The single most important source on the history of Russian conservatism

The Letters of a Russian traveller(1797) are the most important expression of Enlightenment thought from the pen of a Russian writer. In 1789 Nikolai Karamzin (1765-1826), a leading historian and author of sentimental fiction, embarked on an unprecedented intellectual Grand Tour. His itinerary, which took him from St Petersburg through Germany to Revolutionary France and finally to England, served as the basis for this semi-fictional narrative. The narrator visits among others Kant, Herder and Wieland, makes pilgrimage to the resting places of Voltaire and Rousseau, and observes both the revolutionary Assemblée and the English Parliament at first hand. The resulting work is one in which fiction, philosophy, literary and art criticism, historical and biographical writing coalesce, producing nothing less than a wholesale anthropology and evaluation of the Enlightenment from the unfamiliar perspective of a Russian intellectual writing after the outbreak of the French Revolution.This is the first ever complete translation of Karamzin's work into English. The introduction and concluding study explore the intersection of Russian and European intellectual and literary movements, and illuminate questions about travel literature; history of the book and the growth of readership; the self as a philosophical subject; the growth of perceptions of the public sphere; the pre-Romantic fascination with funerary monuments and theories of sociability. This book is aimed at both Russian specialists and Enlightenment scholars who do not read Russian. 'The appearance of Nikolai Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Travellerin an articulate and richly annotated English translation by Andrew Kahn gives cause for celebration. [...] Andrew Kahn has amplified and enriched the commentary of the Lotman-Uspenskii edition. The scholarly apparatus that accmpanies his fluent translation astonishes the reader with its breadth and erudition.'Slavic Review 'Though a seminal work in the history of Russian literature and culture, Nikolai Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Travellerhas long languished in the shadows of his more famous short prose and highly influential History of the Russian State. [...] In response to this relative neglect, Andrew Kahn has now translated and published the entire text in English for the first time. The result is a fine work, a fluent rendition of the original Russian that will be appreciated for years to come. [...] This admirable translation of Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Travellerwill be of interest to teachers, students and scholars. [...] it provides rich material for scholars working in diverse disciplines, especially the cultural, intellectual and literary history of eighteenth-century Europe, the Enlightenment, and the history of travel writing; these areas are explicitly addressed in Kahn's study of Karamzin's "Discourses of Enlightenment". [...] an impressive work that deserves a wide readership.'Seer https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780729408110?cc=us

For those who cannot read the language of the original texts, the lively and varied world of eighteenth-century Russian literature has been largely inaccessible. In this valuable collection, expert translator David Gasperetti presents three seminal tales that express the major literary, social, and philosophical concerns of late-eighteenth-century Russia. The country's first bestseller, Matvei Komarov's Vanka Kain tells the story of a renowned thief and police spy and is also an excellent historical source on the era's criminal underworld. Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook is a cross between Moll Flanders, with its comic emphasis on a woman of ill-repute who struggles to secure her place in society, and Tristram Shandy, with its parody of the conventions of novel writing. Finally, Nikolai Karamzin's Poor Liza, the story of a young woman who kills herself over a failed love affair, set the standard for writing sentimentalist fiction in Russia. Taken as a whole, these three works outline the beginnings of modern prose fiction in Russia and also illuminate the literary culture that would give rise to the Golden Age of Russian letters in the middle of the next century.

Nicholas Karamzin (1766–1826) was a remarkably active thinker and writer during a time that was trying to all Europeans. A first-hand witness to the French Revolution, Napoleonic suzerainty over Europe, the burning of Moscow, and the Decembrist revolt in St. Petersburg, he presented in his voluminous correspondence and published writings a world view that recognized the weaknesses of the Russian Empire and at the same time foresaw the dangers of both radical change and rigid autocracy. Russian conservatism owes much to this man, even though he would have agreed with very few of those who came after him and were called conservative: he supported autocracy, but was committed to enlightenment; he abhorred constitutions. The fact that his writing had lasting significance has rarely been challenged, but the social and political nature of that contribution has never before been demonstrated. Previous studies of Karamzin have dealt with his literary career. This monograph focuses on the final third of his life, on his career at court (1816–26) and on the cultural heritage he left to the Russian Empire. As the historian of Russia most widely read by his and later generations, his historical interpretations mirrored and helped shape the image Russians had of themselves. Professor Black’s study of Karamzin is crucial to any examination of Russia’s enlightenment, conservatism, historical writing, and national self-consciousness.

The destructive power of obsessive love was a defining subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature. In Febris Erotica, Sobol argues that Russian writers were deeply preoccupied with the nature of romantic relationships and were persistent in their use of lovesickness not simply as a traditional theme but as a way to address pressing philosophical, ethical, and ideological concerns through a recognizable literary trope. Sobol examines stereotypes about the damaging effects of romantic love and offers a short history of the topos of lovesickness in Western literature and medicine. Read an interview with the author: http://www.rorotoko.com/index.php/article/valeria_sobol_interview_febris_erotica_lovesickness_russian_literary_imagin/

The tragic tale of a nobleman's seduction of a girl of lower social status, "Poor Liza" was Russia's first literary sensation: pilgrimages were made to locations mentioned in the story and suicides were even reported. Nikolay Karamzin's most well-known work of fiction, "Poor Liza" is notable for its psychological analysis of its titular character-the first time a Russian writer had attempted to portray the thoughts and feelings of a young girl in love. It is fair to say that "Poor Liza" was the most significant Russian prose in terms of popularity and influence before the emergence of Alexander Pushkin onto the Russian literary scene in the 1820s. The story was so well received that in 1803 it was translated into English, a very rare occurrence for Russian literature of the time. More sentimentalist short stories by Karamzin appeared in English in 1804, such as "Natalia" and "Julia," both of which are included in this collection.

In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great are the most vivid exemplars of this phenomenon in the pre-Soviet period. Both rulers have been alternately lionized for great achievements and despised for the extraordinary violence of their reigns. In many accounts, the balance of praise and condemnation remains unresolved; often the violence is simply repressed. Platt explores historical and cultural representations of the two rulers from the early nineteenth century to the present, as they shaped and served the changing dictates of Russian political life. Throughout, he shows how past representations exerted pressure on subsequent attempts to evaluate these liminal figures. In ever-changing and often counterposed treatments of the two, Russians have debated the relationship between greatness and terror in Russian political practice, while wrestling with the fact that the nation's collective selfhood has seemingly been forged only through shared, often self-inflicted trauma. Platt investigates the work of all the major historians, from Karamzin to the present, who wrote on Ivan and Peter. Yet he casts his net widely, and "historians" of the two tsars include poets, novelists, composers, and painters, giants of the opera stage, Party hacks, filmmakers, and Stalin himself. To this day the contradictory legacies of Ivan and Peter burden any attempt to come to terms with the nature of political power—past, present, future—in Russia.

Russia has a rich, huge, unwieldy cultural tradition. How to grasp it? This classroom reader is designed to respond to that problem. The literary works selected for inclusion in this anthology introduce the core cultural and historic themes of Russia's civilisation. Each text has resonance throughout the arts - in Rublev's icons, Meyerhold's theatre, Mousorgsky's operas, Prokofiev's symphonies, Fokine's choreography and Kandinsky's paintings. This material is supported by introductions, helpful annotations and bibliographies of resources in all media. The reader is intended for use in courses in Russian literature, culture and civilisation, as well as comparative literature.

“This book provides a deep reading of Nikolai Karazin’s works and his relationship with Central Asia. Elena Andreeva shows how Karazin’s prolific creations have much to tell us about Russian imperialism, colonial and local society as well as Russians’ self-identity as colonizers and Europeans. The work offers an original contribution to the scholarship on Russian imperial history and that of Central Asia, and Russian literary history also. Karazin’s importance—at the time and now—is appropriately highlighted.” - Jeff Sahadeo, Associate Professor, Carleton University, Canada “Elena Andreeva’s book resurrects a vital if forgotten figure from the Russian past: Nikolai Karazin, Russia’s Kipling, a multifaceted participant in Russian imperial expansion, whose fiction, journalism, ethnography and visual representations may well have done more than any agent of the Russian state to represent and popularize Russia’s conquest of Central Asia to a newly literate Russian public beyond the educated elites. Archivally based and carefully argued, Andreeva’s study of Karazin reveals the absence of any singular logic to Russian imperial expansion. In her analysis Karazin emerges as a vernacular enthusiast of empire who was able to reconcile a skeptical attitude towards tsarist autocracy with an idealized view of Russia’s 'civilizing' mission in the East.” - Harsha Ram, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA This book is dedicated to the literary and visual images of Central Asia in the works of the popular Russian artist Nikolai Karazin. It analyzes the ways Karazin’s discourse inflected, and was inflected by, the expansion of the Russian empire – and therefore sheds light on the place of art and culture in the Russian colonial enterprise. It is the first attempt to interpret Karazin’s images of Central Asia within Russian imperial networks and within the maze of the Russian national identity that informed them.