A New "Russian Traveler" in Germany: Dostoevsky's Misuse of Karamzin's Cosmopolitan Legacy‪.‬

1. Introduction During Dostoevsky's time, as now, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin occupied a seminal place in Russian culture. In addition to his reputation as founder of the country's Sentimentalist school and originator of linguistic changes that transformed the language, the historical figure of Karamzin also had a profound impact on Russia's sense of national identity. His Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Letters of a Russian Traveler) which appeared in Russia between 1791 and 1801, in the French journal Spectateur du Nord around 1798, and in a German translation by Richter in 1800, set up an image of the Russian aristocrat as a highly cultured man, who possessed, in the words of Prince Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirskii, "a new, enlightened, and cosmopolitan sensibility" (Mirsky 61). Paradoxically, Karamzin's Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskogo (History. of the Russian State, 1818-1825), with its epic panoramas of the country's past, and his Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, 1811), with its insistence on traditional Russian values, also elevated the author to the status of a quintessential Russian patriot.