Knight of our time

The knight of our time is the unfinished novel of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin , published in 1802-1803, that is, at the very end of his work as a fiction writer.

The novel was published in three issues of the journal Vestnik Evropy , with the initial chapters dating from 1799 and the final chapters to 1803. In the introduction, the author characterizes the work as "the romance story of one of my friends."

Thirteen short chapters of the novel tell about the early years of Leon, a sensitive and tender boy. According to Karamzin himself, the novel "is based on the memories of youth, which the author was engaged in during mental and bodily illness."

Biographer Karamzin A. V. Starchevsky in 1849 noted that the novel was written under the influence of Russo 's “Confession” ^[1] .

N. N. Bulich in a biographical sketch about Karamzin, published in 1866, wrote:

If, as Karamzin’s biographers usually say, to consider his unfinished story “The Knight of Our Time” as his poetic autobiography, based on his own memoirs of his youth, then in spite of her sensitive or sentimental character, common to all Karamzin’s stories, we we can find in her real memories of the first adolescent years of Karamzin. The first childhood years of Karamzin, like Leon in “The Knight of Our Time” passed in the Simbirsk village, “on the meadow side of the Volga, where the transparent Sviyaga flows into it”, in the family nest, “where the great-grandfather, grandfather, Leonov’s father” was born. Maybe in the father and mother of a romantic hero you can recognize the parents of Karamzin ^[2] .

Yuri Lotman wrote that in “The Knight of Our Time” Karamzin “proceeds from the idea of ​​a good child, embodying the wonderful possibilities of man” ^[3] .

Researchers note that the name and motives of the Karamzin work were reflected in the “ Hero of Our Time ” by Mikhail Lermontov . The first to compare the two novels was Peter Pletnev ^[4] in a review of Lermontov’s novel in Sovremennik ^[5] .