Nikolay Ogarev

Nikolay Ogarev

Nikolay Platonovich Ogarev (Ogaryov; Russian: Никола́й Плато́нович Огарёв; December 6 1813 – June 12 1877), was a Russian poet, historian and political activist. He was deeply critical of the limitations of the Emancipation reform of 1861 claiming that the serfs were not free but had simply exchanged one form of serfdom for another.

Ogarev was a fellow-exile and collaborator of Alexander Herzen on Kolokol, a newspaper printed in England and smuggled into Russia. The two young men swore on the Sparrow Hills above Moscow in 1840 not to rest until their country was free; the oath reportedly sustained them and their friends throughout many crises of their lives at home and abroad and was described in E. H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles.

From October 1874, Ogarev was living in Newcastle upon Tyne where he arrived with his beloved Mary all the way from Genoa. While in Newcastle, Ogarev worked on his 'Confession in Verse' and his 'Last Curse' (unfinished). The end of the year, however, saw the couple in Mary's home town of Greenwich, where Ogarev died in 1877.