“Feeding chest with hatred...”

05/17/1950 - 07/12/2014

Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov guessed to be born on December 10, as if he foresaw that this day would be dedicated to human rights activists and dissidents, "enemies of the existing order." Few people celebrated his 190th birthday this year, but in vain. First, he was a great journalist and an excellent editor. Both in Sovremennik, which he edited (1847–1866), and in Fatherland Notes (1868–1877), Nekrasov demonstrated the best examples of biased, oppositional journalism. Both he and his collaborators, these Carbonari of St. Petersburg - Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov. The result of the engagement was obvious: they came for Belinsky with an arrest warrant, the literary worker Chernyshevsky thundered to hard labor, Sovremennik was closed under the Tsar-Liberator, and Fatherland Notes under Alexander III, in 1884. The Nekrasov-Shchedrin cohort understood journalism in the words of Nekrasov himself: "Feeding the chest with hatred, arming the mouth with satire ..."

There is a version that Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote off his idealist crucian carp, who always asks pike about whether they know what virtue is, from a colleague in the magazine, that is, from a poet and citizen. Nekrasov's left-wing ideas should not surprise us: after all, his generation was bruised by serfdom, so the "muzhik" became for him forever an object of compassion and human rights. However, he defended the Decembrists and Decembrists no less fiercely.

How do we understand his words today: “He who lives without sorrow and anger does not love his Fatherland!” What is 190 years for Russia? The humiliated and insulted still stand at the entrances of courts and chambers, and where there are people, there is a groan. Nekrasov's "contemporary" seems to be our contemporary. And in Otechestvennye Zapiski the same thing is written as in the few opposition publications of our days: stupid, vicious, inhuman government and a suffering people, stagnant in their slavery. Nekrasov did not have a book dispute between a poet and a citizen inside, they were in complete agreement: “From those who rejoice, chatter idly, stain their hands in blood, take me to the camp of those who perish for the great cause of love.” And this love was not mixed with syrup, and Nekrasov certainly would not have been accepted into the Patriots of Russia. Not as a poet, not as a citizen. Because his lyre is punishing, because he became "the accuser of the crowd, its passions and delusions." Poets and citizens have stood and stand on this, their love is a difficult love. “And believing and not believing again in the dream of a high calling, he preaches love with a hostile word of denial.”

Nekrasov starved for only 3 years, being a penniless student. Then he received an inheritance, earned money by journalism, because his magazines were simply torn from his hands. He even eventually bought himself the estate of Karabikha and went hunting. A nobleman, a magazine publisher... But wealth did not make him a conformist. He has never been in high ranks or with thick wallets.

A citizen in Russia is obliged to scold the government and never be on the side of the establishment. And it’s also good if he is lucky to end his life not on the bunk, but in his own bed, as happened with Nekrasov. Actually, for the same activity and for the same poems, the poet and citizen Yuri Galanskov died in the Potminsk camps in 1972. The same fate befell the great Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus.

For a poet, citizen and journalist in Russia, every day is December 14, and every article, every verse is Senate Square. “A son cannot look calmly at the grief of his mother, there will not be a citizen worthy of the Fatherland with a cold soul. There is no bitterer reproach for him... Go into the fire for the honor of the Fatherland, for beliefs, for love... Go and die impeccably. You won’t die in vain, a thing is solid when blood flows under it ... "

 *12 декабря 2011 года*