Nicholas Karamzin, from the commencement of whose influence this period of Russian literature is in general dated, was born A.D. 1765. He was educated in the house of a German professor at Moscow. In spite of the early development of his literary propensities, he entered the military service, which was then considered as the most honourable in Russia. After two years spent in travelling through Europe, he opened his literary career with the publication of a periodical work called the Moscow Journal, which exercised a decidedly favourable influence on Russian literature; although those productions of Karamzin himself, which first appeared in this journal, evidently bear the stamp of the author's youth. Both in his prose writings and in his scattered lyrical poems, at this period, there is a certain dulcet sentimentality, behind which we look in vain for energetic or true poetic thoughts. He showed more maturity in his second periodical, called the European Messenger; where political and moral subjects occupied his pen. But his principal reputation rests upon his History of the Russian Empire. In composing this work, he was greatly favoured by the government; all the archives were opened to him; all documents delivered into his hands; and when it was completed, rewards and gratuities of every description were heaped upon the author with imperial munificence, and continued to his widow and children after his decease in 1826. [32]
The beauties of Karamzin's style are so entirely _idiomatic,_ that no one, who is not perfectly and thoroughly acquainted with the language, is able to appreciate in what the charm of his writings consists. To foreigners of sound critical taste, on the contrary, the productions of his early life exhibit an affectation, a pretension to feeling, and an emptiness of original thought, sometimes quite intolerable. And as to the more condensed and exact style of his great historical work, even the highest beauties of diction, and the acknowledged diligence and accuracy of the writer's examination of facts, could never reconcile us to that _want of truth_, which, without wresting the fact itself, impresses upon it a false character by the whole colouring and mode of representation. Over the characteristic barbarism of ancient times his dexterous hand throws a veil of embellishment, and lends a spirit of chivalry and romantic charm to historical persons and deeds, where all the circumstances of place and time stand in absolute contradiction to it. Not seldom do we seem to be perusing a novel.