Karamzin's Moskovskii zhurnal : Voice of a writer, broadsheet of a movement

Abstract

Anthony Glenn Cross, Karamzin's Moskovskii zhurnal: voice of a writer, broadsheet of a movement. Although it rarely receives the emphasis it deserves, Karamzin's activity as a journalist was of paramount importance for his development as a writer and for the influence he exerted on the contemporary reading public. He served his journalistic apprenticeship as co-editor of Novikov's Detskoe chtcnie, Russia's first journal for children. After his return from his European travels he published his first independent journal, Moskovskii zhurnal, and followed this, a decade later, by Vestnik Evropy, widely acknowledged as the first of the tolslye zhurnaly of the nineteenth century. It was on the pages of these journals that Karamzin published the majority of his stories, translations, essays, poems and much of Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika. Moskovskii zhurnal occupies a particular place in Karamzin's career: it was in this journal that the young writer First made his impact, finding an original voice and heralding the triumph of the "literature of feeling".