Letters of a Russian Traveller by Nikolai Karamzin, Andrew Kahn

Abstract

MLR, 101.2, 2oo6 6ii Letters of a Russian Traveller. By NIKOLAI KARAMZIN. Trans., with an essay on Karamzin's discourses of Enlightenment, by ANDREW KAHN. (SVEC, 2003:04) Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2003. Xi+ 582 pp. ?69. ISBN o-7294-o8II6. Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveller, based on the author's travels through the German states to France, Switzerland, and England in 1789-90, are a seminal work inRussian travel writing. More broadly, they represent amajor early example of the corpus of writing through which the Russian elite, receptive toWestern culture as a result of the reforms of Peter the Great (sole ruler from I696 to I725) and Catherine the Great (r. I762-96), extended its cultural and intellectual horizons by means of exploration ofWestern civilization. Uplifted by that civilization, Karamzin's good natured, open-minded narrator displays a tolerant humanism. Like the narrator of Karamzin's contemporaneous works of short prose fiction in the Sentimentalist man ner, of which 'Poor Liza' (I 792) iS the most celebrated example, he has the capacity to empathize with fellow humans of all ages, classes, and nationalities and reveals his sensitivity by shedding many a tear.And yet behind the guileless persona of the narra tor there lies amore worldly-wise and ambitious young author intent upon turning his supposedly spontaneous jottings into a highly crafted literary work. In other respects too the Letters are perhaps not entirely what they seem. On the one hand, they can be made to yield a tolerant cosmopolitanism that is characteristic of the Enlightenment (of whose reception in Russia the Letters are themselves, up to a point, indicative). On the other hand, the traveller who delights in the cultural and intellectual riches and natural beauty of the lands he visits, aRussian Westernizer avant la lettre, so it would appear, is also a proud patriot who fervently admires Peter the Great (a ruler perceived as superior by far to Louis XIV), because Peter has enabled Russia quickly to catch up with theWest and has given her the opportunity shortly to surpass the hitherto more advanced civilization. Moreover, for all his seeming sympathy with the persecuted and the dispossessed, such as Jews and beggars, the narrator does not at bottom approve of the revolution that was beginning in France at the time of his journey. On the contrary, he is already the champion of monarchic government and it is easy to discern his kinship to Karamzin the journalist and historian who in the nineteenth century would staunchly defend serfdom and the Russian autocratic state. It is surprising that up until now the English-speaking reader has had tomake do either with the translation of the Letters that was produced from aGerman version in I803, very soon after the publication of the first complete edition of the Letters in Russia, or with a defective, abridged translation by Florence Jonas, published in I957. Andrew Kahn's fresh translation of the whole text is therefore welcome. All readers of a translation of a text of this magnitude will of course be able to find examples of unnaturalness, where in the necessary quest for literal accuracy the translator has remained too close to the syntax of the original, or erred in choice of word, or produced a stilted version. (Would any English writer, for instance, say: 'Ossian! You vividly felt the lamentable fate of everything sublunary' (p. 246)?) But Kahn is to be congratulated not merely for tackling this long and important work but also for producing an elegant, readable translation which captures the youthful joy of Karamzin's narrator. It is also amerit of the volume that the translation is accompanied by an exten sive apparatus. There is a short introduction which briefly acquaints the reader with Karamzin's biography, the cultural context of Catherine's Russia, Karamzin's activity as a publisher, his role in the creation of a reading public and inmoulding taste, his historical scholarship and political orientation, the publication history of the Letters, and the reception of the work, both in Russia and elsewhere. There is also a large corpus of notes on the text, almost seven hundred in all, inwhich Kahn provides a compendium of...