Nikolai Лaramzin and his concepts of China (a case study of magazine «Рerald of Europe»)

Abstract

The topicality of the subject, which we have chosen, is caused by two factors. First, so far, the issue of correlation patterns of documentary and literary principles is being more vigorously developed in the Humanities. Second, the consideration of fruitful contacts of Russia and China in different epochs and based on various material is highly anticipated in the context of the overall problem of the dialogue between Western and Eastern civilizations.

The novelty of our approach is related to the fact that we for the first time investigate Karamzin’s famous publications in Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe) in relationship with historical and documentary sources, which Chinese science has at its disposal.

In the present article, the author deals with the problem of correlation between documentary and literary principles in the articles about China prepared for the magazine «The Herald of Europe» by its editor, an outstanding literary figure and enlightener Nikolai Karamzin. Proceeding from German and French sources, Karamzin publishes a cycle of three essays: «Chinese wisdom», «Chinese newspapers» and «Early modern history and statistical memorabilities of China». Karamzin is interested in three the most important fields: the history of China on the move to his time, the development level of social idea of China (using newspapers as an example) and Chinese moral philosophy, with priority attention to the problems of family education. We compared Karamzin’s views on history and culture of China with Chinese historical documents. In the course of analysis, our main task was to find out, where the Russian writer followed the facts and where he strived to recast the information, having changed it within the range of his own understanding of the ideal in literary culture. As we found out, the main dream, although it was a pipe-dream, of Russian writer and journalist was to show to people the necessity and benefit of a new union of West and East in the course of the world civilization development.

The theoretical and methodological, and practical relevance of the results, which we obtained in the course of our research work, lies in the possibility of their use when analyzing Russian-Chinese dialogues in literary culture of other periods.