Reviews
Nikolaï Karamzin en France: L'image de la France dans les Lettres d'un voyageur russe, publié sous la direction de Rodolphe Baudin. Paris, Institut d'études slaves, 2014. pp. 226
This collection of articles is based on contributions to a conference held in Strasbourg in June 2010 on the theme of France in Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveller. They have been supplemented by four more, previously published elsewhere, but rightly judged by the compiler to add significantly to the overall coherence of the volume. Its success in due in great measure to Rodolphe Baudin's skill as editor. He has organised a plethora of observations under five headings: 'Languages', 'Places', 'Encounters', 'Experiences' and 'Discussions'. He has provided an illuminating introduction to guide the reader, indicating the need to differentiate Karamzin, the authentic author, from the fictional creation of the 'Russian Traveller' who, he suggests, may be considered to be more like a modern tourist, guide-book in hand, than the Sternean sentimental traveller or nobleman on a Grand Tour. Apart from his introduction, Baudin includes his own previously published study of Karamzin and the Strasbourg Cathedral that introduces and gives balance to the section on 'Places' and an article on the French emigré in the Letters as well asproviding illustrations and translating eight of the contributions.
The two articles in the introductory 'Languages' section complement each other well. Gitta Hammarberg subtly explores the presence of both 'author' and 'reader' in the writer of the Letters and the complex nature of his relationship with his interlocutors on his journey and with his distant Russian addressees. The use of French, as Christine Bracquenier is able to show, serves to highlight and dramatise these relationships and encourages the reader of the Letters to become Karamzin's co-author.
The 'Places' of the second section, Strasbourg, Paris and Calais, reveal different aspects of the Traveller's approach to his depiction of France. Baudin demonstrates the extent of the narrator's dependence on literary sources for his physical description of Strasbourg cathedral and how contemporary Russian enthusiasm for neo-Gothic as emblematic of superior Northern values may have prompted Karamzin's personal discovery of the values of truly Gothic architecture. The self-confident, Northern European Russian is to the fore in Olga Kafanova's examination of the portrayal of Paris where previous unreflective appreciations of the rich variety of Europe's cultural capital are modified in such a way that a new point of view is established for future Russian literary travellers. Calais, apart from its memories of Sterne's stay there, is a place that gives Andrei Sorin the opportunity to range over the numerous frontiers crossed by the Russian Traveller where he could reinforce his feeling of becoming a citizen of Europe without ceasing to be essentially a Russian at heart.
The 'Encounters' section, the most varied in the volume, is indicative of the rich complexity of the Letters. Whereas it is their essentially fictional nature that is highlighted, Elena Karpova is able to identify what was an actual historical meeting between Karamzin and the French sculptor Joseph Chinard in Lyons. It is a salutary reminder that the Letters should not be taken wholly as a sophisticated invention. According to Gabriela Lehmann-Carli, meeting the French historian, Pierre-Charles Lesvesque, allowed Karamzin to clarify his views on Peter the Great and historiography in general. For Angelina Vatcheva, Karamzin's depiction of Frenchwomen helped him to convey the complex processes of change in revolutionary France. Karamzin's attitude to those changes are teased out in Baudin's detailed analysis of chance encounters between the Russian traveller and French emigrés. The claim is made that these vignettes are sufficient to make Karamzin a forerunner of the German and French novelists of the emigration who only appeared later in the 1790s. These encounters not only insinuate his ideological position tpwards the evolving revolution but also his awareness of the rich literary potential of the emigré experience.
Many of the Traveller's 'Experiences' discussed in the following section are modified by his literary enthusiasms. Tatiana Smoliarova analyses his letter that reflects on the great hydraulic pumping machine at Marly, an engineering wonder of the age, through a translation of Delille's poem inspired by it. This is followed by Martina Stemberger's study of the place of the theatre in the Letters and the way in which the theatrical experience, where Karamzin was as fascinated by the performance of the auditorium as that played out on the boards, encouraged Karamzin to see the social, political, cultural and even philosophical life of France as a theatrical presentation at which he was the spectator. Karamzin, as the late Jean Breullard, noted in his 'French Culture as Experience', was not only captivated by the theatre but by cafes, clubs, political and social salons where citizens could play out their role in day-to-day social life. The Letters from France reflect for their Russian reader the importance of this social dimension to culture, essential for the nurturing of a truly civic society to which a Europeanised Russian might aspire.
It is the same 'art of living' with its fundamental components of amiability, politeness and honesty that attracted Karamzin's attention notes Natalia Kochetkova in her 'Karamzin between Gallomanes and Gallophobes' in the concluding 'Discourses' section. But she stresses that it was viewed through the Traveller's Russian eyes. Accompanying articles by Joachim Klein on Karamzin as a Russian European in France and Anna Semenova on Karamzin's reception of the French Revolution and the Russian liberal tradition at the beginning of the 19th century raise again the intriguing question of the extent of his 'Europeanisation', refined by his appreciation of French social life, hovering in the background to many of the various studies in this collection.
- W. Gareth Jones, Bangor University
gareth.jones@lineone.net
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