Nikolay Karamzin

Nikolay Karamzin taught Russian prose to sound like speech, then became his country's first national historian. The sentimental tale Poor Liza and his Letters of a Russian Traveller made him the leading Russian writer of the 1790s, reforming the literary language. As imperial historiographer he gave his last two decades to the History of the Russian State, eleven volumes and an unfinished twelfth reaching 1611. Its portrait of Boris Godunov as the murderer of the Tsarevich Dmitry, which modern historians reject, reached Musorgsky through Pushkin and then directly: the 1872 revision names Karamzin as a source in its own right.