ealth was injured for life, but he did not manage to
complete the University course. These very hardships contributed
greatly, no doubt, to the power of his poetry later on, even though they
exerted a hardening effect upon his character, and aroused in him the
firm resolve to acquire wealth at any cost. Successful as his
journalistic enterprises were in later life, it is known that he could
not have assured himself the comfortable fortune he enjoyed from that
source alone, and he is said to have won most of it at the
gambling-table. This fact and various other circumstances may have
exercised some influence upon the judgment of a section of the public as
to his literary work. There is hardly any other Russian writer over
whose merits such heated discussions take place as over Nekrasoff, one
party maintaining that he was a true poet, with genuine inspiration;
the other, that he was as clever with his poetry in a business sense, as
he was with financial operations, and that he possessed no feeling,
inspiration, or poetry.[27] The truth would seem to lie between these
two extremes. Like all the other writers of his day--like writers in
general--he was unconsciously impressed by the spirit of the time, and
changed his subjects and treatment as it changed; and like every other
writer, some of his works are superior in feeling and truth to others.

The most important period of his life was that from 1841 to 1845, when
his talent was forming and ripening. Little is known with definiteness
regarding this period, but it is certain that while pursuing his
literary labors, he moved in widely differing circles of
society--fashionable, official, literary, theatrical, that of the
students, and others--which contributed to the truth of his pictures
from these different spheres in his poems. In 1847 he was able (in
company with Panaeff) to buy "The Contemporary," of which, eventually,
he became the sole proprietor and editor, and with which his name is
indelibly connected. When this journal was dropped, in 1866, he became
the head, in 1868, of "The Annals of the Fatherland," where he remained
until his death. It was during these last ten years of his life that he
wrote his famous poems, "Russian Women" and "Who in Russia Finds Life
Good," with others of his best poems. He never lost his adoration of
the critic Byelinsky, to whom he attributed his own success, as the
result of judicious development of his powers.

One of the many confl