The early life of the little Nekrassov was passed amid a series of
contrasting pictures. His father, when he had abandoned his military
calling and settled upon his estate, became the Chief of the district
police. He would take his son Nicholas with him in his trap as he drove
from village to village in the fulfilment of his new duties. The
continual change of scenery during their frequent journeys along country
roads, through forests and valleys, past meadows and rivers, the various
types of people they met with, broadened and developed the mind of
little Nekrassov, just as the mind of the child Ruskin was formed and
expanded during his journeys with his father. But Ruskin's education
lacked features with which young Nekrassov on his journeys soon became
familiar. While acquiring knowledge of life and accumulating impressions
of the beauties of nature, Nekrassov listened, perforce, to the brutal,
blustering speeches addressed by his father to the helpless, trembling
peasants, and witnessed the cruel, degrading corporal punishments he
inflicted upon them, while his eyes were speedily opened to his father's
addiction to drinking, gambling, and debauchery. These experiences would
most certainly have demoralised and depraved his childish mind had it
not been for the powerful influence the refined and cultured mother had
from the first exercised upon her son. The contrast between his parents
was so startling that it could not fail to awaken the better side of the
child's nature, and to imbue him with pure and healthy notions of the
truer and higher ideals of humanity. In his poetical works of later
years Nekrassov repeatedly returns to and dwells upon the memory of the
sorrowful, sweet image of his mother. The gentle, beautiful lady, with
her wealth of golden hair, with an expression of divine tenderness in
her blue eyes and of infinite suffering upon her sensitive lips,
remained for ever her son's ideal of womanhood. Later on, during years
of manhood, in moments of the deepest moral suffering and despondency,
it was always of her that he thought, her tenderness and spiritual