Nikolay Mikhaylovich Karamzin

Nikolay Mikhaylovich Karamzin (born Dec. 12 [Dec. 1, Old Style], 1766, Mikhaylovka, Simbirsk [now Ulyanovsk] province, Russia—died June 3 [May 22], 1826, St. Petersburg) was a Russian historian, poet, and journalist who was the leading exponent of the sentimentalist school in Russian literature.

From an early age, Karamzin was interested in Enlightenment philosophy and western European literature. After extensive travel in western Europe, Karamzin described his impressions in his Pisma russkogo puteshestvennika Letters of a Russian Traveller, 1789–1790), the most important of his contributions to a monthly review, Moskovsky zhurnal (1791–92; “Moscow Journal”), that he founded on his return. Written in a self-revealing style influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Laurence Sterne, the “Letters” helped introduce to Russia the sentimental style then popular in western Europe. Karamzin’s tale “Bednaya Liza” (1792; “Poor Liza”), about a village girl who commits suicide after a tragic love affair, soon became the most celebrated work of the Russian sentimental school.

In 1803 Karamzin’s friendship with the emperor Alexander I resulted in his appointment as court historian. The rest of his life was devoted to his 12-volume Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo (1816–29; “History of the Russian State”). Though based on original research, this first general survey of Russian history was conceived as a literary rather than an academic work. The history is, in effect, an apology for Russian autocracy. It is the first such Russian work to have drawn on a great number of documents, including foreign accounts of historical incidents. Uncompleted at his death, the work closes with the accession of Michael Romanov (1613). As history it has been superseded, but it remains a landmark in the development of Russian literary style; it provided a main source for Pushkin’s drama Boris Godunov. His History is also considered to have contributed much to the development of Russian literary language, for in it he sought to bring written Russian—then rife with cumbrous locutions—closer to the rhythms and conciseness of educated speech and to equip the language with a full cultural vocabulary.