The Last Chronicler, or Two Lives of Nikolai Karamzin

14 hrs. 10 min.

Language Russian

Author Natan Eidelman

Narrator Andrey Leonov

Description

The book by the well-known writer, publicist, and literary scholar N. Ya. Eydelman is devoted to N. M. Karamzin’s main work—“History of the Russian State.”

At the beginning of the 19th century, Russia faced an urgent need for wide-ranging reforms in the life of the state. “A republican at heart and a loyal subject of the Russian tsar,” as Karamzin wrote about himself, proposed his own concept of reforms, based on the ideals of enlightenment and the development of civic self-awareness in Russian society. The foundation of this concept was “History of the Russian State,” the work on which Karamzin began in 1803 and continued until 1826—up to the last days of his life.

Karamzin searched for ancient chronicles, studied, compared, and critically assessed thousands of testimonies and documents—domestic, Western European, Byzantine, Arabic… Since he created his work not only by looking far into the thousand-year past, but with constant attention to Russia of his time and with thoughts about the country’s future, many pages of “History” were, for his contemporaries, as Pushkin put it, “like a fresh newspaper.”

In Eydelman’s book, the ruthless struggle of opinions and the deadly disputes that flared up around Karamzin’s “History,” which became one of the main events in the literature, historiography, and ultimately in the entire political life of the time, are shown with extraordinary clarity.

A vivid political temperament is the most important trait of Karamzin the historian.

In a large appendix to this edition, lesser-known political manifestos by Karamzin are published—“A Note on Ancient and New Russia in Its Political and Civic Relations,” “The Opinion of a Russian Citizen”—as well as a project for a manifesto about his accession to the throne, written at the request of Nicholas I.