Nikolai Ogaryov

Nikolay Ogarev
Ogarev's portrait by an unknown painter, c. 1830.
Born	Nikolay Platonovich Ogarev (1813-12-06)December 6, 1813 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Died	June 12, 1877(1877-06-12) (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 reform of 1861 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.

Nikolay Ogaryov was born in Saint Petersburg into a family of wealthy Russian landowners. Having lost his mother early, Nikolay spent his childhood years in his father's estate nearby Penza. In 1820 he left the farm and went to study at the University of Moscow, where he developed a remarkable political work by joining a group of utopian socialists, resulting in his arrest and exile on his father's farm. In 1826 he met and became a close friend of his distant relative Aleksandr Herzen, with whom he instantly found two things in common, the aversion to monarchy and deep empathy with the Decembrists' ideas.

In 1856 he left Russia for good, living many years in London and Geneva, dedicated to the organization of free Russian print publication of The Bell and General Assembly. From October 1874, Ogarev began 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 unfinished work Last Curse. By the end of that year, however, the couple was living in Mary's hometown of Greenwich, where Ogarev died in 1877.