This chapter examines the earliest and the most “classical” Gothic tale in Russian literature — Nikolai Karamzin's The Island of Bornholm (1793) where the Russian traveler, stranded on a mysterious Danish island, is surprised to learn that the island used to be populated by Slavs. The fictional traveler's investigation of the mysteries of the island (deriving from possible incest and the resulting punishment) becomes a journey back to the dark pagan origins of Russian history and a Gothic prelude to Karamzin's later historical project. The Island of Bornholm remains an isolated phenomenon in late-eighteenth-century Russian literature, unique for its complex fusing of Gothic tropes and historical concerns.
Selected Tragedies Of A. P. Sumarokov. Translated by Richard and Raymond Fortune. Introduction by John Fizer. Foreword by Henry M. NebelJr. , Publications of Eighteenth-Century Russian Literature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. xiii, 229 pp. $8.50.