Nikolay Karamzin

Nikolay Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826) was a Russian writer, historian, translator and poet, and one of the leading figures of Russian sentimentalism. He lived at the turn of the nineteenth century, and he matters for two reasons: his prose helped give literary Russian a more supple, emotional voice, and his History of the Russian State set the pattern for telling the nation's past for decades.

He was born into a family of modest noble standing near Simbirsk. Some historians from Orenburg argue for 1765 as his birth year, though 1766 is the generally accepted date. He was educated in Moscow by the Swiss-German teacher Johann Matthias Schaden and later, in Saint Petersburg, befriended the poet Ivan Dmitriev. He tried a military career but left it after a year. He then turned to translating essays by foreign authors and mixed in the intellectual circles of Moscow, many of them tied to Freemasonry. In 1789 he travelled through Germany, France, Switzerland and England.

On his return he published Letters of a Russian Traveller, modelled on Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. Two stories from 1792, Poor Liza and Natalia, the Boyar's Daughter, made his name. Poor Liza tells of a peasant girl who, seduced and abandoned by a young aristocrat, takes her own life. Beneath the sentiment lies a social problem, though the idealised countryside and the young man's belated remorse soften the conflict. His clear, flowing sentences, drawn from French prose rather than the long periods of older Slavonic writing, proved highly influential.

After 1803 his attention shifted to history. Alexander I appointed him official historiographer, granting him a pension and direct access to the archives. He devoted his last years to the History of the Russian State, presenting the first eight volumes to the tsar in 1818. The work was widely read and both celebrated and contested: it combines scholarly narrative with a defence of autocracy, and he is often counted among the early founders of Russian conservative thought. He died of tuberculosis in Saint Petersburg in 1826.

His legacy is twofold. As a writer he opened the way for Romantic prose, and Pushkin admired him. As a historian he set a model for narrating the nation's past. His name still appears on streets, libraries and monuments across Russia.