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.