The article analyzes the poem by Nikolai Nekrasov Who is Happy in Russia? аnd in particular, one of its first chapters, The Priestling . The author makes an attemptto look at the paradigmatic text of the Russian classic from modern new positions and to speculate about the issue of how much the poem - the so called epic of folk life - actually gets in line with the epic mentality and to what extent the poet objectively draws up the answer to the question posed in the title of the poem. In the course of the analysis, the authors of the work compare the canonical text of The Priestling chapter with draft manuscripts, notes, additions, and page amendments which are summarized by Nekrasov scholars and published in the comments to the poet's collected works. Comparison of various versions of the chapter allows the authors of the study to show how crucially and unexpectedly Nekrasov’s attitude to his characters changed and what tendencies the poet followed. The work shows that the basis for the first version of the