Nikolay Karamzin read Russia's history aloud to the tsar in a palace garden
Nikolay Karamzin first made Russians weep over sentimental fiction, then locked himself away to write their national history. Alexander I made him state historian and went through the drafts with him at Tsarskoye Selo. Along the way Karamzin helped shape modern literary Russian and popularised a new letter of the alphabet.
Karamzin was born in December 1766 near Simbirsk, on a family estate, although some Orenburg historians argue for a different village and the year 1765. His father was a retired army captain from a noble family of modest means, and his mother died when he was just over two. He was schooled in Moscow by a Swiss-German teacher, Johann Matthias Schaden, then moved to St Petersburg, where he befriended the poet Ivan Dmitriev and translated foreign essays.
In 1789 he toured Germany, France, Switzerland and England. His Letters of a Russian Traveller, modelled on Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, ran in the Moscow Journal he edited and later filled six volumes. His 1792 tale Poor Liza brought sentimentalism to Russian readers and earned him the nickname a Russian Sterne, while The Island of Bornholm counts among the country's earliest Gothic stories. Pushkin and Nabokov admired his light, French-influenced sentences, which broke with heavy Slavonic prose and helped form a Russian literary language.
After editing the Envoy of Europe in 1802 and 1803 he turned to history, spending two secluded years near Simbirsk. Alexander I invited him to Tver to hear eight volumes read, and from 1816 in St Petersburg they reviewed pages together. The History of the Russian State drew on huge research and far outclassed Vasily Tatishchev's rough earlier effort, though critics fault its romantic gloss, which recalls Walter Scott. It praised autocracy so openly it was nicknamed the Epic of Despotism, while treating Ivan the Terrible with disgust. He reached 1613 and the accession of Michael Romanov before dying in June 1826.
His 1812 memoir attacking Mikhail Speransky's reforms became a pillar of imperial ideology, and he is often seen as a father of Russian conservatism. He also openly hoped Poland would vanish altogether. The letter Ë, introduced to the alphabet some time after 1795, is credited to him, and in 2016 the Central Bank of Russia marked his 250th birthday with a silver coin.
Source: Nikolay Karamzin
