| Nikolay Ogarev | |
|---|---|
Ogarev's portrait by an unknown painter, c. 1830. |
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| Born | Nikolay Platonovich Ogarev December 6, 1813 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire |
| Died | June 12, 1877 (aged 63) Greenwich, England |
| Occupation | poet, historian and political activist |
Nikolay Platonovich Ogarev (Ogaryov; Russian: Никола́й Плато́нович Огарёв; December 6 [O.S. November 24] 1813 – June 12 [O.S. May 31] 1877), was a Russian poet, historian and political activist. He was deeply critical of the limitations of the Emancipation of the Serfs claiming that the serfs were not free but had simply exchanged one form of serfdom for another.
Ogarev was a fellow-exile and collaborator of Alexander Herzen on Kolokol, a newspaper printed in England and smuggled into Russia. The two young men swore on the Sparrow Hills above Moscow in 1840 not to rest until their country was free; the oath reportedly sustained them and their friends throughout many crises of their lives at home and abroad and was described in E. H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles.
From October 1874, Ogarev was living in Newcastle upon Tyne where he arrived with his beloved Mary all the way from Genoa. While in Newcastle, Ogarev worked on his 'Confession in Verse' and his 'Last Curse' (unfinished). The end of the year, however, saw the couple in Mary's home town of Greenwich, where Ogarev died in 1877.
Nikolay Ogaryov was born in Saint Petersburg in a Russian noble family. Having lost his mother early, Nikolay spent his childhood years in his father's estate nearby Penza. In 1920 he moved to Moscow. The year of 1826 saw the beginning of Ogaryov's long friendship with Aleksander Hertzen, a distant relative whom he instantly found two things in common: aversion to monarchy and deep empathy with the Decemberists' ideas.[1]