Who Is Happy in Russia?

5 hrs. 28 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Nikolai Nekrasov

Narrator Alexander Sinitsa

Description

From this poem, the reader will never find out who in Russia lives well. Most likely, that will remain an unanswered question. But the author vividly depicts the state of post-reform Russia: ruin and sadness, drinking and fear of the future. Peasant life is shown with all its problems and troubles, yet representatives of the higher estates do not consider themselves happy either. The speaking names of villages—“Zapatova,” “Dyryaeva,” “Razutova,” and so on—testify to total decline. And although it seems the poem is pessimistic, there are also bright notes: the musicality of the language, the beauty of labor, the folklore element…

The question of happiness is, by itself, very subtle. Rarely does any person readily admit that he is happy. Nekrasov’s poem is not about happiness but about life. Even though it is filled with “civic pathos,” it does not diminish its value as a verbal study of the realities of that distant, yet native Russia—with its people, who are capable of “working to death and drinking to half-death.”