“History of the Russian people” by N.A. Polevoy

Markers of the Temporal Canon of the Late Enlightenment in the First Macrohistory of the Post-Karamzin Period

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the problems of comparative analyses of the structuring of the time in the narratives of N.M. Karamzin and N.A. Polevoy. The author believes that the version of presentation of the time, which proposed at the turn of the 20s-30s of the XIX century in the “History of the Russian people” by Polevoy, formed under the influence of the British and Russian historiographical tradition of the late Enlightenment. “The History of England” by  D. Hume, “The History of Scotland”, “The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V” and “The History of America” by W. Robertson, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by E. Gibbon previously had a significant impact to the “Russian History from Ancient Times” by M.M. Shcherbatov and the “History of the Russian State” by Karamzin. In the post-Karamzin period, Polevoy proposed a version of the presentation of time in which significant similarities with the variants of predecessors prevailed over differences. This is evidenced by the comparative analysis of the complexes of temporal markers highlighted in the texts of Karamzin's and Polevoy's macrohistories. The comparison of the role of exact Dating, time periods of uncertain duration, periodization, division by centuries, personified time, the best and the worse time, synchronization, time connection in this texts gives grounds to assert that in the post-Karamzin period, the “History of the Russian state” preserved the status of historiographical sample in Russian historical science, at least in the field of time structuring.