KARAMZIN, Nikolai Mikhailovich

Nationality: Russian. Born: On family estate near the city of Simbirsk, 1 December 1766. Education: Monsieur Fauvel's boarding school, Simbirsk, 1777-78; school of Johann Matthias Schaden, Moscow, graduated 1781. Military Service: Preobrazhensky Guards, Saint Petersburg, 1781-83. Family: Married Elizaveta Ivanovna Protasova in 1801 (died 1802). Career: Writer; editor, Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma, 1787-89; took grand tour of Europe, 1789-97; tutor (to future poet Petr Viazemsky); court historian. Died: 22 May 1826.

Publications

Fiction

Moi bezdelki. 1794.

Aglaia. 1794.

Bednaia Liza. 1794.

Oda na sluchai prisiagi moskovskikh zhitei e. i. v. Pavlu Pervomu, samoderzhtsu vserossiikomu. 1796.

Razgovor o shchastii. 1797.

Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika. 1797.

E. i. v. Aleksandru I, Samoderzhtsu Vserossiiskomu, na vosshestvie ego na prestol. 1801.

Panteon rossiiskikh avtorov. 1801-2.

Istoricheskoe pokhval'noe slovo Ekaterine II. 1802.

Sochineniia. 1803.

Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo. 1816-18.

O drevnei i novoi Rossii v ee politicheskom i grazhdanskom otnosheniiakh. 1861.

Other

Editor, with A. A. Petrov, Detskoe chtenie dlia serdtsa i razuma.1787-89.

Editor, Moskovskii zhurnal. 1791-92.

Editor, Aglaia, almanakh. 1794-95.

Editor, Aonidi, ili Sobranie raznykh novykh stikhotvorenii. 1796-99.

Editor, Vestnik Evropy. 1802-03.

Translator, Dereviannaia noga: Shveitsarskaia idiliia by SalomonGessner. 1783.

Translator, O proiskhozhdenii zla, poema velikogo Gallera by Albrecht von Haller. 1786.

Translator, Iulii Tsezar' by William Shakespeare. 1787.

Translator, Emiliia Galotti by Gottholt E. Lessing. 1788.

Translator, Novye Marmontelevy povesti by Jean-Francois Marmontel.1794-98.

Translator, Melina by Madame de Staël. 1795.

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Critical Studies:

"Karamzin in Recent Soviet Criticism: A Review Article" by John G. Garrard, in Slavic and East European Journal, Winter 1967; N. M. Karamzin's Prose: The Teller in the Tale: A Study in Narrative Technique by Roger B. Anderson, 1974; Essays on Karamzin: Russian Man-of-Letters, Political Thinker, Historian, 1766-1826 by Joseph L. Black, 1975; From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin's Sentimentalist Prose by Gitta Hammarberg, 1991.

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Nikolai Karamzin began his career as a prose writer in 1783 with a translation from the German of Salomon Gessner's idyll Das hölzerne Bein (The Wooden Leg). Between then and 1803, when he obtained an appointment as court historiographer and abandoned fiction altogether, he wrote some 16 short prose works. The first of any importance were "Evgenii i Iuliia" (Eugene and Julia; 1789), the simple plot of which contrasted sharply with the complex plots of the roman d'aventure then in vogue, and the much imitated story of the lower classes, "Frol Silin, blagodetel'nyi chelovek" (Frol Silin, a Virtuous Man; 1791). By far the most famous and popular of Karamzin's stories, however, is "Bednaia Liza" (Poor Liza; 1794), the archetypal work of sentimentalist short fiction.

In his other short stories Karamzin displayed a willingness to experiment. Thus, "Ostrov Borgol'm" (The Island of Bornholm; 1794) is a gothic tale, and "Natal'ia, boiar'skaia doch"' (Natalia, the Boyar's Daughter; 1792) and "Marfa-posadnitsa" (Martha the Mayoress; 1803) are historical tales, while "Iuliia" (Julia; 1796) is an early version of the so-called society tale (svetskaia povest'). Despite these differences the stories are, as A. G. Cross has pointed out, linked both by Karamzin's interest in the psychology of his characters and the depiction of their emotions and by the importance accorded to the role of the narrator.

"Natalia, the Boyar's Daughter" is set in the time of Moscow's wars with Lithuania in the seventeenth century. This historical setting anticipates "Martha the Mayoress," yet the story has much to link it with "Poor Liza," not least the character of the eponymous heroine, which differs very little from that of Liza. The heroine is young, innocent, and naive and, in opposition to the will of her parents, enters a love affair with the son of a boyar wrongly accused of treason. Both heroines speak the same language, which is neither that of a peasant nor that of a seventeenth-century Russian but rather that of an educated lady of the end of the eighteenth century. The fates of these sentimental heroines are different, however. Unlike Liza, who is abandoned by her lover and commits suicide, Natalia marries her lover, who regains the favor of the czar. Although the story purports to be historically true, the style is self-consciously humorous. The story is, in fact, a parody of Matvei Komarov's 1782 work "Povest' o prikliuchenii aglinskogo milorda Georga i o brandenburgskoi markgrafine Friderika" (Tale of the Adventures of the English Milord George and the Brandenburg Margravine Friderika). This may account for its apparent influence on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and the reference to it in the same author's "Baryshnia-krest'ianka" (Mistress into Maid), which is written in an equally tongue-in-cheek manner.

"Julia" represents a development of "Poor Liza." The social milieu is now that of the upper classes, the setting urban rather than rural. Karamzin's criticism of urban mores, embodied in the character of the cynical roué Prince N*, implies, however, that rural life is superior, a theme that runs through Russian literature to this day. The story, like "Natalia, the Boyar's Daughter," reflects Karamzin's assimilation of eighteenth-century European culture. In "Natalia" the tone of the narration is very much that of Laurence Sterne. Here the dominant influence is that of Rousseau, although the use of the nom parlant has Russian as well as European ancestry. The story was translated into French as early as 1797, and an anonymous Russian article of 1804 singled it out as the story that best exemplified Karamzin's gifts as a writer of short stories and that entitled him to be placed on a par with the most celebrated exponent of the genre at the time, Jean-François Marmontel.

"The Island of Bornholm," published in Aglaia (1794-95), a two-part almanac of Karamzin's work, is part of a triptych of stories—the others being "Sierra Morena" and "Afinskaia zhizn"' (Athenian Life)—with foreign settings. The story shows the influence of yet another European tradition, that of the English gothic novel. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho was published in the same year as Aglaia, and Karamzin's story has many of the accoutrements that characterize the gothic novel: the sinister castle, with its equally sinister owner, the imprisoned maiden, star-crossed lovers, and incest.

Six years separate the Aglaia stories from those published in the journal Vestnik Evropy (The Messenger of Europe), which Karamzin founded in 1802. Of these "Martha the Mayoress" is by far the most important, with the possible exception of the unfinished novel Rytsar' nashego vremeni (A Knight of our Time; 1802-03). The story was termed by the author "a historical tale" (istoricheskaia povest'), the subject matter of which is indicated by its alternative title Pokorenie Novgoroda (The Subjection of Novgorod). Supposedly based on an ancient manuscript and, unlike "Natalia, the Boyar's Daughter," written in a lofty, serious style, it can be seen as a fictional precursor to Karamzin's monumental Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo (History of the Russian State), to which he devoted most of the rest of his life. Unusually for Karamzin, there is an overt political dimension to the story, which gave rise to considerable controversy. Martha, an actual historical personage, is a tragic heroine who leads Novgorod's struggle for freedom against the Moscow of Ivan III. Yet her cause is doomed and for Karamzin, an advocate of centralized Russian rule, misguided. Novgorod capitulates, and Martha is executed.

Karamzin's influence can be traced in many classic works of nineteenth-century Russian literature, from Dostoevskii's Poor Folk to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. It was, however, his practical contribution to the debate over Russian literary language that left the most enduring mark on Russian literature. Declaring that the prose of the great classical poet and homo universalis Mikhail Lomonosov "cannot serve as a model for us" because it is "not pleasant to hear," Karamzin placed himself at the head of the innovators in opposition to the antimodernist group led by Admiral A. S. Shishkov. His ideal, expressed in 1803, was that people should "write as they speak" and "speak as they write," the resulting language being devoid of crudeness and distinguished by enlightened good taste. The new literary language he created was variously called the "middle style," a term borrowed from Lomonosov or, by Shishkov, the "new style." However the new language is termed, it is clear that but for Karamzin's mastery of style, but for the naturalness and simplicity of his expression, his stories would not have attracted the attention they did. The claim that he was the first Russian writer to raise prose fiction to the level of art does not seem too far-fetched. The critic V. G. Belinskii himself remarked that Karamzin's "influence on his contemporaries was so strong that a whole period of our literature from the nineties to the twenties is, with good reason, called the 'Karamzin period,"' while the most gifted of his followers, the poet and translator Vasilii Zhukovskii, wrote of "the holy name of Karamzin."

—Michael Pursglove

See the essay on "Poor Liza."