Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790: An Account of a Young Russian Gentleman’s Tour through Germany, Switzerland, France and England

This edition is published by BORODINO BOOKS – www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – borodinobooks@gmail.com

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1957 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

LETTERS OF A RUSSIAN TRAVELER

1789-1790

An Account of a Young Russian Gentleman’s Tour

Through Germany, Switzerland, France, and England

BY

N. M. KARAMZIN

Translated and Abridged by

FLORENCE JONAS

Introduction by

LEON STILMAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

PREFACE 6

INTRODUCTION BY LEON STILMAN 7

PART ONE—MOSCOW THROUGH GERMANY 21

PART TWO—SWITZERLAND 72

PART THREE—FRANCE 108

ACADEMIES 140

AN ACQUAINTANCE AT THE OPERA 143

MEDLEY 148

PART FOUR—ENGLAND...AND HOME 163

THE EXCHANGE AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY 180

PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS 189

THEATER 192

RANELAGH 193

FAMILY LIFE 195

LITERATURE 198

WESTMINSTER 202

VICINITY OF LONDON 205

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 215

DEDICATION

THIS TRANSLATION IS DEDICATED

TO MY SON STEVEN

PREFACE

TRAVELING, in its richest sense, has to do with movement in time as well as in space, and it was this approach to one of life’s most enriching experiences which drew me to this particular traveler. For Karamzin moved not only from place to place, but also from age to age—from his own time backward—and forward into ours.

With the unbounded curiosity and interest, the continuous quest and sensibility so typical of his century, he recorded not only his impressions of people and places but also his reactions to ideas, his attitude toward attitudes. He posed questions. He offered answers. And, though he was limited, as everyone is, by his own age, many of his questions and answers appear so modern that one can only ask, Is this eighteenth-century, twenty-two-year-old enlightened youth not typical of the enlightened youth of every era?

It was because these letters are so fresh, so alive, so current, that I wanted to share them. And therefore, this translation.

Actually, Karamzin wrote more than is presented here. The selection of material has not been easy. In order to preserve the smooth flow of Karamzin’s writing I have avoided the use of deletion marks. In most cases I have included entire letters, but I have also omitted letters or retained only excerpts. Karamzin visited and described many churches, monuments, and other sights of interest to travelers. He also poured forth his feelings in lengthy sentimental passages. In the belief that this tends to become repetitious and might therefore prove cloying to the modern reader, I have chosen only those sections which I feel reveal, most interestingly, both Karamzin’s literary ability and particular interests and the social and intellectual atmosphere of his time. All of his meetings with important persons are, of course, included.

In translating the letters, I have striven to achieve smoothness and clarity, without sacrificing either the spirit or style of the author. The sprinkling of foreign words and expressions which Karamzin himself used has been retained.

For me it has been a joy and a privilege to journey through Europe with Karamzin. However, I feel that I could not have arrived at my destination without the aid of the following persons. To Professor Ernest J. Simmons I am deeply indebted for his interest, encouragement, and invaluable suggestions. I am also grateful to Professor Henry M. Nebel, Jr., Northwestern University, for his help in selecting and editing certain portions of the letters. To Professor Leon Stilman I wish to express my heartfelt appreciation for his wise counsel and his interesting and illuminating introduction, which gives us so full an understanding of Karamzin, the author and the man. For their unstinting and ever-willing assistance in the preparation of the manuscript I wish to thank Dr. William Bridgwater, Miss Elisabeth Shoemaker, and Miss Barbara Melissa Voorhis.

FLORENCE JONAS

INTRODUCTION BY LEON STILMAN

NIKOLAI MIKHAILOVICH KARAMZIN (1766-1826) is identified in Russian literary history with the sentimentalist movement of which he was the uncontested leader, if not the initiator. Karamzin dedicated himself to a career of letters very early in his life, publishing translations, short essays, narrative sketches and poetry. In the 1790s, the Letters of a Russian Traveler and several short stories brought him wide recognition and established him as the leading literary figure of the younger generation.

Much of Karamzin’s work appeared initially on the pages of several literary journals and yearlies of which he was founder, editor, and publisher. Then, when, in 1801, the short and insanely oppressive reign of Paul I came to a sudden end, and Alexander I inaugurated a more liberal era, it became possible to depart from the previously narrow formula of the literary journal and to touch, however cautiously, upon political problems. Before the year was out, Karamzin had founded the European Herald, the most memorable of his publishing ventures and the first review in Russia to give any substantial amount of its space to articles on political affairs, especially those concerning the European scene, and most of these were contributed by Karamzin himself.

The next stage of his career began in 1803, when, at his own request, Alexander I officially appointed Karamzin historiographer of Russia. Receiving a yearly allowance, he could thereafter devote himself entirely to his project, a monumental History of the Russian State. As if to foreshadow this new phase, Karamzin had expressed in the Letters of a Russian Traveler the view that till now we have had no good history of Russia, that is, one written with philosophical understanding, a critical spirit and noble eloquence. The models for such a history, he thought, were Tacitus, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, and with these in mind, with intelligence, taste, and talent and the ability to select, enliven, and add color, he believed one could extract from the old Russian chronicles something attractive, powerful, deserving the interest not only of Russians, but of foreigners as well.

By 1818 the first eight volumes of the History were completed and published. Their success was triumphal: the 3,000 copies of the first printing were sold in less than a month. Karamzin continued his labors on the History during the remaining years of his life, but he did not live long enough to complete his work. In 1826, he died while working on the twelfth volume, which dealt with the early seventeenth century.

Karamzin, as Russia’s official historiographer, was a close and respected friend of Alexander I, especially after 1818, even though the opinions he expressed and the advice he offered often failed to please the emperor. These opinions were those of a moderate but very independent conservative; Karamzin had gradually moved away from the liberalism, equally moderate, of his younger years; but he did remain, throughout his life, a man of great integrity and dignity, civilized, tolerant, and humane.

Of Karamzin’s creative writing, especially in his short stories, immensely popular in their day, we may sum up its quality with the statement that it belongs to that period of lachrymose, virtuously self-complacent, and decorous sensibility which is especially alien to the twentieth-century reader. His poetry is smooth and graceful in a rather colorless way and his History, which impressed his contemporaries with its eloquence and its epic grandeur, has long become obsolete both as a product of scholarship and as a literary work. The latter is what it was primarily intended to be, for historiography in Karamzin’s day was not clearly differentiated from belles-lettres. But among his works there is one book which is still eminently readable: his Letters of a Russian Traveler, a vivid picture of the Western Europe of the end of the eighteenth century as seen by a young Russian, remarkably well-read, perceptive, and intelligent, a sentimental traveler who had at least as much sense as he had sensibility.

Karamzin was twenty-two when, in May, 1789, he left Russia for his tour of Germany, Switzerland, France, and England. Born December, 1766, the second son in a family of the provincial gentry, which owned an estate on the middle Volga, he spent his childhood here and in the near-by town of Simbirsk. His father was a retired army captain and a good-natured, neighborly squire. His mother, who seems to have been a delicate and sensitive person, very fond of reading, died during his infancy, and when the boy was four, his father remarried.

At a very early age Karamzin learned to read and soon became an avid reader. From the prayer book he proceeded to Aesop’s fables; then he discovered the yellow bookcase, his mother’s library, with two shelves of old romances, in awkward Russian translations from the French. The tales were long, implausible, and exciting, and they told, invariably, of the tribulations of two lovers, separated by cruel fate and ruthless enemies, but at long last reunited in an unexpected triumph of virtue, innocence, and fidelity. The volumes from the yellow bookcase were often read on the hilly, wooded banks of the Volga, and the river’s vast expanses provided a slightly incongruous backdrop for the fair princesses, the valiant knights, the pirates, and the fierce Oriental rulers. Karamzin’s next adventure in reading was Charles Rollin’s Roman History, in a laborious Russian translation, a work of quite formidable length, in which he discovered new heroes and new villains, Scipio and Hannibal being the most memorable.

In 1779 young Karamzin was brought to Moscow and placed in a small boarding school kept by a Hungarian-born and German-educated professor at Moscow University (he lectured mostly in Latin), Johannes Matthias Schaden, then a highly regarded scholar and educator. Professor Schaden’s method with his young pupils was the education of the heart in the mildly pietistic spirit of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, poet moralist, and professor at Leipzig, whom Schaden greatly admired. Gellert’s fables were read, memorized, and offered for meditation, and the same author’s Moralische Vorlesungen was later used as a text in lessons on moral philosophy.

Karamzin tells in his Letters that, visiting Leipzig, he saw two monuments, both in white marble, erected in Gellert’s memory. The monuments reminded him of his years at Schaden’s when he used to weep over some of this author’s works and laugh gaily over others. Gellert and his own boyhood having thus been brought back to him, the sentimental traveler decided to spend that evening alone, reading poems dedicated to Gellert, an elegy and two odes. He would read, feel—and perhaps shed a tear.

The young Karamzin spent four years at Schaden’s boarding school. His course completed, he moved on to St. Petersburg where he served for some time, in a rather desultory fashion, as an officer in a Guards regiment. When his father died late in 1783, he soon abandoned the career of arms and returned to Simbirsk.

Both in St. Petersburg and afterwards in Simbirsk, Karamzin seems to have led the somewhat dissipated life of a young man about town, Schaden and Gellert notwithstanding. His literary interests remained alive, however, and in St. Petersburg he was able to share them with a young man who was to become a poet of renown and Karamzin’s lifelong friend and literary associate: Ivan Dmitriev. Also in St. Petersburg, in 1783, Karamzin’s first published effort appeared, a translation from the German—and a very poor one—of a piece entitled The Wooden Leg, by Salomon Gessner, the then-famous and widely imitated Swiss author of idylls in poetic prose, who had a strong and lasting influence on Karamzin. In those days, however, Karamzin’s tastes were eclectic; back in Simbirsk he thought of translating Voltaire’s The White Bull, a work in no sense akin to that of either Gessner or Gellert.

The uncertainties of those years, moral as well as literary, however, were soon resolved, at least for a time. In Simbirsk, Karamzin was befriended by a wealthy and cultured nobleman some fourteen years his senior, Ivan Petrovich Turgenev. Turgenev was a prominent Freemason. Visiting Simbirsk in 1784, he founded there a Masonic lodge. Young Karamzin was received in this lodge, and the significance his initiation seems to have held for him was that of a genuine dedication to noble pursuits and to a high moral ideal. Toward the end of the year 1784, following Turgenev’s advice, Karamzin once more went to Moscow. There Turgenev, who belonged to a very active group of Freemasons, introduced his young protégé to this circle; Karamzin’s association with this group marked the four and a half years which he spent in Moscow before embarking on his journey abroad.

Most of the members of this Masonic group belonged to the high nobility, and were wealthy and socially prominent, of wide culture and great moral earnestness. The moving force in the group, however, was a man of modest origin, Nikolai Novikov, one of the most remarkable figures of the Russia of the late eighteenth century. Novikov first attracted attention as publisher of and usually sole contributor to satirical journals, the first of which began to appear in 1769. In these journals, Novikov directed his satire not only against such acceptable targets as Gallomania and prodigality, but also against serious social evils, above all serfdom. Novikov, however, had an opponent in the person of the Empress Catherine II, who, a femme de lettres in her moments of leisure, had begun publishing a satirical journal herself shortly before Novikov made his debut. His sallies ultimately proved too aggressive and too direct for her taste, and in 1774, he was compelled to discontinue the last of his three journals. Thus silenced, he turned to book publishing, mainly of historical material.

In 1775, Novikov became a Freemason, and four years later he moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow, where he had important Masonic connections. Among these was a prominent writer, then a curator of the University of Moscow, Mikhail Kheraskov. Karamzin, as evidenced in his Letters, had a high regard for Kheraskov’s talent. He tells of an evening in Leipzig, spent in the tavern of the Blue Angel with several professors of the local university. Questioned about Russian literature, Karamzin cited with pride two epic poems by Kheraskov, Rossiada, and Vladimir, which, he told the learned company, would make their creator forever remembered in the history of Russian poetry.

When Novikov arrived in Moscow, Kheraskov was instrumental in arranging for him a ten-year lease on the university’s printing plant. With these facilities, Novikov built up a publishing and bookselling business on a scale unprecedented in Russia; its peak was reached with the founding, in 1784, of the famous Typographical Company. This publishing business soon branched out into the fields of education and philanthropy; the Friendly Learned Society was founded; a pedagogical seminar and a seminar for translators were organized; several journals, Masonic in spirit, and also a children’s magazine, were published, the proceeds from these publications serving to support schools for poor children; a pharmacy and a hospital for the poor were created; stipends were given for study abroad; the sum of 300,000 rubles, donated by a wealthy Mason, was distributed as relief to famine-stricken peasants.

Novikov’s closest associate in most of these activities was a young German, a professor at the University of Moscow, Ivan (or Johann) Schwartz. Schwartz seems to have been a man of strong beliefs, with a strong personality, capable of exercising a powerful influence over others. The Freemasons regarded him highly for his dedication and his intellectual powers and accepted his spiritual leadership. It is difficult to ascertain whether the reputation for ardent and pure idealism which Schwartz enjoyed was entirely deserved. It was, at any rate, his influence that was largely responsible for the involvement of Novikov’s circle in mysticism and the occult sciences.

Various forms of occultism flourished during the Age of Reason, despite the triumphs of reason, or perhaps as a reaction to these triumphs. Thus, in the days of Catherine the Great, Russia was visited not only by Diderot, but also by Cagliostro.

Regular Freemasonry with its rationalist traditions was everywhere beset by disillusionment and disaffection in the second half of the eighteenth century. These feelings were exploited by several movements or sects which purported to be the true repositories of esoteric knowledge and which promised to reveal it by way of initiation to higher degrees superimposed on the degrees of regular Masonry. One of these occultist movements was the Holy Order of the Rosicrucians. Whatever the origins of this order, its center, the Lodge of the Three Spheres in Berlin, was dominated in the last quarter of the eighteenth century by unscrupulous practitioners of occultism who used their skills for purposes of self-interest and political intrigue.

In 1781, Schwartz was sent to a Masonic congress in Germany as a delegate of the Moscow Masons. In Berlin, he came into contact with the Rosicrucians, was initiated, and upon his return to Moscow, initiated Novikov and the members of his circle. They were now affiliated with the Berlin lodge, and the hierarchical authority over them was vested in Schwartz. Schwartz died soon afterwards, in 1784, at the early age of thirty-three, and the Berlin lodge appointed in his stead one Baron von Schroder, a Prussian army officer who had become involved in Masonic affairs.

The Berlin Rosicrucians in those years had gained complete ascendancy over the weak and superstitious crown prince of Prussia. When his father, Frederick the Great, died in 1786 and he succeeded to the throne as Frederick William II, he promoted his Rosicrucian friends to high positions in the Prussian government. The Berlin Rosicrucians thus became a political power, and their Moscow brethren, affiliated with the Berlin mother lodge, found themselves unwittingly involved in political intrigue, both foreign and domestic.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the relations between the Berlin and the St. Petersburg governments were anything but friendly, and Catherine II was suspicious of all those who maintained contacts with Prussia. Novikov had long been a suspect, and now it was discovered that he and his friends were in contact with the Rosicrucian entourage of the Prussian king. Frederick William, at the same time, was a close personal friend of a man whom Catherine knew to be her bitter enemy: her own son, Grand Duke Paul. Paul’s friendly relations with the Prussian king ran counter to his mother’s policies, and his secret contacts with Berlin were well known to her government. It was in these circumstances that Novikov and his Rosicrucian friends committed a supreme faux pas: they approached the grand duke hoping to convert the future ruler of Russia to their faith. This, too, became known to Catherine’s government, and now the facts seemed to point to a vast conspiracy involving the Prussian court, Grand Duke Paul, and Novikov’s Freemasons. In 1792, after years of suspicion and harassment, and weeks of questioning, Novikov, on the personal order of Catherine II, was placed in solitary confinement in the Schlüsselburg Fortress, and several of his associates were exiled.

Karamzin had severed his relations with the Freemasons before these events occurred. But when Novikov was arrested, he published an Ode to Mercy, which, despite a disguise of metaphorical and abstract language, was clearly an appeal to Catherine to show justice and clemency in Novikov’s case. The appeal, needless to say, went unheeded, but when Paul I succeeded his mother in 1796, one of his first acts was to repeal the measures taken against Novikov and his friends. Paul I found a special enjoyment in undoing whatever his mother had done; in this instance, however, it seems obvious that his motives were deeper and more generous.

Novikov lived another ten years after his release from Schlüsselburg, broken physically and morally, but to the end a firm believer in occultism and the hermetic sciences. A deeply religious man, but one who would not be satisfied with incomplete revelation and who would not resign himself to the presence of evil in the world, he believed that somewhere, within the Christian church, there must be an esoteric church, the repository of an absolute truth, revealed in its entirety, a truth which was also a panacea for all evil and suffering. Disillusioned with regular Masonry, Novikov had continued to seek this esoteric church, only to be drawn finally into the Rosicrucian Order. Thus it had been his practical Christianity, his philanthropic zeal, his quest for justice that had led him to accept the false wisdom of the Rosicrucians.

To return now to Karamzin’s association with the Moscow Freemasons, it must be pointed out that he did not belong to the inner circle of the Rosicrucians; he had never been initiated to the higher degrees, those of the Holy Order. But although he was not admitted to the inner sanctum, there are reasons to believe that he had some knowledge of the occultist activities in Russia and abroad, and that during his journey he was eager to learn more. One might cite as evidence several passages in the Letters, especially the visit in Berlin to Nicolai, author and journalist, one of the most aggressive spokesmen for rationalist Freemasonry, who exposed the machinations of the Rosicrucians and voiced the suspicion that they were secretly connected with the Jesuits; the unsuccessful attempt, in Darmstadt, to meet Starck, the promoter of an esoteric order in Germany and in Russia, similar in many ways to that of the Rosicrucians; or the story of the magician and spiritist Schröpfer, well known in Rosicrucian circles, who committed suicide after a very successful career in Leipzig.

But if Karamzin’s curiosity was aroused by occultism, he undoubtedly stopped short of conversion. Of far greater significance for him was that intellectual life and those literary activities of which the Novikov group was the center, which were often only remotely related to the occultist interests of the Rosicrucian nucleus. Novikov’s organizations translated and published not only Masonic and occultist literature, or books on alchemy and the hermetic sciences, but also Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Klopstock’s Messiah, as well as Young’s Night Thoughts, Thomson’s Seasons, and several works of Rousseau. This very wide range included much that was the common stock of pre-romanticism, and Karamzin’s Moscow years were above all years of a pre-romantic intellectual and literary education in a Masonic environment.

This education began when young Karamzin—he was then eighteen—arrived in Moscow and was provided with living quarters in the house of the Friendly Learned Society, one of the institutions of the Novikov circle. In this house Karamzin shared a modest apartment with another young Mason, Alexander Petrov. The young men—Petrov was the older of the two—soon became close friends, and Karamzin said later that the years of this friendship would forever remain the most important years of his life. Petrov died young, before he could produce anything of significance, but even his few known letters to Karamzin reflect his intellectual gifts, broad culture, and keen critical sense.

Petrov had studied under Schwartz and had a great admiration for him. In the almost ascetically bare apartment which Petrov shared with Karamzin, there was a plaster bust of Schwartz on a small table and, on the wall, a crucifix draped in black crepe.

Petrov initiated Karamzin into the teaching of his master, who had died a few months before Karamzin arrived in Moscow. One of Schwartz’s central concepts was that of three levels of knowledge. The lowest level, according to Schwartz, was the rational. Rational knowledge, he taught, must be mastered; but once it is mastered, man must rise to the next and higher level, that of feeling. Thereafter, additional efforts must be made to attain the highest level, that of mystical receptivity to revelation.

These ideas, while not particularly original, had an obvious appeal for Karamzin: his sensibility, whether natural or acquired during his earlier education, was now recognized and dignified as a higher form of spiritual life. True, if Schwartz were to be followed to the end, the level of feeling, too, would have to be surpassed to reach the stage of mystical knowledge; this, however, was not a matter of immediate urgency, and in the meantime Schwartz’s teaching served Karamzin, as it did many of the younger Masons, as a philosophical foundation for sentimentalism.

Also clearly traceable to Petrov’s and, indirectly, to Schwartz’s influence was Karamzin’s interest in two of the men he visited in Switzerland: Lavater and Bonnet. Karamzin describes, in his Letters, many visits to European celebrities, but in other instances one does not find that intellectual intimacy, that closeness of contact, which are apparent in his conversations with Lavater in Zurich and with the great Bonnet in his retreat near Geneva.

Both authors were held in high esteem by the Freemasons in Moscow, and Lavater was especially recommended by Schwartz. Karamzin, during his Moscow years, was a most enthusiastic admirer of Lavater, and in 1787, he engaged in a quite lively correspondence with him. It may be noted, however, that in the Letters, after visiting Lavater, he took a much more sober attitude toward the Zurich theologian, moralist, and physiognomist. As for Bonnet, Karamzin recalled in later years the long winter nights he had spent with his friend Petrov poring over the works of this mildly mystical and radiantly optimistic philosopher of nature.

One might mention here Karamzin’s literary occupations in Moscow, in which he was closely associated with Petrov. Petrov was in charge of the magazine Reading for Children, published by the Novikov presses. Karamzin helped him with his work, and contributed to the magazine some original pieces of poetry and prose and many translations, among them several sentimentally moralistic stories by Mme. de Génlis, who had an obvious influence on Karamzin’s original efforts in narrative prose. One of the earliest of these was the story of two youthful lovers, Eugene and Julia; they were about to be married, but the happiness which Eugene experienced in anticipating the bliss of his forthcoming union with Julia was too much for the sensitive young man: he fell ill with a fever and died at the dawn of the ninth day. This, of course, is naive to the point of silliness. The story does have a significance, however, for it was an effort, however feeble, to create a literary form diametrically opposed to the old adventure novels which Karamzin had absorbed in his childhood and which were still read in later years. The extreme simplicity of Karamzin’s plot stands in contrast to the complexity of the adventure novel. Unlike these novels, Karamzin’s story uses no external forces to separate the lovers or set up barriers between them: it is love itself that parts them by causing the death of the hero—and the tragic end provides another contrast, for the old novels ended in happy union.

Among Karamzin’s translations, the most important ones were those of a long theological poem, On the Origins of Evil, by the Swiss poet and scientist, Albrecht von Haller, an author mentioned in the Letters; of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, published in 1787 with an introductory essay by the translator (the introduction said little that was original, and the translation was in stilted and colorless prose, but it was the first Russian translation of Shakespeare from the original); and finally of Lessing’s drama Emilia Galotti.

In 1787, Karamzin published a poetic credo in the form of an ode to Poetry. The ode seems to reflect the views of Herder’s school and, more generally, the new, pre-romantic belief in the spontaneous, elemental nature of poetry emerging from the depths of the popular soul and expressing itself through the bards of the different nations. A tribute to the ancients, notably to Homer, was followed by the statement that Britain is the mother of the greatest poets, and this statement introduced eulogies of Ossian, her most ancient bard, of Shakespeare, Milton, Young, and Thomson; leaving Britain, Karamzin glorified Klopstock and later added a stanza devoted to Gessner, the Theocritus of the Alps.

It is possible that the ideas expressed in Karamzin’s poem were at least in part communicated to him by a German poet of the Storm and Stress movement whom he knew, Jakob Lenz, first a friend and later a bitter enemy of Goethe; Lenz ended his stormy and unhappy life in Moscow, where the Masons had given him shelter.

Besides Petrov, Karamzin made friends in Moscow with another resident of the house of the Friendly Learned Society: Aleksei Mikhailovich Kutuzov. Kutuzov was one of the most dedicated members of the Novikov circle and an especially zealous student of the hermetic sciences. In 1787, Kutuzov was sent to Berlin by the Moscow Rosicrucians, for training in the secret science of alchemy. He was accompanied by Baron von Schröder. Kutuzov never returned from this journey: at the time of the debacle of the Novikov circle in 1792, an order was issued to arrest him if he crossed the Russian border. The would-be alchemist thus became a political exile. Forgotten and penniless, Kutuzov died in Berlin in 1797; he obviously had not learned the secret of transmuting lower metals into gold.

Karamzin went abroad about two years after Kutuzov and hoped to meet his friend in Berlin. He tells in the Letters how impatient he was, as he approached the Prussian capital, to meet and embrace his friend; reaching Berlin, however, he learned to his despair that Kutuzov had left for Frankfurt, where he was to miss him once more. Karamzin never saw his friend again.

There is another reference to Kutuzov in Karamzin’s book: in the letter dated July 16, he gives an account of a conversation in Leipzig with Professor Plainer; Plainer, he adds, remembers K——, R——, and other Russians who studied here. These initials stand for Kutuzov and his fellow student in Leipzig and close friend, Alexander Radishchev. In 1790, Radishchev published his famous Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow in which he used the form of a sentimental travel book to deliver a vigorous and eloquent attack against serfdom. The empress, greatly alarmed by the events in France, decided to take strong action. Radishchev was tried, found guilty of lese majesty and sedition, and sentenced to death. The death sentence, however, was commuted by Catherine to exile in eastern Siberia.

Unwary of the consequences, Radishchev had dedicated his subversive book to his old friend Kutuzov. At the time of Radishchev’s trial, Kutuzov was in Berlin and out of