"The bread of fields tilled by slaves does me no good..."

Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov

Nekrasov wrote these lines when he was quite young, at 33, while living at a dacha in Petrovsky Park near Moscow together with Botkin. Shortly before his death the poet would recall this verse and, dictating to his sister, would say:

It was Fate's pleasure that I enjoyed serf bread only until the age of 16; after that I never owned serfs, and, though I was the heir of my fathers, who had ancestral estates, I was not for a single day even the owner of a scrap of ancestral land <...> I once wrote: "The bread of fields tilled by slaves does me no good...". Having written this verse when I was almost still a child, perhaps I wished to justify it in deed.

And what became of the paternal inheritance? Nothing at all: the once large fortune of the Nekrasovs had by his time already melted away, having been lost at cards by his grandfather and great-grandfather. At his death Alexey Sergeyevich left little, and Nikolay Alexeyevich had nothing much to take: the estate had been divided among the other brothers and sisters. Everything Nekrasov had, he bought with his own money, chiefly from his earnings as a writer and publisher. He even recovered the lost possessions of his forebears and, funniest of all, bought the ancestral estate his grandfather had gambled away with capital won at cards.

The whole "prophetic poem" runs as follows:

Sumptuous you are, O sacred breads
Of native fields –
The heavy ears bloom and grow,
And I am barely alive!
Ah, so strangely was I made by heaven,
Such is my fate,
That the bread of fields tilled by slaves
Does me no good!

Literal translation