hen started differed radically from all preceding
Russian reviews in that it dealt with politics and made _belles
lettres_ and criticism a permanent feature. As soon as Karamzin had
put this review on a firm basis, he devoted himself to historical
research, and the fruit of his work in this field was his _History of
the Russian Dominion_, in twelve volumes; eight published in 1816, the
rest in 1821-1826. The Russian language was, as has been said, like an
instrument waiting for a great player to play on it, and to make use
of all its possibilities. Karamzin accomplished this, in the domain of
prose. He spoke to the Russian heart by speaking Russian, pure and
unmarred by stilted and alien conventionalisms.

The publication of Karamzin's history was epoch-making. In the first
place, the success of the work was overwhelming. It was the first
time in Russian history that a prose work had enjoyed so immense a
success. Not only were the undreamed-of riches of the Russian language
revealed to the Russians in the style, but the subject-matter came as
a surprise. Karamzin, as Pushkin put it, revealed Russia to the
Russians, just as Columbus discovered America. He made the dry bones
of history live, he wrote a great and glowing prose epic. His
influence on his contemporaries was enormous. His work received at
once the consecration of a classic, and it inspired Pushkin with his
most important if not his finest achievement in dramatic verse (_Boris
Godunov_).

The first Russian poet of national importance belongs likewise to this
epoch, namely KRYLOV (1769[2]-1844), although he had written a great
deal for the stage in the preceding reigns, and continued to write for
a long time after the death of Alexander I. Krylov is also a Russian
classic, of quite a different kind. The son of an officer of the line,
he started by being a clerk in the provincial magistrature. Many of
his plays were produced with success, though none of them had any
durable qualities. But it was not until 1805 that he found his
vocation which was to write fables. The first of these were published
in 1806 in the _Moscow Journal_; from that time onward he went on
writing fables until he died in 1844.

His early fables were translations from La Fontaine. They imitate La
Fontaine's free versification and they are written in iambics of
varying length. They were at once successful, and he continued to
translate fables from the French, or to adapt from AEsop or othe