Disenchanted Magic: Rationality and Cultural Topography in the World of Nikolai Karamzin

• In Event: How "Enlightened" Was Late-Eighteenth-Century Russia?

Abstract

This paper explores representations of place and space in reference to ideas of Enlightenment and superior rationality on the part of late eighteenth-century Russian writers of fiction. Focusing on the short stories of Nikolai Karamzin, it argues that Karamzin’s depiction of magic and the supernatural firmly within the context of literary fantasy helped to shape his identity as a European and as a Russian intellectual. Attention to ideas of magic and the supernatural offers particular insight into the details of social distinction and elite self-fashioning in the milieu of the Russian Empire’s cultural centers.

Author

• William Forrest Holden, U of Michigan