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Between Sacrifice and Indulgence: Nikolai Nekrasov as a Model for the Intelligentsia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Konstantine Klioutchkine
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Abstract

In this article, Konstantine Klioutchkine explores Nikolai Nekrasov's model of personality as it emerged at the intersection of his poetry, his public life, and his contemporaries’ accounts about him. The fascination with Nekrasov stemmed not so much from the veneration of his civic achievements as from the curiosity about his profligate lifestyle and glamorous ethical failures. Exemplary tensions within Nekrasov's lyric and public personae enabled his contemporaries to negotiate between the recognition of progressive values, the pursuit of unsanctioned pleasures, and the experience of moral infirmity. Discussions of Nekrasov's inherently contradictory personality suggested that, for members of the intelligentsia who came of age between the 1850s and 1880s, his personality symbolized what they had already sensed about the nature of their own selves but could not admit until later decades.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 66 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 45 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2007

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References

I would like to thank Joachim Klein, Boris Wolfson, and Michael Kunichika for their comments and suggestions.

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