Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nikolay Karamzin is best known for his History of the Russian State, a 12-volume national history that was the most ambitious and serious work of Russian historiography produced up to that time. He is also credited with introducing the letter Ë/ë into the Russian alphabet after 1795 and with bringing sentimentalism to Russian fiction through stories such as Poor Liza and Natalia the Boyar's Daughter, both published in 1792.
Nikolay Karamzin was born in the small village of Mikhailovka near Simbirsk, in what is now Ulyanovsk Oblast, Russia. A competing version places his birth in 1765 in a Mikhailovka village of the Orenburg Governorate, and Orenburg historians have in recent years actively disputed the official account.
Letters of a Russian Traveller described Karamzin's journey through Germany, France, Switzerland, and England, which he undertook in 1789. The letters were modeled on A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne and were first published in the Moscow Journal before being collected into six volumes between 1797 and 1801.
The Memoir on Old and New Russia was a political document Karamzin wrote for Emperor Alexander I in 1812. It was a pointed attack on reforms proposed by Mikhail Speransky and became a cornerstone of the official ideology of imperial Russia. It established Karamzin as one of the founding figures of Russian conservatism.
Karamzin shaped the Russian literary language by writing in an elegant, flowing style modeled on French prose writers rather than the heavy periodical paragraphs of the old Slavonic school. He also promoted a more "feminine" style of writing. Alexander Pushkin and Vladimir Nabokov both admired his prose.
Nikolay Karamzin died on the 22nd of May, 1826 (old style), in the Tauride Palace. He did not finish his History of the Russian State, leaving it at the eleventh volume, which ends at the accession of Michael Romanov in 1613. A monument was erected to his memory in Simbirsk in 1845.