Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790

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.