Nikolai Nekrasov wrote about peasants — not as local colour, but as people in pain. “Who Can Be Happy in Russia?,” “Red-Nosed Frost,” “The Railway”: his poetry was political in the best sense of the word, demanding that we see those whom no one sees.
He was born in 1821, the son of a cruel landowner; his childhood was the horror of serfdom, witnessed from the inside. In Petersburg he lived in destitution, wrote for hire, and more than once stood on the edge of starvation.
He went on to edit The Contemporary, the chief journal of the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s–1860s, publishing Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky. He ran the magazine masterfully, balancing between the censorship and his readers.
He was no simple man himself: he gambled at cards, lived like a lord, knew how to come to terms with the authorities. Critics on the left accused him of inconsistency. But the poems stayed honest. He died in 1878, of cancer, in terrible agony; thousands gathered at his bedside.