"The Will and Labor of Man, Marvelous Marvels Do"

We invite our readers to the exhibition "The Will and Labor of Man, Marvelous Marvels Do", dedicated to the anniversary of Nikolay Nekrasov.

«I love Nekrasov very much, respect him, think no end of him. I don’t undertake to suppose, how long his heritage will last, but I think that it will last long enough for our lives. In any case, there can be no doubt that it hasn’t became obsolete yet»

A. P. Chekhov

December 10, 2021 will be the 200th birth anniversary of the great Russian poet, writer and publicist Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov. He was a revolutionary democrat and author of a unique poetic encyclopedia of prerevolutionary Russia, and his muse of the peasantry tragedy made him the hero of liberal and radical circles of Russian intelligentsia, as represented by Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Eternally suffering, but patient and selfless, she finds absolute affirmation in spite of absolute negation – in helping each other, enjoying nature and filling daily occurrence and the ordinary with beauty. For Nekrasov, the meaning of life is in love, openness to the problems of the world and the mutual responsibility of everyone to everyone. According to Dostoevsky, Nekrasov’s striving for the people placed him as a poet in the highest place and allowed him to remaine in centuries.

Nekrasov's heritage is one of the brightest and most precious pages in Russian literature. He was not only a social and civic poet, but also a "poet of the heart", who managed to find new words to express the best human feelings. Nekrasov was first to uplift the "low" peasant language, he introduced the richness of the national language and folklore into Russian poetry. He opened a new chapter in the history of Russian lyric poetry and, as contemporaries argued, inherited Pushkin's clarity of expression of thought, sometimes even Pushkin's style.

The exhibition will run from December 1 to December 15, 2021 (room 201a, department of fiction). Here will be presented all the recognizable works of Nikolay Alekseyevich (from the poems "Grandpa Mazai and the Hares", "Tom Thumb» ("The Nail-sized Man") to the epic poem "Who is Happy in Russia?"), as well as the number of his works, unfamiliar to the general reader. All of them are dedicated to a high goal – "to raise society to the ideal of goodness, light and truth".

«Love creates the sense and purpose of life. Without love, there is neither key to one’s own existence, nor to the existence of others. Man was created to be a support to another, because he himself needs support»

N. A. Nekrasov

Written by A. D. Kulikova, department of fiction