After the death of Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov, his sister Anna Alexeyevna Butkevich became the heiress of copyright to the poet’s works.

In 1879, she published the first posthumous collection of Nekrasov’s poems. A special committee was set up to prepare the edition in 1878. It included Anna Alexeyevna herself, as well as the journalist Grigory Zakharovich Yeliseev, the writer Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin, the philologist and teacher Stepan Ivanovich Ponomaryov, and the historian Mikhail Matveyevich Stasyulevich, in whose printing house the edition was published.

The commentaries and supplements for the edition were prepared by the bibliographer, literary critic and literary historian Stepan Ponomaryov.

In her letters to Stepan Ivanovich, Anna Butkevich expressed her wish to compile this collection as Nekrasov himself wanted it to be, “I would like, as long as I am alive, not to deviate from my brother’s instructions and to fulfill his wishes sacredly, and also, I would like all my brother’s notes and instructions to be included in the edition; I would like not to erase, but on the contrary, to bring out to the last detail his personal last contribution to the publication of the poems“.

It was decided to distribute the material of the posthumous edition into four volumes in chronological sequence. The first volume included works from 1845 to 1860, the second — from 1861 to 1872, the third — from 1873 to 1877. The fourth volume contained appendices: poems that were not included in the first three volumes, notes to all four volumes, a list of previous editions with an article by the critic Vasily Petrovich Gorlenko “Literary Debuts of Nekrasov”, as well as a set of articles about Nekrasov in 1840–1878 and indexes. There was also a list of Nekrasov’s poems that were set to music, with the names of the composers.

Mikhail Stasiulevich planned the work of the printing house so that by the fall of 1878 it would be free for the preparation of the edition. The four volumes began to be typed simultaneously on October 7, 1878, and four months later the work was completed.

On February 7, 1879, Mikhail Matveyevich Stasyulevich wrote to Anna Alexeyevna,