The motif of «dry misfortune» and people's mentality in N. A. Nekrasov's poem «Who is Happy in Russia?»

The article seeks to interpret N. A. Nekrasov's text from a new, modern perspective and to consider whether the poem, an «epic of people's life», meets the criteria of an epic work noted by critics, and to what extent the poet answers the question from the title in the final chapter of his work. The authors compare the «canonical» text of the chapter «The Feast for the Whole World» with the draft notes, variants, and page-by-page corrections, which makes it possible to see how Nekrasov's point of view on the events and the main character, Yakov, changed in one of the important episodes, and what tendencies the poet followed in creating the situation depicted. The article shows that the story of Yakov the Faithful, traditionally perceived as the apex scene of the final chapter, contrasts with the conventional canons of the «peasant epic» in the artistic reality of the poem. The article demonstrates that, in contrast to the stable Christian (Orthodox) tradition, Nekrasov portrays the character's suicide as an act of high vengeance, blessed by God, whereas such behavior cannot be recognized as natural and acceptable to the Russian mentality. The analysis carried out in the article demonstrates the occasional nature of many of the circumstances depicted by the writer, the inconsistency and alogism of Nekrasov's characters and their behavior, the violation of the structural and compositional order of the poem. A number of tendentious factors in the text of the poem, the instability and variability of the writer's approaches help the authors of the article identify and establish the process of reducing the objectivity and epic potential of the work, and propose new strategies for understanding the poem and finding its place among the classical works of Russian literature.