Posledniia pesni. Stikhtvoreniia. [Last Songs. Poems].

Skt. Peterburg, A.A. Kraevskiy for F. Viktorova, 1877. . First edition. 8vo. pp. [2], table of contents, 169 including title (with slight discolouration) and half-title. Contemporary black calf backed brown cloth, speckled edges; rebacked to style.
Fresh copy of a collection published just before the death of the celebrated poet and publisher of Sovremennik. Combining poetry published in earlier magazines with new creations, this collection is an 'excellent example of the realistic poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century' (Fekula).

Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-1878), a much-loved poet in his own right whose work Turgenev described as 'brandish[ing] like fire,' is also credited with discovering and first publishing many other Russian literary giants. As the editor of 'Sovremennik', a journal founded years earlier by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nekrasov was responsible for the publication of Dostoevskii's first works, Turgenev's A Hunstman's Sketches, and even Chernyshevskii's Zeitgeist-defining novel What is to be done? (a question later 'answered' by Lenin himself in a tract of the same name). Nekrasov published the latter whilst the author was in prison, and several of Nekrasov's own works were also banned by the Russian imperial censors; he was an outspoken opponent of serfdom, criticising even the emancipatory ukaz of 1861 for not going far enough to improve the lot of the Russian peasantry.