Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia | Page 3

of the sorrowful, sweet image of his mother.
The gentle, beautiful lady, with her wealth of golden hair, with an
expression of divine tenderness in her blue eyes and of infinite
suffering upon her sensitive lips, remained for ever her son's ideal of
womanhood. Later on, during years of manhood, in moments of the
deepest moral suffering and despondency, it was always of her that he
thought, her tenderness and spiritual consolation he recalled and for
which he craved.

When Nekrassov was eleven years of age his father one day drove him
to the town nearest their estate and placed him in the local

grammar-school. Here he remained for six years, gradually, though
without distinction, passing upwards from one class to another,
devoting a moderate amount of time to school studies and much energy
to the writing of poetry, mostly of a satirical nature, in which his
teachers figured with unfortunate conspicuity.
One day a copy-book containing the most biting of these productions
fell into the hands of the headmaster, and young Nekrassov was
summarily ejected from the school.
His angry father, deciding in his own mind that the boy was good for
nothing, despatched him to St. Petersburg to embark upon a military
career. The seventeen-year-old boy arrived in the capital with a
copy-book of his poems and a few roubles in his pocket, and with a
letter of introduction to an influential general. He was filled with good
intentions and fully prepared to obey his father's orders, but before he
had taken the final step of entering the nobleman's regiment he met a
young student, a former school-mate, who captivated his imagination
by glowing descriptions of the marvellous sciences to be studied in the
university, and the surpassing interest of student life. The
impressionable boy decided to abandon the idea of his military career,
and to prepare for his matriculation in the university. He wrote to his
father to this effect, and received the stern and laconic reply:
"If you disobey me, not another farthing shall you receive from me."
The youth had made his mind up, however, and entered the university
as an unmatriculated student. And that was the beginning of his long
acquaintance with the hardships of poverty.
"For three years," said Nekrassov in after life, "I was hungry all day,
and every day. It was not only that I ate bad food and not enough of
that, but some days I did not eat at all. I often went to a certain
restaurant in the Morskaya, where one is allowed to read the paper
without ordering food. You can hold the paper in front of you and
nibble at a piece of bread behind it...."

While sunk in this state of poverty, however, Nekrassov got into touch
with some of the richest and most aristocratic families in St. Petersburg;
for at that time there existed a complete comradeship and equality
among the students, whether their budget consisted of a few farthings
or unlimited wealth. Thus here again Nekrassov was given the
opportunity of studying the contrasts of life.
For several years after his arrival in St. Petersburg the true gifts of the
poet were denied expression. The young man was confronted with a
terrible uphill fight to conquer the means of bare subsistence. He had
no time to devote to the working out of his poems, and it would not
have "paid" him. He was obliged to accept any literary job that was
offered him, and to execute it with a promptitude necessitated by the
requirements of his daily bill of fare. During the first years of his
literary career he wrote an amazing number of prose reviews, essays,
short stories, novels, comedies and tragedies, alphabets and children's
stories, which, put together, would fill thirty or forty volumes. He also
issued a volume of his early poems, but he was so ashamed of them
that he would not put his name upon the fly-leaf. Soon, however, his
poems, "On the Road" and "My Motherland," attracted the attention of
Byelinsky, when the young poet brought some of his work to show the
great critic. With tears in his eyes Byelinsky embraced Nekrassov and
said to him:
"Do you know that you are a poet, a true poet?"
This decree of Byelinsky brought fame to Nekrassov, for Byelinsky's
word was law in Russia then, and his judgement was never known to
fail. His approval gave Nekrassov the confidence he lacked, and he
began to devote most of his time to poetry.
The epoch in which Nekrassov began his literary career in St.
Petersburg, the early forties of last century, was one of a great revival
of idealism in Russia. The iron reaction of the then Emperor Nicholas I.
made independent political activity an impossibility. But the horrible
and degrading conditions