[4][5][6] According to Nikolay Karamzin, his surname derived from Kara-mirza, a baptized Tatar and his earliest-known ancestor who arrived to Moscow to serve under Russian rule.

[7][1][2] His mother Ekaterina Petrovna Karamzina (née Pazukhina) also came from a Russian noble family of moderate income founded in 1620 when Ivan Demidovich Pazukhin, a long-time officer, was granted lands and a title for his service during the Polish–Russian War.

[8][9] Her father Peter Pazukhin also made a brilliant military career and went from Praporshchik to Colonel; he had been serving in the Simbirsk infantry regiment since 1733.

As far as the family legend goes, the dynasty was founded by Fyodor Pazukh from Lithuanian szlachta who left Mstislavl in 1496 to serve under Ivan III of Russia.

[1][5] Nikolay Karamzin was sent to Moscow to study under Swiss-German teacher Johann Matthias Schaden; he later moved to St Petersburg, where he made the acquaintance of Ivan Dmitriev, a Russian poet of some merit, and occupied himself with translating essays by foreign writers into his native language.

These letters, modelled after Irish-born novelist Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, were first printed in the Moscow Journal, which he edited, but were later collected and issued in six volumes (1797–1801).

In the same periodical, Karamzin also published translations from French and some original stories, including Poor Liza and Natalia the Boyar's Daughter (both 1792).

Admired by Alexander Pushkin and Vladimir Nabokov, the style of his writings is elegant and flowing, modelled on the easy sentences of the French prose writers rather than the long periodical paragraphs of the old Slavonic school.

[14] In 1816, he removed to St Petersburg, where he spent the happiest days of his life, enjoying the favour of Alexander I and submitting to him the sheets of his great work, which the emperor read over with him in the gardens of the palace of Tsarskoye Selo.

In the battle pieces, he demonstrates considerable powers of description, and the characters of many of the chief personages in the Russian annals are drawn in firm and bold lines.

As a critic Karamzin was of great service to his country; in fact he may be regarded as the founder of the review and essay (in the Western style) among the Russians.

This scathing attack on reforms proposed by Mikhail Speransky was to become a cornerstone of official ideology of imperial Russia for years to come.