During their travels, in 1821, Nicholas Nekrassov the future poet was
born, and three years later his father left military service and settled
in his estate in the Yaroslav Province, on the banks of the great river
Volga, and close to the Vladimirsky highway, famous in Russian history
as the road along which, for centuries, chained convicts had been driven
from European Russia to the mines in Siberia. The old park of the manor,
with its seven rippling brooklets and mysterious shadowy linden avenues
more than a century old, filled with a dreamy murmur at the slightest
stir of the breeze, stretched down to the mighty Volga, along the banks
of which, during the long summer days, were heard the piteous, panting
songs of the _burlaki_, the barge-towers, who drag the heavy, loaded
barges up and down the river.
The rattling of the convicts' chains as they passed; the songs of the
_burlaki_; the pale, sorrowful face of his mother as she walked alone in
the linden avenues of the garden, often shedding tears over a letter she
read, which was headed by a coronet and written in a fine, delicate
hand; the spreading green fields, the broad mighty river, the deep blue
skies of Russia,--such were the reminiscences which Nekrassov retained
from his earliest childhood. He loved his sad young mother with a
childish passion, and in after years he was wont to relate how jealous
he had been of that letter[1] she read so often, which always seemed to
fill her with a sorrow he could not understand, making her at moments
even forget that he was near her.
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