
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Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“It is at the same time by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendors found behind the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to one’s eyes, these tears are not the sign of excessive pleasure, they are rather witness to an irritated melancholy, to a condition of nerves, to a nature exiled to imperfection and which would like to seize immediately, on this very earth, a revealed paradise.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)