Reflections at the Front Entrance

Nekrasov is one of the most controversial and contradictory figures in Russian poetry. In the 1860s–1870s, Turgenev repeatedly announced that in Nekrasov’s poems “poetry never even spent the night.” Dostoevsky placed Nekrasov right after Pushkin and Lermontov. The problem is that Nekrasov proposed a different system of coordinates: a new way of thinking about the poet’s tasks, new poetic themes, even a new verse system. Nekrasov truly came into Russian poetry with a new word—one that not everyone, even among his contemporaries (and later generations), was ready to accept and acknowledge.