Petersburg

Nekrasov began to write seriously at an early age after his father, a cruel country squire, refused to support him at the university. A very considerable business ability brought him success in publishing. From 1846 to 1866, he was the co-owner and editor of The Contemporary, a journal that in his hands became the leading literary organ in Russia. Later, he achieved a similar success with the journal Notes of the Fatherland.

Besides his publishing work, Nekrasov was also a poet. As a principal representative of a realist school influenced by radical critics, he eschewed the aesthetic in favor of the civic, choosing as subjects the problems of contemporary Russian life. Nekrasov's greatest strength was as a satirist. His masterpiece is the vast poem Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia? (1863-78), in which a group of peasants wanders through the country in search of a happy man, in the process showing the reader a huge catalog of evils in Russian society. Folklore deeply influenced not only Nekrasov's satires, but also his lyric and narrative poems. Perhaps the most important work with this trait is his long poem The Peddlars (1861), the beginning of which has become a popular song.

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