Nikolay Karamzin

• 1. Introduction

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  Nikolay Karamzin once said his surname traced back to a baptized Tatar called Kara-mirza, an ancestor so distant that no records survived his name. That story tells you something important about Karamzin himself: he was a man who searched the past for the foundations of things. He would spend the better part of his adult life doing exactly that on a national scale, producing a 12-volume History of the Russian State that no Russian writer before him had attempted with such seriousness. But he was also a poet, a sentimentalist, a traveler who journeyed through Germany, France, Switzerland, and England and wrote letters home about what he saw. His letters found an eager audience. His stories made Russian readers cry. And a letter he wrote to a tsar in 1812 shaped the ideology of an empire. How a retired army captain's son from a small village near Simbirsk became the conscience of Russian literature and the chronicler of a nation's soul is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. A Village, a Family, a Name

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  Mikhail Yegorovich Karamzin, Nikolay's father, was a retired captain of the Imperial Russian Army born in 1724. He belonged to a noble family of modest means whose lineage stretched back to a man named Semyon Karamzin, documented as early as 1606. For many generations the Karamzins had served in Nizhny Novgorod as officers and officials. Nikolay's grandfather Yegor Karamzin eventually relocated to Simbirsk, where he married Ekaterina Aksakova, a member of the ancient Aksakov dynasty.

  The family on his mother's side carried its own storied past. Ekaterina Petrovna Karamzina came from the Pazukhin line, which dated its noble standing to 1620, when Ivan Demidovich Pazukhin received lands and a title for service in the Polish-Russian War. Her own father, Peter Pazukhin, had risen from Praporshchik to Colonel, serving in the Simbirsk infantry regiment from 1733. According to family legend, the dynasty's founder, Fyodor Pazukh, came from Lithuanian szlachta and left Mstislavl in 1496 to enter the service of Ivan III of Russia.

  Ekaterina Petrovna was born somewhere between 1730 and 1735. She died in 1769 when Nikolay was just over two years old. His father remarried the following year, taking Evdokia Gavrilovna Dmitrieva as his second wife. Nikolay grew up with three siblings, Vasily, Fyodor, and Ekaterina, along with two agnate siblings from his father's second marriage.

• 3. The Traveler Who Wrote Home

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  In 1789, Nikolay Karamzin resolved to travel. He made his way through Germany, France, Switzerland, and England. A plaque in Geneva still marks his visit. When he returned, he published his Letters of a Russian Traveller, and they met with wide success.

  The letters were modeled after A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne, the Irish-born novelist whose influence on European prose was felt from Edinburgh to St Petersburg. Karamzin had first printed the letters in the Moscow Journal, the periodical he himself edited. They were later gathered into six volumes, published between 1797 and 1801.

  In that same journal, Karamzin published original stories including Poor Liza and Natalia the Boyar's Daughter, both appearing in 1792. Those two stories introduced Russian readers to sentimentalism as a literary mode. The response was enthusiastic enough that critics took to calling Karamzin a "Russian Sterne." What had been an epistolary travel document became the gateway to a new emotional register in Russian fiction.

• 4. Shaping the Russian Tongue

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  By 1794, Karamzin had moved on from his literary journal and published a two-volume miscellany called Aglaia. Among the pieces it contained was "The Island of Bornholm," recognized as one of the first Russian Gothic stories, and Ilya Muromets, a work drawn from the adventures of a celebrated hero of Russian legend.

  From 1797 to 1799, he put out another almanac, The Aonides, in collaboration with the poets Derzhavin and Dmitriev. In 1798 he compiled The Pantheon, a collection of ancient and modern authors translated into Russian. His lighter pieces eventually appeared gathered in a volume called My Trifles.

  Alexander Pushkin and Vladimir Nabokov both admired his style. That style was elegant and fluid, built on the easy sentences of French prose writers rather than the long, ponderous paragraphs of the old Slavonic school. He also promoted what he called a more "feminine" approach to writing. His example helped shape the Russian literary language itself, which stands as one of the most durable contributions any writer made to Russian literary history.

  Karamzin also changed the Russian alphabet in a small but lasting way. After 1795, he began introducing the letter Ë/ë, which before that time had been represented by the plain letter E/e. The new letter was not made obligatory, and plain E/e remained common outside dictionaries and school primers. But its appearance in print is credited to Karamzin.

• 5. The Historian's Grand Project

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  In 1802 and 1803, Karamzin edited the journal Vestnik Evropy, known in English as the Envoy of Europe. Working on that journal clarified something for him: he understood where his real strength lay. He turned to history and began writing what would become his 12-volume History of the Russian State. To concentrate on the task, he withdrew for two years to Simbirsk.

  Before his work appeared, Russian historiography had little to show. The earlier effort of Vasily Tatishchev was described by those who came after as a rough sketch, inelegant in style and without the true spirit of criticism. Karamzin was relentlessly industrious in gathering materials. The footnotes alone were considered mines of interesting information.

  Critics noted that he sometimes cast a false romantic glow over early Russian annals, a quality that drew comparisons to Sir Walter Scott, whose writings were at that time exciting enormous interest throughout Europe and likely influenced how Karamzin approached his material. Still, in battle descriptions and in the drawing of historical characters, Karamzin showed real descriptive power, sketching key figures in Russian history in what one tradition called firm and bold lines.

  Emperor Alexander I came to know of Karamzin's labors and invited him to Tver, where Karamzin read aloud the first eight volumes of his history to the emperor. In 1816, Karamzin moved to St Petersburg, which he came to regard as the happiest period of his life. He enjoyed Alexander's personal favor and continued submitting sheets of his work, which the emperor read alongside him in the gardens of the palace of Tsarskoye Selo.

• 6. Conservatism and the Memoir

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  Karamzin wrote his history as an open defender of autocracy. His work was styled by later commentators as the Epic of Despotism. He considered Ivan III the true architect of Russian greatness, a judgment that represented a shift from an earlier view he had held while more under the influence of Western ideas, when he had assigned that distinction to Peter the Great. He described the deeds of Ivan the Terrible with disgust.

  His political views went beyond the pages of his history. In 1812, he wrote The Memoir on Old and New Russia, addressed directly to Alexander I. The memoir was a pointed attack on reforms proposed by Mikhail Speransky. It became a cornerstone of the official ideology of imperial Russia for years to come.

  Alexander I greatly valued Karamzin's counsel on political matters, and appointing him state historian was in part a recognition of that trust. Karamzin is sometimes counted among the founding fathers of Russian conservatism. He also expressed, in plain terms, the hope that there would be no Poland under any shape or name, a statement that reflected the anti-Polish policies he actively supported within the Russian Empire.

  He died on the 22nd of May, old style, 1826, in the Tauride Palace. He did not complete his history; it ends at the accession of Michael Romanov in 1613, the eleventh volume the last he finished. A monument was erected to his memory in Simbirsk in 1845.

• 7. A Legacy in Stone and Print

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  Several places in Russia carry Karamzin's name. A village once called Mikhailovka is now known as Karamzinka. A road in Moscow is named Proyezd Karamzina. Streets in Kaliningrad, Krasnoyarsk, Mayna, and Ulyanovsk bear his name as well. Monuments stand in Ulyanovsk and at the Ostafyevo Museum-Estate near Moscow. The Millennium of Russia monument in Veliky Novgorod includes a statue of him among its figures.

  The Karamzin Public Library in Simbirsk, built in his honor as a famous native son, opened its doors to readers on the 18th of April, 1848. In 2016, to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, the Ulyanovsk State Regional Scientific Library organized a literary competition accepting only poems about Karamzin or poems based on his works.

  The Central Bank of Russia issued a silver two-ruble coin in his image in 2016, as part of its Outstanding People of Russia series. Two commemorative postage stamps have appeared with his portrait: one in 1991 in the USSR as part of a Russian Historians series, carrying a face value of 10 kopeks, and another in 2016 in the Outstanding Russian Historians series, at 25 rubles. The 1991 stamp appeared when the USSR itself had only months left; the 2016 stamp arrived exactly 250 years after his birth in that disputed village near Simbirsk.