Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790

Book excerpt: During 1789-90, Nicholai Mikhailovich Karamzin, a young poet and short-story writer, toured Western Europe. On his return, he distilled his impressions in the form of travel letters. Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1791-1801, in which Karamzin’s impressions are woven into a wealth of information about Western European society and culture that he derived from wide reading, became a favorite of readers and was widely imitated. The most influential prose stylist of the eighteenth century, Karamzin shaped the development of the Russian literary language, introducing many Gallicisms to supplant Slavonic-derived words and idioms and breaking down the classicist canons of isolated language styles.