Ivan Nikitin (poet)

[1] After his first publications, he joined a circle of local intelligentsia that included his future biographer (and the editor of his collected works) Mikhail De-Poulet.

He taught himself French and German and read widely in world literature, and in 1859 he opened a bookstore and library that became an important center of literary and social life in Voronezh.

Some of his poems became the basis for popular songs, set to music by such composers as Vasily Kalinnikov, Eduard Nápravník, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

D. S. Mirsky wrote that his "principal claim to attention" was in "his realistic poems of the life of the poor":He was inclined sometimes to idealize and sentimentalize them, but his best things are free from this sin.

There is an almost epic calm in the long, uneventful, and powerful Night Rest of the Drivers, and an unsweetened realism in such poems of tragic misery as The Tailor.