it: "The Peasant Children," "Orina, the Mother of a Soldier," "The
Gossips," "The Pedlars," "The Rail-way," and many others.

Nekrassov became the idol of Russia. The literary evenings at which he
used to read his poems aloud were besieged by fervent devotees, and the
most brilliant orations were addressed to him on all possible occasions.
His greatest work, however, the national epic, _Who can be Happy in
Russia?_ was written towards the latter end of his life, between
1873 and 1877.

Here he suffered from the censor more cruelly than ever. Long extracts
from the poem were altogether forbidden, and only after his death it was
allowed, in 1879, to appear in print more or less in its entirety.

When gripped in the throes of his last painful illness, and practically
on his deathbed, he would still have found consolation in work, in the
dictation of his poems. But even then his sufferings were aggravated by
the harassing coercions of the censor. His last great poem was written
on his deathbed, and the censor peremptorily forbade its publication.
Nekrassov one day greeted his doctor with the following remark:

"Now you see what our profession, literature, means. When I wrote my
first lines they were hacked to pieces by the censor's scissors--that
was thirty-seven years ago; and now, when I am dying, and have written
my last lines, I am again confronted by the scissors."

For many months he lay in appalling suffering. His disease was the
outcome, he declared, of the privations he had suffered in his youth.
The whole of Russia seemed to be standing at his bedside, watching with
anguish his terrible struggle with death. Hundreds of letters and