1. The formation of literary activity.
2. The beginning of Russian sentimental-romantic prose and poetry.
3. Karamzin’s innovation and its significance for Russian literature.
N. M. Karamzin was born into the family of a Simbirsk nobleman and spent his childhood in a village located on the banks of the Volga. The future literary figure received an excellent education at the boarding school of Schaden, a professor at Moscow University. While still a student, the young man showed interest in Russian literature, moreover, he tried himself in prose and poetry. However, Karamzin for a long time cannot set a goal for himself, determine his purpose in this life. He is helped in this by I. S. Turgenev, a meeting with whom turned his whole life upside down young man. Nikolai Mikhailovich moves to Moscow and becomes a visitor to I. A. Novikov’s circle.
Soon attention is paid to the young man. Novikov instructs Karamzin and A.A. Petrov to edit the magazine “Children's Reading for the Heart and Mind.” This literary activity undoubtedly brings great benefits to the young writer. Gradually, in his works, Karamzin abandons complex, overloaded syntactic structures and high lexical means. His worldview is greatly influenced by two things: enlightenment and Freemasonry. Moreover, in the latter case, the Freemasons’ desire for self-knowledge and interest in the inner life of a person played no small role. It is human character, personal experiences, soul and heart that the writer puts at the head of the table in his works. He is interested in everything that is in any way connected with the inner world of people. On the other hand, all of Nikolai Mikhailovich’s work is marked by a peculiar attitude towards the order established in Russia: “I am a republican at heart. And I will die like this... I do not demand a constitution or representatives, but in my feelings I will remain a republican, and, moreover, a loyal subject of the Russian Tsar: this is a contradiction, not only an imaginary one! At the same time, Karamzin can be called the founder of Russian sentimental-romantic literature. Despite the fact that the literary heritage of this talented person is relatively small, it has never been fully collected. There remain many diary entries and private letters containing new ideas for the development of Russian literature that have not yet been published.
Karamzin's first literary steps have already attracted the attention of the entire literary community. To some extent, the great Russian commander A.M. Kutuzov predicted his future: “The French Revolution took place in him... but years and experiences will once cool his imagination, and he will look at everything with different eyes.” The commander's assumptions were confirmed. In one of his poems Nikolai Mikhailovich writes:
But time and experience destroy
Castle in the air of youth;
The beauty of magic disappears...
Now I see a different light, -
Karamzin's poetic works constantly touch upon, reveal, expose the essence of man, his soul and heart. In his article “What does an author need?” the poet directly states that any writer “paints a portrait of his soul and heart.” Co student years the talented young man shows interest in poets of the sentimental and pre-romantic movements. He speaks enthusiastically of Shakespeare due to his lack of selectivity in the object of his work. The great playwright of the past, according to Karamzin, opposed the classicists and approached the romantics. His ability to penetrate into “human nature” delighted the poet: “...for every thought he finds an image, for every sensation an expression, for every movement of the soul the best turn.”
Karamzin was a preacher of a new aesthetics, which did not accept any dogmatic rules and clichés and did not at all interfere with the free imagination of a genius. In the poet’s understanding, it acted as a “science of taste.” In Russian literature, conditions have arisen that require new ways of depicting reality, ways based on sensitivity. That is why in work of art Neither “low ideas” nor descriptions of terrible scenes could appear. The writer’s first work, designed in a sentimental style, appeared on the pages of “Children’s Reading” and was called “Russian True Tale: Evgeniy and Yulia.” It told about the life of Mrs. L. and her pupil Julia, who, “waking up with nature,” enjoyed the “pleasures of the morning” and read “the works of true philosophers.” However, the sentimental story ends tragically - the mutual love of Julia and Mrs. L.'s son Evgeniy does not save the young man from death. This work is not entirely typical of Karamzin, although it touches on some sentimental ideas. The work of Nikolai Mikhailovich is more characterized by a romantic vision of the world around him, as well as genre speciation. This is precisely what many poems of the talented writer, created in an elegiac tone, testify to:
My friend! Materiality is poor:
Play with your dreams in your soul,
Otherwise life will be boring.
Another famous work by Karamzin, “Letters of a Russian Traveler,” is a continuation of the tradition of travel, popular in those days in Russia thanks to the work of F. Delorme and K. F. Moritz. The writer turned to this genre not by chance. He was famous for his relaxed form of narration about everything that could come across the author’s path. In addition, in the process of travel, the character of the traveler himself is revealed in the best possible way. In his work, Karamzin pays great attention to the main character and narrator; it is his feelings and experiences that are fully manifested here. State of mind The traveler's stories are described in a sentimental manner, but the depiction of reality amazes the reader with its truthfulness and realism. Often the author uses a fictitious plot invented by a traveler, but immediately corrects himself, claiming that the artist should write everything as it was: “I wrote in the novel. That the evening was the most stormy; that the rain did not leave a dry thread on me... but in fact the evening turned out to be the quietest and clearest.” Thus, romance gives way to realism. In his work, the author is not an outside observer, but an active participant in everything that happens. He states the facts and gives an acceptable explanation of what happened. The focus of the work is the problem of the socio-political life of Russia and art. That is, again romance is closely intertwined with reality. The writer's sentimental style is manifested in melodiousness, in the absence of rude, colloquial expressions in the text, and in the predominance of words expressing various feelings.
Karamzin's poetic works are also filled with pre-romantic motifs, often characterized by moods of sadness, loneliness and melancholy. For the first time in Russian literature, the writer in his poetry turns to the otherworldly, bringing happiness and peace. This theme sounds especially clear in the poem “Cemetery”, constructed in the form of a dialogue between two voices. The first tells about the horror instilled in a person by thoughts of death, while the other sees only joy in death. In his lyrics, Karamzin achieves an amazing simplicity of style, abandoning vivid metaphors and unusual epithets.
In general, the literary work of Nikolai Mikhailovich played a big role in the development of Russian literature. V. G. Belinsky rightfully attributed to the poet the discovery of a new literary era, believing that this talented man “created an educated literary language in Rus',” which significantly helped “to make the Russian public eager to read Russian books.” Karamzin’s activities played a huge role in the development of such outstanding Russian writers as K. N. Batyushkov and V. A. Zhukovsky. From his very first literary experiments, Nikolai Mikhailovich showed innovative qualities, trying to find his own path in literature, revealing characters and themes in a new way, using stylistic means, in particular in terms of prose genres.
Karamzin himself characterizes his work in the best possible way, speaking about the activities of W. Shakespeare, however, following the same principles: “he did not want to observe the so-called unities, which our current dramatic authors so firmly adhere to. He did not want to put tight limits on his imagination. His spirit soared like an eagle and could not measure its soaring with the measure with which sparrows measure theirs.”
December 12, 1766 (family estate Znamenskoye, Simbirsk district, Kazan province (according to other sources - the village of Mikhailovka (now Preobrazhenka), Buzuluk district, Kazan province) - June 03, 1826 (St. Petersburg, Russian Empire)
On December 12 (December 1, Old Style), 1766, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin was born - Russian writer, poet, editor of the Moscow Journal (1791-1792) and the magazine Vestnik Evropy (1802-1803), honorary member Imperial Academy of Sciences (1818), full member of the Imperial Russian Academy, historian, first and only court historiographer, one of the first Russian reformers literary language, the founding father of Russian historiography and Russian sentimentalism.
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Contribution of N.M. It is difficult to overestimate Karamzin's contribution to Russian culture. Remembering everything that this man managed to do in the short 59 years of his earthly existence, it is impossible to ignore the fact that it was Karamzin who largely determined the face of the Russian 19th century - the “golden” age of Russian poetry, literature, historiography, source studies and other humanitarian areas of scientific research. knowledge. Thanks to linguistic research aimed at popularizing the literary language of poetry and prose, Karamzin gave Russian literature to his contemporaries. And if Pushkin is “our everything,” then Karamzin can safely be called “our Everything” with a capital letter. Without him, Vyazemsky, Pushkin, Baratynsky, Batyushkov and other poets of the so-called “Pushkin galaxy” would hardly have been possible.
“No matter what you turn to in our literature, everything began with Karamzin: journalism, criticism, stories, novels, historical stories, journalism, the study of history,” V.G. rightly noted later. Belinsky.
“History of the Russian State” N.M. Karamzin became not just the first Russian-language book on the history of Russia, accessible to a wide reader. Karamzin gave the Russian people the Fatherland in the full sense of the word. They say that, having closed the eighth and final volume, Count Fyodor Tolstoy, nicknamed the American, exclaimed: “It turns out that I have a Fatherland!” And he wasn't alone. All his contemporaries suddenly learned that they lived in a country with a thousand-year history and had something to be proud of. Before this, it was believed that before Peter I, who opened a “window to Europe,” there was nothing in Russia that was even remotely worthy of attention: the dark ages of backwardness and barbarism, boyar autocracy, primordially Russian laziness and bears in the streets...
Karamzin’s multi-volume work was not completed, but, having been published in the first quarter of the 19th century, it completely determined the historical identity of the nation for many years to come. All subsequent historiography was never able to generate anything more consistent with the “imperial” self-awareness that developed under the influence of Karamzin. Karamzin’s views left a deep, indelible mark in all areas of Russian culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, forming the foundations of the national mentality, which ultimately determined the path of development of Russian society and the state as a whole.
It is significant that in the 20th century, the edifice of Russian great power, which had collapsed under the attacks of revolutionary internationalists, was revived again by the 1930s - under different slogans, with different leaders, in a different ideological package. but... The very approach to the historiography of Russian history, both before 1917 and after, largely remained jingoistic and sentimental in Karamzin style.
N.M. Karamzin - early years
N.M. Karamzin was born on December 12 (1st century), 1766 in the village of Mikhailovka, Buzuluk district, Kazan province (according to other sources, in the family estate of Znamenskoye, Simbirsk district, Kazan province). Little is known about his early years: there are no letters, diaries, or memories of Karamzin himself about his childhood. He did not even know exactly his year of birth and almost all his life he believed that he was born in 1765. Only in his old age, having discovered the documents, did he become “younger” by one year.
The future historiographer grew up on the estate of his father, retired captain Mikhail Egorovich Karamzin (1724-1783), an average Simbirsk nobleman. Received a good home education. In 1778 he was sent to Moscow to the boarding school of Moscow University professor I.M. Shadena. At the same time, he attended lectures at the university in 1781-1782.
After graduating from the boarding school, in 1783 Karamzin entered service in the Preobrazhensky Regiment in St. Petersburg, where he met the young poet and future employee of his “Moscow Journal” Dmitriev. At the same time he published his first translation of S. Gesner’s idyll “The Wooden Leg”.
In 1784, Karamzin retired as a lieutenant and never served again, which was perceived in the society of that time as a challenge. After a short stay in Simbirsk, where he joined the Golden Crown Masonic lodge, Karamzin moved to Moscow and was introduced to the circle of N.I. Novikov. He settled in a house that belonged to Novikov’s “Friendly Scientific Society” and became the author and one of the publishers of the first children’s magazine “Children’s Reading for the Heart and Mind” (1787-1789), founded by Novikov. At the same time, Karamzin became close to the Pleshcheev family. For many years he had a tender platonic friendship with N.I. Pleshcheeva. In Moscow, Karamzin published his first translations, in which his interest in European and Russian history is clearly visible: Thomson’s “The Seasons,” Zhanlis’s “Country Evenings,” W. Shakespeare’s tragedy “Julius Caesar,” Lessing’s tragedy “Emilia Galotti.”
In 1789, Karamzin’s first original story, “Eugene and Yulia,” appeared in the magazine “Children’s Reading...”. The reader practically did not notice it.
Travel to Europe
According to many biographers, Karamzin was not inclined towards the mystical side of Freemasonry, remaining a supporter of its active and educational direction. To be more precise, by the end of the 1780s, Karamzin had already “become ill” with Masonic mysticism in its Russian version. Perhaps his cooling towards Freemasonry was one of the reasons for his departure to Europe, where he spent more than a year (1789-90), visiting Germany, Switzerland, France and England. In Europe, he met and talked (except for influential Freemasons) with European “masters of minds”: I. Kant, I. G. Herder, C. Bonnet, I. K. Lavater, J. F. Marmontel, visited museums, theaters, secular salons. In Paris, Karamzin listened to O. G. Mirabeau, M. Robespierre and other revolutionaries at the National Assembly, saw many outstanding political figures and was familiar with many. Apparently, revolutionary Paris in 1789 showed Karamzin how powerfully a word can influence a person: in print, when Parisians read pamphlets and leaflets with keen interest; oral, when revolutionary speakers spoke and controversy arose (an experience that could not be acquired in Russia at that time).
Karamzin did not have a very enthusiastic opinion about English parliamentarism (perhaps following in the footsteps of Rousseau), but he very highly valued the level of civilization at which English society as a whole was located.
Karamzin – journalist, publisher
In the fall of 1790, Karamzin returned to Moscow and soon organized the publication of the monthly “Moscow Journal” (1790-1792), in which most of the “Letters of a Russian Traveler” were published, telling about the revolutionary events in France, the story “Liodor”, “ Poor Lisa"," Natalya, the Boyar's Daughter ", " Flor Silin ", essays, stories, critical articles and poems. Karamzin attracted the entire literary elite of that time to collaborate in the magazine: his friends Dmitriev and Petrov, Kheraskov and Derzhavin, Lvov, Neledinsky-Meletsky and others. Karamzin’s articles approved a new literary direction - sentimentalism.
The Moscow Journal had only 210 regular subscribers, but for the end of the 18th century, this is the same as a hundred thousand circulation at the end of the 19th century. Moreover, the magazine was read precisely by those who “made the weather” in literary life countries: students, officials, young officers, minor employees of various government agencies (“archive youths”).
After Novikov’s arrest, the authorities became seriously interested in the publisher of the Moscow Journal. During interrogations in the Secret Expedition, they ask: was it Novikov who sent the “Russian traveler” abroad on a “special mission”? The Novikovites were people of high integrity and, of course, Karamzin was shielded, but because of these suspicions the magazine had to be stopped.
In the 1790s, Karamzin published the first Russian almanacs - “Aglaya” (1794 -1795) and “Aonids” (1796 -1799). In 1793, when in the third stage French Revolution The Jacobin dictatorship was established, which shocked Karamzin with its cruelty, Nikolai Mikhailovich abandoned some of his previous views. The dictatorship aroused in him serious doubts about the possibility of humanity to achieve prosperity. He sharply condemned the revolution and all violent methods of transforming society. The philosophy of despair and fatalism permeates his new works: the story “The Island of Bornholm” (1793); "Sierra Morena" (1795); poems “Melancholy”, “Message to A. A. Pleshcheev”, etc.
During this period, real literary fame came to Karamzin.
Fedor Glinka: “Out of 1,200 cadets, it was rare that he did not repeat by heart some page from The Island of Bornholm.”.
The name Erast, previously completely unpopular, is increasingly found in lists of nobles. There are rumors of successful and unsuccessful suicides in the spirit of Poor Lisa. The poisonous memoirist Vigel recalls that important Moscow nobles had already begun to make do with “almost like an equal with a thirty-year-old retired lieutenant”.
In July 1794, Karamzin’s life almost ended: on the way to the estate, in the steppe wilderness, he was attacked by robbers. Karamzin miraculously escaped, receiving two minor wounds.
In 1801, he married Elizaveta Protasova, a neighbor on the estate, whom he had known since childhood - at the time of the wedding they had known each other for almost 13 years.
Reformer of the Russian literary language
Already in the early 1790s, Karamzin was seriously thinking about the present and future of Russian literature. He writes to a friend: “I am deprived of the pleasure of reading much in my native language. We are still poor in writers. We have several poets who deserve to be read.” Of course, there were and are Russian writers: Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Fonvizin, Derzhavin, but there are no more than a dozen significant names. Karamzin is one of the first to understand that it is not a matter of talent - there are no less talents in Russia than in any other country. It’s just that Russian literature cannot move away from the long-outdated traditions of classicism, founded in the middle of the 18th century by the only theorist M.V. Lomonosov.
The reform of the literary language carried out by Lomonosov, as well as the theory of the “three calms” he created, met the tasks of the transition period from ancient to modern literature. A complete rejection of the use of familiar Church Slavonicisms in the language was then still premature and inappropriate. But the evolution of the language, which began under Catherine II, actively continued. The “Three Calms” proposed by Lomonosov were based not on lively colloquial speech, but on the witty thought of a theoretical writer. And this theory often put the authors in a difficult position: they had to use heavy, outdated Slavic expressions where in the spoken language they had long been replaced by others, softer and more elegant. The reader sometimes could not “cut through” the piles of outdated Slavicisms used in church books and records in order to understand the essence of this or that secular work.
Karamzin decided to bring the literary language closer to the spoken one. Therefore, one of his main goals was the further liberation of literature from Church Slavonicisms. In the preface to the second book of the almanac “Aonida,” he wrote: “The thunder of words alone only deafens us and never reaches our hearts.”
The second feature of Karamzin’s “new syllable” was the simplification of syntactic structures. The writer abandoned lengthy periods. In the “Pantheon of Russian Writers” he decisively declared: “Lomonosov’s prose cannot serve as a model for us at all: his long periods are tiresome, the arrangement of words is not always consistent with the flow of thoughts.”
Unlike Lomonosov, Karamzin strove to write in short, easily understandable sentences. This is still a model of good style and an example to follow in literature.
Karamzin’s third merit was the enrichment of the Russian language with a number of successful neologisms, which became firmly established in the main vocabulary. Among the innovations proposed by Karamzin are such widely known words in our time as “industry”, “development”, “sophistication”, “concentrate”, “touching”, “entertainment”, “humanity”, “public”, “ generally useful”, “influence” and a number of others.
When creating neologisms, Karamzin used mainly the method of tracing French words: “interesting” from “interessant”, “refined” from “raffine”, “development” from “developpement”, “touching” from “touchant”.
We know that even in the era of Peter the Great, many foreign words appeared in the Russian language, but they mostly replaced words that already existed in the Slavic language and were not a necessity. In addition, these words were often taken in their raw form, so they were very heavy and clumsy (“fortecia” instead of “fortress”, “victory” instead of “victory”, etc.). Karamzin, on the contrary, tried to give foreign words a Russian ending, adapting them to the requirements of Russian grammar: “serious”, “moral”, “aesthetic”, “audience”, “harmony”, “enthusiasm”, etc.
In his reform activities, Karamzin focused on the lively spoken language of educated people. And this was the key to the success of his work - he writes not scholarly treatises, but travel notes (“Letters of a Russian Traveler”), sentimental stories (“Bornholm Island”, “Poor Lisa”), poems, articles, translations from French, English and German .
"Arzamas" and "Conversation"
It is not surprising that most of the young writers contemporary to Karamzin accepted his transformations with a bang and willingly followed him. But, like any reformer, Karamzin had staunch opponents and worthy opponents.
A.S. stood at the head of Karamzin’s ideological opponents. Shishkov (1774-1841) – admiral, patriot, famous statesman of that time. An Old Believer, an admirer of Lomonosov's language, Shishkov, at first glance, was a classicist. But this point of view requires significant qualifications. In contrast to Karamzin's Europeanism, Shishkov put forward the idea of nationality in literature - the most important sign of a romantic worldview that was far from classicism. It turns out that Shishkov also joined for romantics, but not of a progressive, but of a conservative direction. His views can be recognized as a kind of forerunner of later Slavophilism and Pochvenism.
In 1803, Shishkov presented his “Discourse on the old and new syllables of the Russian language.” He reproached the “Karamzinists” for succumbing to the temptation of European revolutionary false teachings and advocated for the return of literature to oral folk art, to the vernacular, to Orthodox Church Slavonic books.
Shishkov was not a philologist. He dealt with the problems of literature and the Russian language, rather, as an amateur, so Admiral Shishkov’s attacks on Karamzin and his literary supporters sometimes looked not so much scientifically substantiated as unsubstantiated ideological. Karamzin’s language reform seemed to Shishkov, a warrior and defender of the Fatherland, unpatriotic and anti-religious: “Language is the soul of the people, the mirror of morals, a true indicator of enlightenment, an incessant witness of deeds. Where there is no faith in the hearts, there is no piety in the language. Where there is no love for the fatherland, there the language does not express domestic feelings.”.
Shishkov reproached Karamzin for the excessive use of barbarisms (“epoch”, “harmony”, “catastrophe”), he was disgusted by neologisms (“coup” as a translation of the word “revolution”), artificial words hurt his ear: “future”, “well-read” and etc.
And we must admit that sometimes his criticism was pointed and accurate.
The evasiveness and aesthetic affectation of the speech of the “Karamzinists” very soon became outdated and fell out of literary use. This is precisely the future that Shishkov predicted for them, believing that instead of the expression “when travel became a need of my soul,” one could simply say: “when I fell in love with traveling”; the refined and periphrased speech “motley crowds of rural oreads meet with dark bands of reptile pharaohs” can be replaced with the understandable expression “gypsies come to meet the village girls”, etc.
Shishkov and his supporters took the first steps in studying the monuments of ancient Russian writing, enthusiastically studied “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” studied folklore, advocated the rapprochement of Russia with the Slavic world and recognized the need to bring the “Slovenian” style closer to the common language.
In a dispute with the translator Karamzin, Shishkov put forward a compelling argument about the “idiomatic nature” of each language, about the unique originality of its phraseological systems, which make it impossible to literally translate a thought or true semantic meaning from one language to another. For example, when translated literally into French, the expression “old horseradish” loses its figurative meaning and “means only the thing itself, but in the metaphysical sense it has no circle of signification.”
In defiance of Karamzin, Shishkov proposed his own reform of the Russian language. He proposed to designate concepts and feelings missing in our everyday life with new words formed from the roots not of French, but of Russian and Old Church Slavonic. Instead of Karamzin’s “influence” he suggested “influx”, instead of “development” - “vegetation”, instead of “actor” - “actor”, instead of “individuality” - “intelligence”, “wet feet” instead of “galoshes” and “wandering” instead "labyrinth". Most of his innovations did not take root in the Russian language.
It is impossible not to recognize Shishkov’s ardent love for the Russian language; One cannot help but admit that the passion for everything foreign, especially French, has gone too far in Russia. Ultimately, this led to the fact that the language of the common people, the peasant, became very different from the language of the cultural classes. But we cannot ignore the fact that the natural process of the language evolution that had begun could not be stopped. It was impossible to forcefully bring back into use the expressions that were already outdated at that time, which were proposed by Shishkov: “zane”, “ugly”, “izhe”, “yako” and others.
Karamzin did not even respond to the accusations of Shishkov and his supporters, knowing firmly that they were guided exclusively by pious and patriotic feelings. Subsequently, Karamzin himself and his most talented supporters (Vyazemsky, Pushkin, Batyushkov) followed the very valuable instructions of the “Shishkovites” on the need to “return to their roots” and examples of their own history. But then they could not understand each other.
The pathos and ardent patriotism of A.S.’s articles. Shishkova evoked a sympathetic attitude among many writers. And when Shishkov, together with G. R. Derzhavin, founded literary society"Conversation of Lovers" Russian word"(1811) with a charter and its own journal, P. A. Katenin, I. A. Krylov, and later V. K. Kuchelbecker and A. S. Griboedov immediately joined this society. One of the active participants in the “Conversation...”, the prolific playwright A. A. Shakhovskoy, in the comedy “New Stern”, viciously ridiculed Karamzin, and in the comedy “A Lesson for Coquettes, or Lipetsk Waters”, in the person of the “balladeer” Fialkin, he created a parody image of V. A. Zhukovsky.
This caused a unanimous rebuff from young people who supported Karamzin’s literary authority. D. V. Dashkov, P. A. Vyazemsky, D. N. Bludov composed several witty pamphlets addressed to Shakhovsky and other members of the “Conversation...”. In “Vision in the Arzamas Tavern” Bludov gave the circle of young defenders of Karamzin and Zhukovsky the name “Society of Unknown Arzamas Writers” or simply “Arzamas”.
The organizational structure of this society, founded in the fall of 1815, was dominated by a cheerful spirit of parody of the serious “Conversation...”. In contrast to the official pomposity, simplicity, naturalness, and openness prevailed here; a large place was given to jokes and games.
Parodying the official ritual of the “Conversation...”, upon joining Arzamas, everyone had to read a “funeral speech” to his “deceased” predecessor from among the living members of the “Conversation...” or Russian Academy sciences (Count D.I. Khvostov, S.A. Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, A.S. Shishkov himself, etc.). “Funeral speeches” were a form of literary struggle: they parodied high genres and ridiculed the stylistic archaism of the poetic works of the “talkers.” At the meetings of the society, the humorous genres of Russian poetry were honed, a bold and decisive struggle was waged against all kinds of officialdom, and a type of independent Russian writer, free from the pressure of any ideological conventions, was formed. And although P. A. Vyazemsky is one of the organizers and active participants of the society - in mature years condemned the youthful mischief and intransigence of his like-minded people (in particular, the rituals of “funeral services” for living literary opponents), he rightly called “Arzamas” a school of “literary camaraderie” and mutual creative learning. The Arzamas and Beseda societies soon became centers of literary life and social struggle in the first quarter of the 19th century. “Arzamas” included such famous people as Zhukovsky (pseudonym - Svetlana), Vyazemsky (Asmodeus), Pushkin (Cricket), Batyushkov (Achilles) and others.
"Conversation" disbanded after Derzhavin's death in 1816; "Arzamas", having lost its main opponent, ceased to exist by 1818.
Thus, by the mid-1790s, Karamzin became the recognized head of Russian sentimentalism, which discovered not only new page in Russian literature, and Russian fiction in general. Russian readers, who had previously absorbed only French novels, and the works of the enlighteners, “Letters of a Russian Traveler” and “Poor Liza” were enthusiastically received, and Russian writers and poets (both “besedchiki” and “Arzamas people”) realized that they could and should write in their native language.
Karamzin and Alexander I: a symphony with power?
In 1802 - 1803, Karamzin published the journal “Bulletin of Europe”, in which literature and politics predominated. Largely thanks to the confrontation with Shishkov, a new concept appeared in Karamzin’s critical articles. aesthetic program the formation of Russian literature as nationally distinctive. Karamzin, unlike Shishkov, saw the key to the uniqueness of Russian culture not so much in adherence to ritual antiquity and religiosity, but in the events of Russian history. The most striking illustration of his views was the story “Martha the Posadnitsa or the Conquest of Novagorod.”
In his political articles of 1802-1803, Karamzin, as a rule, made recommendations to the government, the main one of which was educating the nation for the sake of the prosperity of the autocratic state.
These ideas were generally close to Emperor Alexander I, the grandson of Catherine the Great, who at one time also dreamed of an “enlightened monarchy” and a complete symphony between the authorities and a European educated society. Karamzin’s response to the coup of March 11, 1801 and the accession to the throne of Alexander I was “Historical eulogy to Catherine the Second” (1802), where Karamzin expressed his views on the essence of the monarchy in Russia, as well as the duties of the monarch and his subjects. The “eulogium” was approved by the sovereign as a collection of examples for the young monarch and was favorably received by him. Alexander I, obviously, was interested in Karamzin’s historical research, and the emperor rightly decided that the great country simply needed to remember its no less great past. And if you don’t remember, then at least create it again...
In 1803, through the mediation of the tsar’s educator M.N. Muravyov - poet, historian, teacher, one of the most educated people of that time - N.M. Karamzin received the official title of court historiographer with a pension of 2,000 rubles. (A pension of 2,000 rubles a year was then assigned to officials who, according to the Table of Ranks, had ranks no lower than general). Later, I.V. Kireevsky, referring to Karamzin himself, wrote about Muravyov: “Who knows, maybe without his thoughtful and warm assistance Karamzin would not have had the means to accomplish his great deed.”
In 1804, Karamzin practically retired from literary and publishing activities and began to create the “History of the Russian State,” on which he worked until the end of his days. With his influence M.N. Muravyov made many previously unknown and even “secret” materials available to the historian, and opened libraries and archives for him. Modern historians can only dream of such favorable working conditions. Therefore, in our opinion, talking about “The History of the Russian State” as a “scientific feat” by N.M. Karamzin, not entirely fair. The court historiographer was on duty, conscientiously doing the work for which he was paid. Accordingly, he had to write the kind of history that was currently needed by the customer, namely, Emperor Alexander I, who at the first stage of his reign showed sympathy for European liberalism.
However, under the influence of studies in Russian history, by 1810 Karamzin had become a consistent conservative. During this period, the system of his political views was finally formed. Karamzin’s statements that he is a “republican at heart” can only be adequately interpreted if we consider that we are talking about “Plato’s Republic of the Wise Men,” an ideal social order based on state virtue, strict regulation and the renunciation of personal freedom . At the beginning of 1810, Karamzin, through his relative Count F.V. Rostopchin, met in Moscow the leader of the “conservative party” at court - Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna (sister of Alexander I) and began to constantly visit her residence in Tver. The Grand Duchess's salon represented the center of conservative opposition to the liberal-Western course, personified by the figure of M. M. Speransky. In this salon, Karamzin read excerpts from his “History...”, and then he met the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, who became one of his patrons.
In 1811, at the request of Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, Karamzin wrote a note “On ancient and new Russia in its political and civil relations,” in which he outlined his ideas about the ideal structure Russian state and sharply criticized the policies of Alexander I and his immediate predecessors: Paul I, Catherine II and Peter I. In the 19th century, the note was never published in full and was circulated only in handwritten copies. In Soviet times, the thoughts expressed by Karamzin in his message were perceived as a reaction of the extremely conservative nobility to the reforms of M. M. Speransky. The author himself was branded a “reactionary”, an opponent of the liberation of the peasantry and other liberal steps of the government of Alexander I.
However, during the first full publication of the note in 1988, Yu. M. Lotman revealed its deeper content. In this document, Karamzin made a justified criticism of unprepared bureaucratic reforms carried out from above. Praising Alexander I, the author of the note at the same time attacks his advisers, meaning, of course, Speransky, who stood for constitutional reforms. Karamzin takes it upon himself to prove in detail, with references to historical examples, to the Tsar that Russia is not ready, either historically or politically, for the abolition of serfdom and the limitation of the autocratic monarchy by the constitution (following the example of the European powers). Some of his arguments (for example, about the futility of liberating peasants without land, the impossibility of constitutional democracy in Russia) even today look quite convincing and historically correct.
Along with a review of Russian history and criticism of the political course of Emperor Alexander I, the note contained a complete, original and very complex in its theoretical content concept of autocracy as a special, distinctively Russian type of power, closely associated with Orthodoxy.
At the same time, Karamzin refused to identify “true autocracy” with despotism, tyranny or arbitrariness. He believed that such deviations from the norms were due to chance (Ivan IV the Terrible, Paul I) and were quickly eliminated by the inertia of the tradition of “wise” and “virtuous” monarchical rule. In cases of a sharp weakening and even complete absence of the supreme state and church power (for example, during the Time of Troubles), this powerful tradition led, within a short historical period, to the restoration of autocracy. Autocracy was the “palladium of Russia”, the main reason for its power and prosperity. Therefore, the basic principles of monarchical rule in Russia, according to Karamzin, should have been preserved in the future. They should have been supplemented only by proper policies in the field of legislation and education, which would not lead to the undermining of the autocracy, but to its maximum strengthening. With such an understanding of autocracy, any attempt to limit it would be a crime against Russian history and the Russian people.
Initially, Karamzin’s note only irritated the young emperor, who did not like criticism of his actions. In this note, the historiographer showed himself plus royaliste que le roi (a greater royalist than the king himself). However, subsequently the brilliant “hymn to the Russian autocracy” as presented by Karamzin undoubtedly had its effect. After the War of 1812, Napoleon's winner Alexander I curtailed many of his liberal projects: Speransky's reforms were not completed, the constitution and the very idea of limiting autocracy remained only in the minds of future Decembrists. And already in the 1830s, Karamzin’s concept actually formed the basis of the ideology of the Russian Empire, designated the “theory official nationality» Count S. Uvarov (Orthodoxy-Autocracy-Nationalism).
Before the publication of the first 8 volumes of “History...” Karamzin lived in Moscow, from where he traveled only to Tver to visit Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna and Nizhny Novgorod, during the occupation of Moscow by the French. He usually spent the summer in Ostafyevo, the estate of Prince Andrei Ivanovich Vyazemsky, whose illegitimate daughter, Ekaterina Andreevna, Karamzin married in 1804. (Karamzin’s first wife, Elizaveta Ivanovna Protasova, died in 1802).
In the last 10 years of his life, which Karamzin spent in St. Petersburg, he became very close to the royal family. Although Emperor Alexander I had a reserved attitude towards Karamzin since the submission of the Note, Karamzin often spent the summer in Tsarskoe Selo. At the request of the empresses (Maria Feodorovna and Elizaveta Alekseevna), he more than once had frank political conversations with Emperor Alexander, in which he acted as a spokesman for the opinions of opponents of drastic liberal reforms. In 1819-1825, Karamzin passionately rebelled against the sovereign’s intentions regarding Poland (submitted a note “Opinion of a Russian Citizen”), condemned the increase in state taxes in peacetime, spoke about the absurd provincial system of finance, criticized the system of military settlements, the activities of the Ministry of Education, pointed out the sovereign’s strange choice of some of the most important dignitaries (for example, Arakcheev), spoke of the need to reduce internal troops, about the imaginary correction of roads, which was so painful for the people, and constantly pointed out the need to have firm laws, civil and state.
Of course, having such intercessors behind us as both empresses and Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, it was possible to criticize, and argue, and show civil courage, and try to guide the monarch “on the true path.” It is not for nothing that Emperor Alexander I was called the “mysterious sphinx” by both his contemporaries and subsequent historians of his reign. In words, the sovereign agreed with Karamzin’s critical remarks regarding military settlements, recognized the need to “give fundamental laws to Russia,” and also to revise some aspects of domestic policy, but it so happened in our country that in reality, all the wise advice of government officials remains “fruitless for dear Fatherland"...
Karamzin as a historian
Karamzin is our first historian and last chronicler.
With his criticism he belongs to history,
simplicity and apothegms - the chronicle.
A.S. Pushkin
Even from the point of view of modern Karamzin historical science, no one dared to call the 12 volumes of his “History of the Russian State” a scientific work. Even then it was clear to everyone that the honorary title of court historiographer could not make a writer a historian, give him the appropriate knowledge and proper training.
But, on the other hand, Karamzin initially did not set himself the task of taking on the role of a researcher. The newly minted historiographer did not intend to write a scientific treatise and appropriate the laurels of his illustrious predecessors - Schlözer, Miller, Tatishchev, Shcherbatov, Boltin, etc.
Preliminary critical work on sources for Karamzin is only “a heavy tribute to reliability.” He was, first of all, a writer, and therefore wanted to apply his literary talent to ready-made material: “to select, animate, color” and thus make from Russian history “something attractive, strong, worthy of the attention of not only Russians, but also foreigners." And he accomplished this task brilliantly.
Today it is impossible not to agree that at the beginning of the 19th century, source studies, paleography and other auxiliary historical disciplines were in their infancy. Therefore, to demand from the writer Karamzin professional criticism, as well as strict adherence to one or another methodology for working with historical sources, is simply ridiculous.
You can often hear the opinion that Karamzin simply beautifully rewrote the “Russian History from Ancient Times” written in a long-outdated, difficult-to-read style by Prince M.M. Shcherbatov, introduced some of his own thoughts from it, and thereby created a book for lovers of fascinating reading in family circle. This is wrong.
Naturally, when writing his “History...” Karamzin actively used the experience and works of his predecessors - Schlozer and Shcherbatov. Shcherbatov helped Karamzin navigate the sources of Russian history, significantly influencing both the choice of material and its arrangement in the text. Whether by chance or not, Karamzin brought the “History of the Russian State” to exactly the same place as Shcherbatov’s “History”. However, in addition to following the scheme already worked out by his predecessors, Karamzin provides in his work a lot of references to extensive foreign historiography, almost unfamiliar to the Russian reader. While working on his “History...”, he for the first time introduced into scientific circulation a mass of unknown and previously unstudied sources. These are Byzantine and Livonian chronicles, information from foreigners about the population of ancient Rus', as well as a large number of Russian chronicles that have not yet been touched by the hand of a historian. For comparison: M.M. Shcherbatov used only 21 Russian chronicles when writing his work, Karamzin actively cites more than 40. In addition to the chronicles, Karamzin involved in the study monuments of ancient Russian law and ancient Russian fiction. A special chapter of “History...” is dedicated to “Russian Truth,” and a number of pages are devoted to the just discovered “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.”
Thanks to the diligent help of the directors of the Moscow Archive of the Ministry (Collegium) of Foreign Affairs N. N. Bantysh-Kamensky and A. F. Malinovsky, Karamzin was able to use those documents and materials that were not available to his predecessors. Many valuable manuscripts were provided by the Synodal Repository, libraries of monasteries (Trinity Lavra, Volokolamsk Monastery and others), as well as private collections of manuscripts by Musin-Pushkin and N.P. Rumyantseva. Karamzin received especially many documents from Chancellor Rumyantsev, who collected historical materials in Russia and abroad through his numerous agents, as well as from A.I. Turgenev, who compiled a collection of documents from the papal archive.
Many of the sources used by Karamzin were lost during the Moscow fire of 1812 and were preserved only in his “History...” and extensive “Notes” to its text. Thus, Karamzin’s work, to some extent, itself acquired the status of a historical source, to which professional historians have every right to refer.
Among the main shortcomings of the “History of the Russian State,” the author’s peculiar view of the tasks of the historian is traditionally noted. According to Karamzin, “knowledge” and “learning” in a historian “do not replace the talent to depict actions.” Before the artistic task of history, even the moral one, which Karamzin’s patron, M.N., set for himself, recedes into the background. Muravyov. The characteristics of historical characters are given by Karamzin exclusively in a literary-romantic vein, characteristic of the direction of Russian sentimentalism he created. Karamzin’s first Russian princes are distinguished by their “ardent romantic passion” for conquest, their squad is distinguished by their nobility and loyal spirit, the “rabble” sometimes shows dissatisfaction, raising rebellions, but ultimately agrees with the wisdom of the noble rulers, etc., etc. P.
Meanwhile, the previous generation of historians, under the influence of Schlözer, had long ago developed the idea of critical history, and among Karamzin’s contemporaries, the demands for criticism of historical sources, despite the lack of a clear methodology, were generally accepted. And the next generation has already made a demand philosophical history– with the identification of the laws of development of the state and society, recognition of the main driving forces and laws of the historical process. Therefore, Karamzin’s overly “literary” creation was immediately subjected to well-founded criticism.
According to the idea, firmly rooted in Russian and foreign historiography of the 17th - 18th centuries, the development of the historical process depends on the development of monarchical power. Karamzin does not deviate one iota from this idea: monarchical power exalted Russia during the Kiev period; the division of power between the princes was a political mistake, which was corrected by the statesmanship of the Moscow princes - the collectors of Rus'. At the same time, it was the princes who corrected its consequences - the fragmentation of Rus' and the Tatar yoke.
But before reproaching Karamzin for not bringing anything new into the development of Russian historiography, it should be remembered that the author of “History of the Russian State” did not at all set himself the task of philosophical understanding of the historical process or blind imitation of the ideas of Western European romantics (F. Guizot , F. Mignet, J. Meschlet), who even then started talking about the “class struggle” and the “spirit of the people” as the main driving force of history. Karamzin was not at all interested in historical criticism, and he deliberately rejected the “philosophical” direction in history. The researcher’s conclusions from historical material, as well as his subjective fabrications, seem to Karamzin to be “metaphysics”, which is not suitable “for depicting action and character.”
Thus, with his unique views on the tasks of a historian, Karamzin, by and large, remained outside the dominant trends of Russian and European historiography of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course, he participated in its consistent development, but only in the form of an object for constant criticism and the clearest example of how history does not need to be written.
Reaction of contemporaries
Karamzin's contemporaries - readers and fans - enthusiastically accepted his new “historical” work. The first eight volumes of “History of the Russian State” were printed in 1816-1817 and went on sale in February 1818. A huge circulation of three thousand for that time was sold out in 25 days. (And this despite the hefty price of 50 rubles). A second edition was immediately required, which was carried out in 1818-1819 by I.V. Slenin. In 1821 a new, ninth volume was published, and in 1824 the next two. The author did not have time to finish the twelfth volume of his work, which was published in 1829, almost three years after his death.
“History...” was admired by Karamzin’s literary friends and the vast public of non-specialist readers who suddenly discovered, like Count Tolstoy the American, that their Fatherland has a history. According to A.S. Pushkin, “everyone, even secular women, rushed to read the history of their fatherland, hitherto unknown to them. She was a new discovery for them. Ancient Russia seemed to be found by Karamzin, like America by Columbus.”
Liberal intellectual circles of the 1820s found Karamzin’s “History...” backward in general views and overly tendentious:
Research specialists, as already mentioned, treated Karamzin’s work precisely as a work, sometimes even belittling it historical meaning. To many, Karamzin’s enterprise itself seemed too risky - to undertake to write such an extensive work given the then state of Russian historical science.
Already during Karamzin’s lifetime, critical analyzes of his “History...” appeared, and soon after the author’s death, attempts were made to determine the general significance of this work in historiography. Lelevel pointed out an involuntary distortion of the truth due to Karamzin’s patriotic, religious and political hobbies. Artsybashev showed to what extent the writing of “history” is harmed literary devices non-professional historian. Pogodin summed up all the shortcomings of the History, and N.A. Polevoy saw the general reason for these shortcomings in the fact that “Karamzin is a writer not of our time.” All his points of view, both in literature and in philosophy, politics and history, became outdated with the advent of new influences of European romanticism in Russia. In contrast to Karamzin, Polevoy soon wrote his six-volume “History of the Russian People,” where he completely surrendered to the ideas of Guizot and other Western European romantics. Contemporaries assessed this work as an “undignified parody” of Karamzin, subjecting the author to rather vicious, and not always deserved, attacks.
In the 1830s, Karamzin’s “History...” became the banner of the officially “Russian” movement. With the assistance of the same Pogodin, its scientific rehabilitation is being carried out, which is fully consistent with the spirit of Uvarov’s “theory of official nationality”.
In the second half of the 19th century, based on the “History...”, a lot of popular science articles and other texts were written, which served as the basis for well-known educational and teaching aids. Based on the historical stories of Karamzin, many works were created for children and youth, the purpose of which for many years was to instill patriotism, loyalty to civic duty, and the responsibility of the younger generation for the fate of their Motherland. This book, in our opinion, played a decisive role in shaping the views of more than one generation of Russian people, having a significant impact on the foundations of patriotic education of youth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
December 14. Karamzin's finale.
The death of Emperor Alexander I and the December events of 1925 deeply shocked N.M. Karamzin and had a negative impact on his health.
On December 14, 1825, having received news of the uprising, the historian goes out into the street: “I saw terrible faces, heard terrible words, five or six stones fell at my feet.”
Karamzin, of course, regarded the action of the nobility against their sovereign as a rebellion and a serious crime. But among the rebels there were so many acquaintances: the Muravyov brothers, Nikolai Turgenev, Bestuzhev, Ryleev, Kuchelbecker (he translated Karamzin’s “History” into German).
A few days later Karamzin will say about the Decembrists: “The delusions and crimes of these young people are the delusions and crimes of our century.”
On December 14, during his movements around St. Petersburg, Karamzin caught a severe cold and contracted pneumonia. In the eyes of his contemporaries, he was another victim of this day: his idea of the world collapsed, his faith in the future was lost, and a new king ascended to the throne, very far from the ideal image of an enlightened monarch. Half-ill, Karamzin visited the palace every day, where he talked with Empress Maria Feodorovna, moving from memories of the late Emperor Alexander to discussions about the tasks of the future reign.
Karamzin could no longer write. The XII volume of “History...” froze during the interregnum of 1611 - 1612. The last words of the last volume are about a small Russian fortress: “Nut did not give up.” The last thing that Karamzin actually managed to do in the spring of 1826 was that, together with Zhukovsky, he persuaded Nicholas I to return Pushkin from exile. A few years later, the emperor tried to pass the baton of the first historiographer of Russia to the poet, but the “sun of Russian poetry” somehow did not fit into the role of state ideologist and theorist...
In the spring of 1826 N.M. Karamzin, on the advice of doctors, decided to go to Southern France or Italy for treatment. Nicholas I agreed to sponsor his trip and kindly placed a frigate of the Imperial Navy at the disposal of the historiographer. But Karamzin was already too weak to travel. He died on May 22 (June 3), 1826 in St. Petersburg. He was buried at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
Table of contents
I. Introduction………………………………………………………………………...3
II. Biography of N.M. Karamzin…………………………………………..… .4
III. Peculiarities of creativity of N.M. Karamzin…………………………………..7
IV. Conclusion……………………………………………………………..18
V. Bibliography…………………………………………… …………………19
Introduction
Whatever you turn to in our literature, everything began with Karamzin: journalism, criticism, stories, novels, historical stories, journalism, the study of history.
V.G. Belinsky.
In the last decades of the 18th century, a new literary trend gradually emerged in Russia - sentimentalism. Determining its features, P.A. Vyazemsky pointed to the “elegant depiction of the basic and everyday.” In contrast to classicism, sentimentalists declared a cult of feelings, not reason, and glorified the common man, the liberation and improvement of his natural principles. The hero of works of sentimentalism is not a heroic person, but simply a person, with his rich inner world, various experiences, and self-esteem. The main goal of noble sentimentalists is to restore the trampled human dignity of the serf peasant in the eyes of society, to reveal his spiritual wealth, and to portray family and civic virtues.
The favorite genres of sentimentalism were elegy, epistle, epistolary novel (novel in letters), diary, travel, and story. The dominance of drama is replaced by epic storytelling. The syllable becomes sensitive, melodious, and emphatically emotional. The first and largest representative of sentimentalism was Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin.
Biography of N.M. Karamzin
Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826) was born on December 1 in the village of Mikhailovka, Simbirsk province, into the family of a landowner. Received a good home education. At the age of 14 he began studying at the Moscow private boarding school of Professor Schaden. After graduating in 1873, he came to the Preobrazhensky Regiment in St. Petersburg, where he met the young poet and future employee of his “Moscow Journal” I. Dmitriev. At the same time he published his first translation of S. Gesner’s idyll “The Wooden Leg”. Having retired with the rank of second lieutenant in 1784, he moved to Moscow, where he became one of the active participants in the magazine “Children's Reading for the Heart and Mind,” published by N. Novikov, and became close to the Freemasons. Engaged in translations of religious and moral works. Since 1787, he regularly publishes his translations of Thomson’s “The Seasons,” Genlis’s “Country Evenings,” Shakespeare’s Tragedy “Julius Caesar,” and Lessing’s tragedy “Emilia Galotti.”
In 1789, Karamzin’s first original story, “Eugene and Yulia,” appeared in the magazine “Children’s Reading.” In the spring he goes on a trip to Europe: he visits Germany, Switzerland, France, where he observed the activities of the revolutionary government. In June 1790 he moved from France to England.
In the fall he returns to Moscow and soon begins publishing the monthly “Moscow Magazine”, in which most of the “Letters of a Russian Traveler”, the stories “Liodor”, “Poor Liza”, “Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter”, “Flor Silin”, essays, stories, criticism and poems. Karamzin attracted I. Dmitriev, A. Petrov, M. Kheraskov, G. Derzhavin, Lvov, Neledinsky-Meletsky and others to collaborate in the magazine. Karamzin's articles approved a new literary direction - sentimentalism. In the 1970s, Karamzin published the first Russian almanacs - “Aglaya” and “Aonids”. The year came 1793, when, at the third stage of the French Revolution, the Jacobin dictatorship was established, which shocked Karamzin with its cruelty. The dictatorship aroused in him doubts about the possibility for humanity to achieve prosperity. He condemned the revolution. The philosophy of despair and fatalism permeates his new works: the stories “Bornholm Island” (1793), “Sierra Morena” (1795), poems: “Melancholy”, “Message to A.A. Pleshcheev” and others.
By the mid-1790s, Karamzin became the recognized head of Russian sentimentalism, which opened a new page in Russian literature. He was an indisputable authority for V. Zhukovsky, K. Batyushkov, young Pushkin.
In 1802-03, Karamzin published the journal “Bulletin of Europe”, in which literature and politics predominated. In Karamzin’s critical articles, a new aesthetic program emerged, which contributed to the formation of Russian literature as nationally distinctive. Karamzin saw the key to the identity of Russian culture in history. The most striking illustration of his views was the story “Martha the Posadnitsa.” In his political articles, Karamzin made recommendations to the government, pointing out the role of education.
Trying to influence Tsar Alexander I, Karamzin gave him his “Note on Ancient and New Russia” (1811), causing his irritation. In 1819, he submitted a new note - “Opinion of a Russian Citizen”, which caused even greater dissatisfaction with the Tsar. However, Karamzin did not abandon his belief in the salvation of an enlightened autocracy and condemned the Decembrist uprising. However, Karamzin the artist was still highly valued by young writers, even those who did not share his political convictions.
In 1803, through M. Muravyov, Karamzin received the official title of court historiographer. In 1804, he began to create the “History of the Russian State,” which he worked on until the end of his days, but did not complete. In 1818, the first 8 volumes of History, Karamzin’s greatest scientific and cultural feat, were published. In 1821, the 9th volume, dedicated to the reign of Ivan the Terrible, was published, and in 18245 - the 10th and 11th, about Fyodor Ioannovich and Boris Godunov. Death interrupted work on the 12th volume. This happened on May 22 (June 3, new style) 1826 in St. Petersburg.
Peculiarities of creativity of N.M. Karamzin
Karamzin's worldview.
From the beginning of the century, Karamzin was firmly assigned to literary residence in anthologies. It was published occasionally, but not for reading purposes, but for educational purposes. The reader had a firm conviction that there was no need to take Karamzin into his hands, especially since in the briefest information the matter could not be avoided without the word “conservative”. Karamzin sacredly believed in man and his improvement, in reason and enlightenment: “My mental and sensitive power will be destroyed forever, before I believe that this world is a cave of robbers and villains, virtue is an alien plant on the globe, enlightenment is a sharp a dagger in the hands of a murderer.”
Karamzin discovered Shakespeare for the Russian reader by translating Julius Caesar into the times of youthful tyrant-fighting sentiments, releasing it with an enthusiastic introduction in 1787 - this date should be considered the starting date in the procession of the works of the English tragedian in Russia.
Karamzin’s world is a world of a walking spirit, in continuous movement, which has absorbed everything that constituted the content of the pre-Pushkin era. No one did as much to saturate the air of the era with literary and spiritual content as Karamzin, who walked many pre-Pushkin roads.
In addition, one must see the silhouette of Karamzin, expressing the spiritual content of the era, on the vast historical horizon, when one century gave way to another, and the great writer was destined to play the role of the last and the first. As the finalizer - the “head of the school” of Russian sentimentalism - he was the last writer of the 18th century; as the discoverer of a new literary field - historical prose, as a transformer of the Russian literary language - he undoubtedly became the first - in a temporary sense - writer of the 19th century, providing Russian literature with access to the world stage. The name Karamzin was the first to appear in German, French and English literature.
Karamzin and classicists.
The classicists saw the world in a “halo of splendor.” Karamzin took a step towards seeing a person in a dressing gown, alone with himself, giving preference to “middle age” over youth and old age. The majesty of the Russian classicists was not discarded by Karamzin - it was suitable for showing history in faces.
Karamzin came to literature when classicism suffered its first defeat: Derzhavin in the 90s of the 18th century was already recognized as the largest Russian poet, despite his complete disregard for traditions and rules. The next blow to classicism was dealt by Karamzin. A theorist and reformer of Russian noble literary culture, Karamzin took up arms against the foundations of the aesthetics of classicism. The pathos of his work was a call for the depiction of “natural, unadorned nature”; to the depiction of “true feelings”, not bound by the conventions of classicism’s ideas about characters and passions; a call for the depiction of small things and everyday details, in which there was no heroism, no sublimity, no exclusivity, but in which a fresh, unprejudiced look revealed “unexplored beauties characteristic of dreamy and modest pleasure.” However, one should not think that “natural nature”, “true feelings” and attentiveness to “inconspicuous details” turned Karamzin into a realist who sought to depict the world in all its truthful diversity. The worldview associated with the noble sentimentalism of Karamzin, like the worldview associated with classicism, was conducive to only limited and largely distorted ideas about the world and man.
Karamzin is a reformer.
Karamzin, if we consider his activities as a whole, was a representative of broad layers of the Russian nobility. All of Karamzin’s reform activities met the interests of the nobility and, first of all, the Europeanization of Russian culture.
Karamzin, following the philosophy and theory of sentimentalism, is aware of the relative importance of the author’s personality in the work and the significance of his individual view of the world. In his works he offers a new connection between the depicted reality and the author: personal perception, personal feeling. Karamzin structured the period so that there was a sense of the presence of the author. It was the presence of the author that transformed Karamzin’s prose into something completely new compared to the novel and story of classicism. Let us consider the artistic techniques most often used by Karamzin using the example of his story “Natalya, the Boyar’s Daughter.”
The stylistic features of the story “Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter” are inextricably linked with the content, ideological orientation of this work, with its system of images and genre originality. The story reflects character traits style characteristic of Karamzin’s fictional prose as a whole. The subjectivism of Karamzin’s creative method and the writer’s increased interest in the emotional impact of his works on the reader determine the abundance of periphrases, comparisons, likenings, etc. in them.
Among the various artistic techniques - first of all, tropes, which give the author great opportunities to express his personal attitude to an object, phenomenon (i.e., to show what impression the author experiences, or with what the impression made on him by some object can be compared, phenomenon). Periphrases that are generally characteristic of the poetics of sentimentalists are also used in “Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter.” So, instead of saying that boyar Matvey was old, close to death, Karamzin writes: “the quiet fluttering of the heart heralded the onset of life’s evening and the approach of night.” Boyar Matvey’s wife did not die, but “fell asleep in eternal sleep.” Winter is the “queen of cold,” etc.
There are substantivized adjectives in the story that are not adjectives in ordinary speech: “What are you doing, reckless one!”
In using epithets, Karamzin takes mainly two routes. One row of epithets should highlight the internal, “psychological” side of the subject, taking into account the impression that the subject makes directly on the “heart” of the author (and, therefore, on the “heart” of the reader). The epithets of this series seem to be devoid of real content. Such epithets are a characteristic phenomenon in the system of visual means of sentimentalist writers. And the stories contain “the tops of gentle mountains”, “a kind ghost”, “sweet dreams”, the boyar Matvey has “a clean hand and a pure heart”, Natalya becomes “cloudier”. It is curious that Karamzin applies the same epithets to various objects and concepts: “Cruel! (she thought). Cruel!" - this epithet refers to Alexei, and a few lines later Karamzin calls the frost “cruel.”
Karamzin uses another series of epithets in order to enliven the objects and paintings he creates, to influence the reader’s visual perception, “to make the objects he describes sparkle, light up, shine. This is how he creates decorative painting.
In addition to the epithets of these types, one more type of epithets can be noted in Karamzin, which is much less common. Through this “row” of epithets, Karamzin conveys impressions perceived as if from the auditory side, when any quality, by the expression it produces, can be equated to concepts perceived by ear. “The moon descended, and a silver ring was rattled at the boyar gate.”; The ringing of silver can be clearly heard here - this is the main function of the epithet “silver”, and not to indicate what material the ring was made of.
Appeals that are characteristic of many of Karamzin’s works appear many times in “Natalya, the Boyar’s Daughter.” Their function is to give the story a more emotional character and introduce into the story an element of closer communication between the author and the readers, which obliges the reader to treat the events depicted in the work with greater confidence.
The story “Natalya, the Boyar’s Daughter,” like the rest of Karamzin’s prose, is distinguished by its great melodiousness, reminiscent of the style of poetic speech. The melodiousness of Karamzin's prose is achieved mainly by the rhythmic organization and musicality of the speech material (the presence of repetitions, inversions, exclamations, dactylic endings, etc.).
The closeness of Karamzin's prose works led to the widespread use of poetic phraseology in them. The transfer of phraseological means of poetic styles into prose creates an artistic and poetic flavor of Karamzin’s prose works.
Brief description of Karamzin's main prose works.
Karamzin's main prose works are “Liodor”, “Eugene and Julia”, “Julia”, “A Knight of Our Time”, in which Karamzin depicted Russian noble life. The main goal of noble sentimentalists is to restore the trampled human dignity of the serf peasant in the eyes of society, to reveal his spiritual wealth, and to portray family and civic virtues. The same features can be found in Karamzin’s stories from peasant life - “Poor Liza” (1792) and “Frol Silin, a virtuous man” (1791). The most significant artistic expression of the writer’s interests was his story “Natalya, the Boyar’s Daughter,” the characteristics of which are given above. Sometimes Karamzin goes into completely fabulous, fabulous times in his imagination and creates fairy tales, for example, “Dense Forest” (1794) and “Bornholm Island”. The latter, containing a description of a rocky island and a medieval castle with some mysterious family tragedy in it, expresses not only the sensitive, but also the sublimely mysterious experiences of the author and therefore should be called a sentimental-romantic story.
In order to correctly restore Karamzin’s true role in the history of Russian literature, it is necessary to first dispel the existing legend about the radical transformation of all Russian literary stylistics under the pen of Karamzin; it is necessary to explore in its entirety, breadth and in all internal contradictions the development of Russian literature, its trends and its styles, in connection with the intense social struggle in Russian society of the last quarter of the 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th century.
It is impossible to consider Karamzin’s style, his literary production, the forms and types of his literary, artistic and journalistic activity statically, as a single, immediately defined system that did not know any contradictions and any movement. Karamzin's work covers more than forty years of development of Russian literature - from Radishchev to the collapse of Decembrism, from Kheraskov to the full flowering of Pushkin's genius.
Karamzin's stories belong to the best artistic achievements of Russian sentimentalism. They played a significant role in the development of Russian literature of their time. They really retained their historical interest for a long time.
Features of Karamzin's poetry.
Karamzin is known to the general reading public as a prose writer and historian, the author of “Poor Liza” and “History of the Russian State.” Meanwhile, Karamzin was also a poet who managed to say his new word in this area. In his poetic works he remains a sentimentalist, but they also reflected other aspects of Russian pre-romanticism. At the very beginning of his poetic career, Karamzin wrote the programmatic poem “Poetry” (1787). However, unlike the classic writers, Karamzin asserts not the state, but the purely personal purpose of poetry, which, in his words, “has always been the joy of innocent, pure souls.” Looking back at the history of world literature, Karamzin re-evaluates its centuries-old legacy.
Karamzin strives to expand the genre composition of Russian poetry. He owned the first Russian ballads, which would later become the leading genre in the work of the romantic Zhukovsky. The ballad “Count Guarinos” is a translation of an ancient Spanish romance about the escape of a brave knight from Moorish captivity. It was translated from German using trochaic tetrameter. This meter would later be chosen by Zhukovsky in the “romances” about Sid and Pushkin in the ballads “Once Upon a Time There Lived a Poor Knight” and “Rodrigue.” Karamzin’s second ballad, “Raisa,” is similar in content to the story “Poor Liza.” Her heroine, a girl deceived by her loved one, ends her life in the depths of the sea. In the descriptions of nature, one can feel the influence of the dark poetry of Ossean, popular at that time: “In the darkness of the night a storm raged; // A menacing ray sparkled in the sky.” The tragic denouement of the ballad and the affectation of love feelings anticipate the style of the “cruel romances of the 19th century.”
Karamzin's poetry is distinguished from the poetry of the classicists by the cult of nature. Addressing her is deeply intimate and in some cases marked with biographical features. In the poem “Volga” Karamzin was the first of the Russian poets to glorify the great Russian river. This work was created based on direct childhood impressions. The range of works dedicated to nature includes “A Prayer for Rain,” created during one of the terrible dry years, as well as the poems “To the Nightingale” and “Autumn.”
The poetry of moods is affirmed by Karamzin in the poem “Melancholy”. The poet refers in it not to a clearly expressed state of the human spirit - joy, sadness, but to its shades, “overflows”, to transitions from one feeling to another.
Karamzin's reputation as a melancholic person was firmly established. Meanwhile, sad motives are only one of the facets of his poetry. In his lyrics there was also a place for cheerful epicurean motifs, as a result of which Karamzin can already be considered one of the founders of “light poetry”. The basis of these sentiments was enlightenment, which proclaimed man’s right to pleasure given to him by nature itself. The poet’s anacreontic poems glorifying feasts include such works as “The Merry Hour,” “Resignation,” “To Lila,” and “Impermanence.”
Karamzin is a master of small forms. His only poem, “Ilya Muromets,” which he called “a heroic tale” in the subtitle, remained unfinished. Karamzin's experience cannot be considered successful. The peasant son Ilya Muromets is transformed into a gallant, sophisticated knight. And yet, the poet’s very appeal to folk art, the intention to create a national fairy-tale epic on its basis, is very indicative. The style of narration also comes from Karamzin, replete with lyrical digressions of a literary and personal nature.
Features of Karamzin's works.
Karamzin’s repulsion from classicist poetry was also reflected in the artistic originality of his works. He sought to free them from shy classic forms and bring them closer to relaxed colloquial speech. Karamzin did not write either odes or satires. His favorite genres were epistle, ballad, song, and lyrical meditation. The overwhelming majority of his poems do not have stanzas or are written in quatrains. The rhyme, as a rule, is not ordered, which gives the author’s speech a relaxed character. This is especially true for friendly messages from I.I. Dmitriev, A.A. Pleshcheev. In many cases, Karamzin turns to rhymeless verse, which Radishchev also advocated in “The Journey.” This is how both of his ballads, the poems “Autumn”, “Cemetery”, “Song” in the story “Bornholm Island”, and many anacreontic poems were written. Without abandoning iambic tetrameter, Karamzin, along with it, often uses trochee tetrameter, which the poet considered a more national form than iambic.
Karamzin is the founder of sensitive poetry.
In poetry, Karamzin's reform was taken up by Dmitriev, and after the latter - by Arzamas poets. This is how Pushkin’s contemporaries imagined this process from a historical perspective. Karamzin is the founder of “sensitive poetry”, poetry of “heartfelt imagination”, poetry of spiritualization of nature - natural philosophy. In contrast to Derzhavin’s poetry, which is realistic in its tendencies, Karamzin’s poetry gravitates towards noble romance, despite the motifs borrowed from ancient literature and the tendencies of classicism partially preserved in the field of verse. Karamzin was the first to instill in the Russian language the form of ballads and romances and introduce complex meters. In poems, trochees were almost unknown in Russian poetry before Karamzin. The combination of dactylic stanzas with trochaic stanzas was also not used. Before Karamzin, blank verse was also rarely used, which Karamzin turned to, probably under the influence of German literature. Karamzin’s search for new dimensions and a new rhythm speaks of the same desire to embody new content.
The main character of Karamzin’s poetry, its main task is to create subjective and psychological lyrics, to capture the subtlest moods of the soul in short poetic formulas. Karamzin himself formulated the poet’s task this way: “He correctly translates everything dark in the hearts into a language that is clear to us, // Finds words for subtle feelings.” The poet’s job is to express “shades of different feelings, not thoughts to agree” (“Prometheus”).
In Karamzin's lyrics, considerable attention is paid to the feeling of nature, understood in psychological terms; the nature in it is inspired by the feelings of the person living with it, and the person himself is merged with it.
Karamzin's lyrical style predicts Zhukovsky's future romanticism. On the other hand, Karamzin used the experience of German and English in his poetry literature XVIII century. Later, Karamzin returned to French poetry, which at that time was saturated with sentimental pre-romantic elements.
Karamzin’s interest in poetic “trifles,” witty and elegant poetic trinkets, such as “Inscriptions on the statue of Cupid,” poems for portraits, madrigals, is connected with the experience of the French. In them he tries to express the sophistication, the subtlety of relationships between people, sometimes to fit into four verses, two verses an instantaneous, fleeting mood, a flashing thought, an image. On the contrary, Karamzin’s work on updating and expanding the metrical expressiveness of Russian verse is connected with the experience of German poetry. Like Radishchev, he is dissatisfied with the “dominance” of the iambic. He himself cultivates trochee, writes in trisyllabic meters, and especially introduces blank verse, which has become widespread in Germany. The variety of sizes, freedom from the usual consonance should have contributed to the individualization of the very sound of the verse in accordance with the individual lyrical task of each poem. Karamzin’s poetic creativity also played a significant role in the development of new genres.
P.A. Vyazemsky wrote in his article about Karamzin’s poems (1867): “With him was born in us the poetry of a feeling of love for nature, gentle ebbs of thought and impressions, in a word, inner, soulful poetry. If in Karamzin one can notice some lack of brilliant properties of a happy poet, then he had a feeling and awareness of new poetic forms.”
Karamzin's innovation - in the expansion of poetic themes, in its boundless and tireless complication - later resonated for almost a hundred years. He was the first to introduce blank verse into use, boldly resorted to imprecise rhymes, and his poems were constantly characterized by “artistic play.”
At the center of Karamzin's poetics is harmony, which constitutes the soul of poetry. The idea of it was somewhat speculative.
Karamzin - reformer of the Russian literary language
1) Inconsistency of the theory of Lomonosov’s “three calms” with new requirements.
Karamzin's creativity played a big role in further development Russian literary language. Creating a “new syllable”, Karamzin builds on Lomonosov’s “three calms”, on his odes and laudatory speeches. The reform of the literary language carried out by Lomonosov met the tasks of the transition period from ancient to new literature, when it was still premature to completely abandon the use of Church Slavonicisms. The theory of the “three calms” often put writers in a difficult position, since they had to use heavy, outdated Slavic expressions where in the spoken language they had already been replaced by other, softer, more elegant ones. Indeed, the evolution of the language, which began under Catherine, continued. Many foreign words came into use that did not exist in an exact translation in the Slavic language. This can be explained by the new demands of cultural, intelligent life.
Karamzin's reform.
The “Three Calms” proposed by Lomonosov were based not on lively colloquial speech, but on the witty thought of a theoretical writer. Karamzin decided to bring the literary language closer to the spoken language. Therefore, one of his main goals was the further liberation of literature from Church Slavonicisms. In the preface to the second book of the almanac “Aonida,” he wrote: “The thunder of words alone only deafens us and never reaches our hearts.”
The second feature of the “new syllable” was the simplification of syntactic structures. Karamzin abandoned lengthy periods. In the “Pantheon of Russian Writers,” he decisively declared: “Lomonosov’s prose cannot serve as a model for us at all: his long periods are tiresome, the arrangement of words is not always consistent with the flow of thoughts.” Unlike Lomonosov, Karamzin strove to write in short, easily understandable sentences.
Karamzin’s third merit was the enrichment of the Russian language with a number of successful neologisms, which became firmly established in the main vocabulary. “Karamzin,” wrote Belinsky, “introduced Russian literature into the sphere of new ideas, and the transformation of language was already a necessary consequence of this.” Among the innovations proposed by Karamzin are such widely known words in our time as “industry”, “development”, “sophistication”, “concentrate”, “touching”, “entertainment”, “humanity”, “public”, “ generally useful”, “influence” and a number of others. When creating neologisms, Karamzin used mainly the method of tracing French words: “interesting” from “interessant”, “refined” from “raffine”, “development” from “developpement”, “touching” from “touchant”.
etc.................
: journalism, criticism, story, novel, historical story, journalism, study of history. V.G. Belinsky
Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin is an outstanding reformer of the Russian language. He left a noticeable mark on science, art, and journalism, but an important result of Karamzin’s work in the 1790s was the reform of the language, which was based on the desire to bring the written language closer to the living spoken language of the educated layer of society. Thanks to Karamzin, the Russian reader began to think, feel and express himself somewhat differently.
In our speech we use many words introduced into colloquial circulation by Karamzin. But speech is always a reflection of a person’s intellect, culture, and spiritual maturity. After Peter's reforms in Russia, a gap arose between the spiritual needs of an enlightened society and the semantic structure of the Russian language. All educated people were forced to speak French, since in the Russian language there were no words and concepts to express many thoughts and feelings. In order to express in Russian the diversity of concepts and manifestations of the human soul, it was necessary to develop the Russian language, create a new speech culture, and bridge the gap between literature and life. By the way, at that time the French language really had a pan-European distribution; not only the Russian, but, for example, the German intelligentsia preferred it to their native language.
In an article of 1802 “On love for the Fatherland and national pride,” Karamzin wrote: “Our trouble is that we all want to speak French and don’t think about working on processing own language; Is it any wonder that we don’t know how to explain to them some of the subtleties in conversation” - and called for giving the native language all the subtleties of the French language. At the end of the 18th century, Karamzin came to the conclusion that the Russian language was outdated and needed to be reformed. Karamzin was not a tsar, nor was he a minister. Therefore, Karamzin’s reform was expressed not in the fact that he issued some decrees and changed the norms of the language, but in the fact that he himself began to write his works in a new way and place translated works written in a new literary language in his almanacs.
Readers became acquainted with these books and learned new principles literary speech who were norm-oriented French(these principles are called the “new syllable”). Karamzin’s initial task was for Russians to begin to write as they speak, and for noble society to begin to speak as they write. It was these two tasks that determined the essence of the writer’s stylistic reform. In order to bring the literary language closer to the spoken language, first of all, it was necessary to free literature from Church Slavonicisms (heavy, outdated Slavic expressions, which in the spoken language had already been replaced by others, softer, more elegant).
Outdated Old Church Slavonicisms such as: abie, byahu, koliko, penezhe, ubo, etc. have become undesirable. Karamzin’s statements are known: “To do, instead of to do, cannot be said in conversation, and especially to a young girl.” But Karamzin could not completely abandon Old Church Slavonicisms: this would cause enormous harm to the Russian literary language. Therefore, it was allowed to use Old Church Slavonicisms, which: a) in the Russian language retained a high, poetic character (“sitting under the shade of trees”, “on the gates of the temple I look at the image of miracles”, “this memory shook her soul”, “his hand kindled only a single sun on firmament"); b) can be used for artistic purposes (“a golden ray of hope, a ray of consolation illuminated the darkness of her sorrow”, “no one will throw a stone at a tree if there is no fruit on it”); c) being abstract nouns, they are capable of changing their meaning in new contexts (“there were great singers in Rus', whose creations were buried for centuries”); d) can act as a means of historical stylization (“I listen to the dull groan of the times,” “Nikon resigned his supreme rank and ... spent his days dedicated to God and soul-saving labors”). The second step in reforming the language was the simplification of syntactic structures. Karamzin decisively abandoned the heavy German-Latin syntactic construction introduced by Lomonosov, which was not in keeping with the spirit of the Russian language. Instead of long and incomprehensible periods, Karamzin began to write in clear and concise phrases, using light, elegant and logically harmonious French prose as a model.
In the “Pantheon of Russian Writers” he decisively declared: “Lomonosov’s prose cannot serve as a model for us at all: his long periods are tiresome, the arrangement of words is not always consistent with the flow of thoughts.” Unlike Lomonosov, Karamzin strove to write in short, easily understandable sentences. In addition, Karamzin replaces the Old Slavonic conjunctions yako, paki, zane, koliko, etc. with Russian conjunctions and allied words that, so that, when, how, which, where, because (“Liza demanded that Erast often visit her mother “,” “Liza said where she lives, said and went.”) Rows of subordinating conjunctions give way to non-conjunction and coordinating constructions with conjunctions a, and, but, yes, or, etc.: “Liza fixed her gaze on him and thought. .”, “Liza followed him with her eyes, and her mother sat in thought,” “She already wanted to run after Erast, but the thought: “I have a mother!” stopped her."
Karamzin uses a direct word order, which seemed to him more natural and consistent with the train of thought and movement of a person’s feelings: “One day Lisa had to go to Moscow,” “The next day Lisa picked the best lilies of the valley and again went with them to the city,” “Erast jumped out onto the shore and approached Lisa.” The third stage of Karamzin’s language program was the enrichment of the Russian language with a number of neologisms, which were firmly included in the main vocabulary. Among the innovations proposed by the writer are the words known in our time: industry, development, sophistication, concentrate, touching, entertaining, humanity, public, generally useful, influence, future, love, need, etc., some of them have not taken root in Russian language (realness, infantile, etc.) We know that even in the era of Peter the Great, many foreign words appeared in the Russian language, but they mostly replaced words that already existed in the Slavic language and were not a necessity; in addition, these words were taken in their raw form, and therefore were very heavy and clumsy (“fortecia” instead of “fortress”, “victory” instead of “victory”).
Karamzin, on the contrary, tried to give foreign words a Russian ending, adapting them to the requirements of Russian grammar, for example, “serious”, “moral”, “aesthetic”, “audience”, “harmony”, “enthusiasm”. Karamzin and his supporters preferred words that expressed feelings and experiences, creating “pleasantness”; for this they often used diminutive suffixes (horn, shepherd, brook, mother, villages, path, bank, etc.). Words that create “beauty” were also introduced into the context (flowers, dove, kiss, lilies, esters, curl, etc.). Proper names, naming ancient gods, European artists, heroes of ancient and Western European literature, were also used by Karamzinists in order to give the story a sublime tone.
The beauty of speech was created with the help of syntactic constructions close to phraseological combinations (the luminary of the day - the sun; the bards of singing - the poet; the gentle friend of our life - hope; the cypresses of conjugal love - family life, marriage; to move to the heavenly abodes - to die, etc. ). Among Karamzin’s other introductions, one can note the creation of the letter E. The letter E is the youngest letter of the modern Russian alphabet. It was introduced by Karamzin in 1797. One can say even more precisely: the letter E was introduced by Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin in 1797, in the almanac “Aonids”, in the word “tears”. Before this, instead of the letter E in Russia they wrote the digraph io (introduced around the middle of the 18th century), and even earlier they wrote the usual letter E. In the first place decade XIX century, Karamzin’s reform of the literary language was greeted with enthusiasm and gave rise to keen public interest in the problems literary norm. Most of the young writers contemporary to Karamzin accepted his transformations and followed him.
But not all his contemporaries agreed with him; many did not want to accept his innovations and rebelled against Karamzin as a dangerous and harmful reformer. Such opponents of Karamzin were led by Shishkov, a famous statesman of that time. Shishkov was an ardent patriot, but was not a philologist, so his attacks on Karamzin were not philologically justified and were rather of a moral, patriotic, and sometimes even political nature. Shishkov accused Karamzin of corrupting his native language, of being anti-national, of dangerous freethinking, and even of corrupting morals. Shishkov said that only purely Slavic words can express pious feelings, feelings of love for the fatherland. Foreign words, in his opinion, distort rather than enrich the language: “The ancient Slavic language, the father of many dialects, is the root and beginning of the Russian language, which itself was abundant and rich; it does not need enrichment with French words.”
Shishkov proposed replacing already established foreign expressions with old Slavic ones; for example, replace “actor” with “actor”, “heroism” with “valiant soul”, “audience” with “listening”, “review” with “review of books”. It is impossible not to recognize Shishkov’s ardent love for the Russian language; One cannot help but admit that the passion for everything foreign, especially French, has gone too far in Russia and has led to the fact that the common people's, peasant language has become very different from the language of the cultural classes; but it is also impossible not to admit that it was impossible to stop the naturally occurring evolution of language; it was impossible to forcefully return into use the already outdated expressions that Shishkov proposed (“zane”, “ugo”, “izhe”, “yako” and others). In this language dispute, history has shown a convincing victory for Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin and his followers. And mastering his lessons helped Pushkin complete the formation of the language of new Russian literature.
Literature
1. Vinogradov V.V. Language and style of Russian writers: from Karamzin to Gogol. -M., 2007, 390 p.
2. Voilova K.A., Ledeneva V.V. History of the Russian literary language: a textbook for universities. M.: Bustard, 2009. - 495 p. 3. Lotman Yu.M. The Creation of Karamzin. - M., 1998, 382 p. 4. Electronic resource // sbiblio.com: Russian Humanitarian Internet University. - 2002.
N.V. Smirnova
Pure, high glory of Karamzin
belongs to Russia.
A. S. Pushkin
Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin belongs to the century of Russian enlightenment, appearing before his contemporaries as a first-class poet, playwright, critic, translator, reformer, who laid the foundations of the modern literary language, journalist, and creator of magazines. The personality of Karamzin successfully merged the greatest master artistic word and a talented historian. Everywhere his activities are marked by the features of true innovation. He largely prepared the success of his younger contemporaries and followers - figures of the Pushkin period, the golden age of Russian literature.
N.M. Karamzin is a native of a steppe village in Simbirsk, the son of a landowner, a hereditary nobleman. The origins of the formation of the worldview of the future great writer and historian are Russian nature, the Russian word, and the traditional way of life. The caring tenderness of a loving mother, the love and respect of parents for each other, a hospitable home where the father’s friends gathered for a “voluble conversation.” From them Karamzin borrowed “Russian friendliness, ... gained the Russian spirit and noble noble pride.”
Initially he was educated at home. His first teacher was the village sexton, with his obligatory book of hours, with which the teaching of Russian literacy began then. Soon he began to read books left by his late mother, mastering several then popular adventure novels, which contributed to the development of imagination, broadening his horizons, and strengthening the belief that virtue always wins.
After graduating home course Sciences, N.M. Karamzin goes to Moscow to the boarding house of Moscow University professor Schaden, a wonderful teacher and erudite. Here he improves his skills foreign languages, domestic and world history, is seriously engaged in the study of literature, artistic and moral-philosophical, and turns to the first literary experiments, starting with translations.
N.M. Karamzin was inclined to receive further education in Germany, at the University of Leipzig, but at the insistence of his father he began to serve in St. Petersburg in the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment. But military service and secular pleasures could not tear him away from literary studies. Moreover, relative N.M. Karamzina I.I. Dmitriev, a poet and prominent dignitary, introduces him to the circle of St. Petersburg writers.
Soon Karamzin retires and leaves for Simbirsk, where he has great success in local secular society, being equally skillful at whist and in ladies' society. Later he thought about this time with longing, as if it were lost. A sharp change in his life was brought about by a meeting with an old family acquaintance, a famous lover of antiquities and Russian literature, Ivan Petrovich Turgenev. Turgenev was N.I.’s closest friend. Novikov and shared his broad educational plans. He took young Karamzin to Moscow and invited N.I. to participate in educational and publishing activities. Novikova.
The beginning of his own literary activity dates back to this time: translations from Shakespeare, Lessing, etc., publishing debut in the magazine "Children's Reading", the first mature poetic works. Among them are the program poem “Poetry”, messages to Dmitriev, “War Song”, etc. We have preserved them in the collection “Karamzin and the Poets of His Time” (1936).
These works are important not only for revealing the origins of his work, they mark the qualitative new step in the development of Russian poetry. A subtle connoisseur of 18th-century literature P.A. Vyazemsky wrote about N.M. Karamzine: “As a prose writer, he is much higher, but many of his poems are very remarkable. With them began our inner, homely, soulful poetry, the echoes of which were later heard so vividly and deeply in the strings of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov and Pushkin himself.”
Captivated by the idea of self-improvement, having tested himself in translations and poetry, N.M. Karamzin realized that he would write without knowing what else. Therefore, he set off on a trip to Europe in order to add significance to future works through the acquired experience.
So, an ardent, sensitive, dreamy, educated young man, Karamzin sets off on a journey through Western Europe. In May 1789 - September 1790. he traveled around Germany, Switzerland, France, and England. I visited remarkable places, scientific meetings, theaters, museums, observed public life, got acquainted with local publications, met famous people - philosophers, scientists, writers, and compatriots who were abroad.
In Dresden, I visited the famous art gallery; in Leipzig, I enjoyed the many bookstores, public libraries, and people who needed books. But Karamzin the traveler was not a simple observer, sentimental and carefree. He persistently seeks meetings with interesting people, takes advantage of every available opportunity to talk with them about exciting moral issues. He visited Kant, although he had no letters of recommendation to the great philosopher. I talked with him for about three hours. But not every young traveler could speak as an equal with Kant himself! At a meeting with German professors, he talked about Russian literature and, to prove that the Russian language “is not disgusting to the ears,” he read Russian poetry to them. He recognized himself as an authorized representative of Russian literature.
Nikolai Mikhailovich really wanted to go to Switzerland, to the “land of freedom and prosperity.” He spent the winter in Geneva, admiring the magnificent Swiss nature and visiting places haunted by the memory of the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions he had just read.
If Switzerland seemed to him the pinnacle of spiritual communication between man and nature, then France was the pinnacle of human civilization, the triumph of reason and art. To Paris N.M. Karamzin found himself in the midst of a revolution. Here he visited the National Assembly and revolutionary clubs, followed the press, and talked with prominent political figures. He met Robespierre and retained respect for his revolutionary conviction until the end of his life.
And how many surprises were hidden in the Parisian theaters! But most of all he was struck by the naive melodrama from Russian history - “Peter the Great”. He forgave the ignorance of the directors, the absurdity of the costumes, and the absurdity of the plot - a sentimental love story between an emperor and a peasant woman. I forgave him because after the end of the performance he “wiped away his tears” and was glad that he was Russian! And the excited spectators around him were talking about Russians...
Here he is in England, “in that land that in his childhood he loved with such fervor.” And he likes a lot here: cute English women, English cuisine, roads, crowds and order everywhere. Here the artisan reads Hume, the maid reads Stern and Richardson, the shopkeeper talks about the trade benefits of his fatherland, newspapers and magazines are of interest not only to city dwellers, but also to villagers. They are all proud of their constitution and somehow impress Karamzin more than all other Europeans.
Nikolai Mikhailovich’s natural observation ability is striking, allowing him to grasp the characteristic features of everyday life, notice little things, and create General characteristics Parisian crowd, French, English. His love for nature, interest in the sciences and arts, deep respect for European culture and its outstanding representatives - all this speaks of the high talent of a person and a writer.
His journey lasted a year and a half, and all this time N.M. Karamzin remembered the dear fatherland he had left behind and thought about its historical destinies, and was sad about his friends who remained at home. Having returned, he began to publish “Letters of a Russian Traveler” in the “Moscow Journal” he created. Subsequently, they were compiled into a book the likes of which Russian literature has never known before. A hero came into it, endowed with a high consciousness of his personal and national dignity. The book also reflected the noble personality of the author, and the depth and independence of his judgments earned him fame, the love of readers, and recognition in Russian literature for a long time. He himself said about his book: “Here is the mirror of my soul for eighteen months!”
“Letters of a Russian Traveler” was a huge success among readers, based on its entertaining content and light, elegant language. They became a kind of encyclopedia of knowledge about Western Europe and for more than fifty years were considered one of the most fascinating books in the Russian language, going through several editions.
Our library preserves the first volume of “Letters,” published by A.S. Suvorin in 1900 in the series “Cheap Library”.
It is known that this was a publicly available series, the need for which was felt Russian society throughout the second half of the 19th century century. More than 500 books by Russian and foreign authors were published here, which were published in mass editions and cost no more than 40 kopecks. Among them are A. Griboedov, N. Gogol, A. Pushkin, D. Davydov, E. Baratynsky, F. Dostoevsky, V. Shakespeare, G. Hauptmann.
In our copy of “Letters of a Russian Traveler” you can see unique materials taken from the Leipzig edition of the book in 1799, translated by I. Richter, who was a friend of the author and did his translation before his eyes in Moscow. N.M. Karamzin, as stated in Richter’s preface, reviewed this translation himself. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that it is accompanied by several copper engravings depicting some scenes described on the journey - genre pictures of a good-natured comic nature. And since Richter’s translation was published not without the assistance of Karamzin, we can assume his participation in the selection of subjects for illustrations. Our edition includes exact photographs from these engravings, a portrait of the author and a copy title page Part I of a separate edition of the Letters of 1797. We placed them in the text of the story.
We have a copy of “Letters”, published in the “Russian Classroom Library” series, published under the editorship of the famous philologist and educator A.N. Chudinova. It was printed in St. Petersburg, in the printing house of I. Glazunov in 1892.
This manual is a selection from the works of N.M. Karamzin places, the most important and significant, according to the publishers. Since this publication is educational, it is equipped with numerous and detailed comments and footnotes to help the teacher of Russian literature.
Meanwhile, Nikolai Mikhailovich is trying his hand at prose, looking for himself in various literary genres: sentimental, romantic, historical stories. The fame of the best fiction writer in Russia comes to him. For the first time, the public, brought up on foreign literature, reads with such lively interest and sympathy a Russian author. Popularity of N.M. Karamzin grows both in the circle of provincial nobles and in the merchant-philistine environment.
He is rightfully considered one of the transformers of the Russian language. Of course, he had predecessors. D. Kantemir, V. Trediakovsky, D. Fonvizin, as I. Dmitriev noted, “attempted to bring the book language closer to that used in societies,” but this task was fully solved by N.M. Karamzin, who “began to write in a language suitable to the spoken language, when parents with children, Russians with Russians, were not ashamed to speak their natural language.”
He is concerned about issues of education, dissemination of knowledge, education, and moral education. In the article “On the book trade and the love of reading in Russia” (Works of Karamzin. T. 7. M., 1803. pp. 342-352), he reflects on the role of reading, which “has an influence on the mind, without which no heart can survive.” feels, nor imagination imagines,” and asserts that “novels...contribute in some way to enlightenment...whoever reads them will speak better and more coherently...learn both geography and natural history. In a word, it’s good that our public reads novels.”
N.M. Karamzin introduced into Russian literature both a new understanding of man and new genres, later so brilliantly mastered by K. Batyushkov, V. Zhukovsky, A. Pushkin. He enriched poetic language new images and phrases that made it possible to express the complexity of a person’s spiritual life, his subtle feelings and tragic experiences.
But interest in history and a great desire to study only it have always dominated. That's why he left fine literature, turning to history. N.M. Karamzin is sure that “history, in a sense, is the sacred book of peoples: the main, necessary; a mirror of their existence and activity; the tablet of revelations and rules; the covenant of ancestors to posterity; addition, explanation of the present and example of the future..."
So, work ahead to create the largest historical painting- “History of the Russian State.” In 1803, Nikolai Mikhailovich received a decree signed by Emperor Alexander I, which stated that, approving his desire in such a commendable undertaking as the composition of a complete history of our Fatherland, the emperor appoints him a historiographer, court adviser and grants him an annual pension. Now he could devote all his energy to the implementation of his plan.
Pushkin noted that Karamzin retired “to his study room during the most flattering successes” and devoted several years of his life to “silent and tireless labors.” Nikolai Mikhailovich is working especially intensively on the composition of “History” in Ostafyevo, the estate of the Vyazemsky princes near Moscow. He was married for the second time to the daughter of Prince A.I. Vyazemsky, Ekaterina Andreevna. In her person he found a reliable friend, an intelligent, well-educated assistant. She helped in rewriting completed chapters and corrected the first edition of the History. And most importantly, she provided that peace of mind and conditions for creativity, without which her husband’s enormous work would simply be impossible. Karamzin usually got up at nine o'clock and began the day, in any weather, with an hour's walk or horseback ride. After breakfast, he went into his office, where he worked until three or four o’clock, sitting over manuscripts for months and years.
“The History of the Russian State” was created on the basis of a critical study of all previous literature and the development of various sources stored in archives and libraries. In addition to the state ones, Karamzin used the private collections of Musin-Pushkin, the Rumyantsevs, the Turgenevs, the Muravyovs, Tolstoy, Uvarov, and the collections of the university and synodal libraries. This allowed him to introduce into scientific use a huge amount of historical material and, above all, archival primary sources, famous chronicles, the work of Daniil Zatochnik, the Code of Law of Ivan III, many embassy affairs, from which he drew the high patriotic idea of power, the indestructibility of the Russian land while it is united.
Nikolai Mikhailovich often complained about how difficult and slow progress “is my only business and main pleasure.” And the work was truly gigantic! He divided the text into two parts. The upper, main, “for the public” - artistically processed, figurative speech, where events unfold, where historical figures act in carefully reconstructed specific circumstances, where their speech is heard, the roar of battles of Russian knights with enemies who attacked cities and towns with a sword and fire. From volume to volume Karamzin describes not only wars, but also all civil institutions, legislation, morals, customs, and the character of our ancestors.
But, in addition to the main text, there are numerous notes (“notes”, “notes”, as the author called them), which provided comparisons of various chronicle texts, contained critical judgments about the work of predecessors, and provided additional data not included in the main text. Of course, scientific research of this level required a lot of time. When starting work on creating “History,” Nikolai Mikhailovich intended to complete it in five years. But in all this time he only reached 1611.
Work on “The History of the Russian State” took the last 23 years of N.M.’s life. Karamzin. In 1816, he brought the first eight volumes to St. Petersburg, they began to be printed in three printing houses at once - Senate, medical and military. They went on sale at the beginning of 1818 and were a stunning success.
Its first 3,000 copies sold out in one month. They eagerly awaited the release of new volumes, read them with lightning speed, argued and wrote about them. A.S. Pushkin recalled: “Everyone, even secular women, rushed to read the history of their fatherland, hitherto unknown to them, it was a new discovery for them...” He admitted that he himself read the History with “greed and attention.”
“The History of the Russian State” was not the first book about Russian history, but it was the first book about Russian history that could be read easily and with interest, the story of which was memorable. Before Karamzin, this information was distributed only to a narrow circle of specialists. Even the Russian intelligentsia knew almost nothing about the country's past. Karamzin made a whole revolution in this regard. He opened Russian history for Russian culture. The vast material studied by the writer was presented for the first time systematically, vividly and entertainingly. The bright, full of contrasts, spectacular stories in his “History” made a huge impression and were read like a novel. IN historical work N.M.’s artistic talent also manifested itself. Karamzin. All readers admired the historiographer’s language. According to V. Belinsky, this is “a marvelous carving on copper and marble, which neither time nor envy will destroy.”
“The History of the Russian State” has been published several times in the past. During the historian’s lifetime, it managed to be published in two editions. The unfinished 12th volume was published posthumously.
There have been a number of translations of it into major European languages. The author himself did the proofreading of the first two editions. Nikolai Mikhailovich made many clarifications and additions to the second edition. All subsequent ones were based on it. The most famous publishers republished it several times. “History” was repeatedly published as supplements to popular magazines.
To this day, “The History of the Russian State” remains a valuable historical source and is read with great interest.
Fiction, journalism, publishing, history, language - these are the areas of Russian culture that were enriched as a result of the activities of this talented person.
Following Pushkin, one can repeat now: “The pure, high glory of Karamzin belongs to Russia, and not a single writer with true talent, not a single truly learned person, even among those who were his opponents, refused him tribute of respect and gratitude.”
We hope that our material will help bring Karamzin’s era closer to the modern reader and provide an opportunity to feel the full power of the talent of the Russian enlightener.
List of works by N.M. Karamzina,
mentioned in the review:
Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich Translations of Karamzin: in 9 volumes - 4th ed. – St. Petersburg: Printing house of A. Smirdin, 1835.
T. 9: Pantheon of Foreign Literature: [Ch. 3]. – 1835. – , 270 p. R1 K21 M323025 KH(RF)
Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich. History of the Russian State: in 12 volumes / N. M. Karamzin. – Second edition, revised. – St. Petersburg: In the printing house of N. Grech: Dependent on the Slenin brothers, 1818–1829.
T. 2. – 1818. – 260, p. 9(C)1 K21 29930 KH(RF)
T. 12 – 1829. – VII, , 330, , 243, p. 9S(1) K21 27368 KH(RF)
Karamzin and the poets of his time: poems / art., ed. and note. A. Kucherov, A. Maksimovich and B. Tomashevsky. - [Moscow] ; [Leningrad]: Soviet writer, 1936. – 493 pp.; l. portrait ; 13X8 cm. – (Poet's Library. Small series; No. 7) R1 K21 M42761 KH (RF).
Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich. Letters from a Russian traveler: from a portrait. auto and rice / N. M. Karamzin. – 4th ed. – St. Petersburg: Edition of A. S. Suvorin, . – (Cheap Library; No. 45).
T. 1. – . – XXXII, 325 p., l. portrait, l. ill. R1 K21 M119257KH(RF)
Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich. Selected works: [in 2 hours] / N. M. Karamzin. - St. Petersburg: Publishing house I. Glazunov, 1892. - (Russian classroom library: a guide to the study of Russian literature / edited by A. N. Chudinov; issue IX).
Part 2: Letters from a Russian traveler: with notes. - 1892. - , VIII, 272 pp., front. (portrait).R1 K21 M12512 KH(RF)
Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich. Works of Karamzin: in 8 volumes - Moscow: In the printing house of S. Selivanovsky, 1803. - .
T. 7. – 1803. – , 416, p. R1 K21 M15819 KH(RF)
Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich. History of the Russian State: in 12 volumes / N. M. Karamzin. – 3rd ed. – St. Petersburg: Dependent on bookseller Smirdin, 1830–1831.
T. 1 – 1830. – XXXVI, 197, , 156, 1 p. kart. 9(S)1 K21 M12459 KH(RF)
Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich. History of the Russian State / Op. N. M. Karamzin: in 3 books. containing 12 volumes, with full notes, decorations. portrait auto., grav. on steel in London. – 5th ed. – St. Petersburg: Publishing house. I. Einerlinga: In type. Eduard Pratz, 1842–1844.
Book 1 (volumes 1, 2, 3, 4) – 1842. – XVII, 156, 192, 174, 186, 150, 171, 138, 162, stb., 1 l. kart. (9(C)1 K21 F3213 KH(RF)
Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich. History of the Russian State: in 12 volumes / Op. N. M. Karamzina - Moscow: Publishing house. A. A. Petrovich: Typo-lithogr. Comrade N. Kushnerev and Co., 1903.
T. 5–8. – 1903. – 198, 179, 112, 150 pp. 9(C)1 K21 M15872 KH
Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich. History of the Russian State / N. M. Karamzin; oven under the supervision of prof. P. N. Polevoy. T. 1–12. – St. Petersburg: Type. E. A. Evdokimova, 1892.
T. 1 – 1892. – 172, 144 pp., front. (portrait, fax), 5 l. ill. : ill. (Library of the North). 9(C)1 K21 29963
List of used literature:
Lotman Yu. M. The Creation of Karamzin / Yu. M. Lotman; preface B. Egorova. – Moscow: Book, 1987. – 336 p. : ill. – (Writers about writers). 83.3(2=Rus)1 L80 420655-KH
Muravyov V.B. Karamzin: / V. Muravyov. – Moscow: Young Guard, 2014. – 476, p. : l. ill., portrait 83.3(2=Rus)1 M91 606675-KH
Smirnov A. F. Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin / A. F. Smirnov. – Moscow: Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 2005. – 560 p. : ill. 63.3(2) S50 575851-KH
Eidelman N. Ya. The last chronicler / N. Ya. Eidelman. – Moscow: Vagrius, 2004. – 254 p. 63.1(2)4 E30 554585-KH
Tsurikova G. “Here is the mirror of my soul...” / G. Tsurikova, I. Kuzmichev // Aurora. – 1982. – No. 6. – P. 131-141.
Head sector of rare and valuable books
Karaseva N.B