NIKOLAI ALEXAJEWITSCH NEKRASSOW was born in November, 1821, in a village of a Polish province.  His father married the daughter of a Polish magnate against the opposition of her parents.  The marriage turned out unhappily.  There were fourteen children and the poet always thought of his mother as a saint and his father as a tyrant,—­which appears in several of his lyric poems.  His childhood was spent in Greschenewo where the family had inherited an estate.  He was sent to the government school or gymnasium, only until the fifth class.  At sixteen he went to Petersburg to pursue a military career by the will of his father.  His desire for knowledge drove him toward the University, but his father refused his every request, and during his student years he went hungry very often.  He wrote vaudevilles for the Alexander theatre under an assumed name, and not until 1840 published his first volume of verse.  In his fortieth year he brought out an anthology of Russian poets that was sufficiently successful to give him a living.  In his fiftieth year his health seemed failing, and he went abroad to Italy, where the disaster seemed happily averted.  The journal with which he had been connected being now suppressed, he became connected with another for two years.  In December, 1877, he died, widely mourned and called “the singer of Russian folk song.”

IVAN SSAWITSCH NIKITIN was born October 3, 1824, at Woronesh.  Though his life was poor in external circumstances, it was all the richer within.  His best biography is his own work, “From the Diary of a Seminarist.”  His life opened under rather auspicious influences, for his father owned a candle factory and was so prosperous that his business amounted yearly to a hundred thousand roubles.  A shoemaker taught the precocious boy to read, and he was put to school at first in the local school, but this was exchanged in 1841 for the Seminary.  Both here and at home he was, however, more cudgelled than educated, and his soul was threatened with suffocation in scholastic confusion.  Only one consolation was always his; literature and poetry.  While here the first great misfortune befell.  His father’s business failed, the house was turned into an inn and Ivan, instead of attending the University, as he had expected, was obliged to sell candles, not only in his father’s shop, but as that was soon taken from him, even in the market place.  After a few months his mother died and his father sacrificed his last remaining possessions for drink.  He insulted and even attacked his son, bidding him leave his house, and the poor boy was compelled to render the most menial service to all.  For ten long years this condition lasted, yet Ivan remained a poet!