During the period that Alexander II was in the Balkans, a man who especially epitomized the alienated intellectuals' agonizing quest to serve the common people was slowly dying of cancer. He was the poet and editor Nicholas Nekrasov.

The decade following that infamous night at the English Club, when he had read his poem of praise to Count Michael Muraviev (the Hangman) had been a difficult but productive time for Nekrasov. He was often in poor health, and poems with titles such as “I Shall Soon Die” (1867) and “Despondency” (1874) reflect the bleak mood that often struck him. In 1871 he turned fifty. As his hair continued to recede and along with his goatee showed signs of graying, he thought more and more of the past.

He could never forget his “fateful blunder” at the English Club, and although he lashed back at the many hypocritical voices that had mocked him for his performance that night, he never could quite forgive himself. He continued to live two lives, that of a wealthy landowner with a penchant for hunting, gambling, gastronomy, servants and carriages, and that of a radical editor and poet. He was almost like one of Dostoevsky's fictional split personalities, and like some of them, he often berated himself for his sins. The radical poet in him did not much care for the wealthy landowner.

Although he had taken over and remade the Notes of the Fatherland into the most successful radical journal of its day, the running of it was often an agonizing job.