Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler

Abstract

Unlike Fonvizin and Radishchev, who used the voyage almost exclusively to express extra-literary ideas, Karamzin exploited the travel genre for its literary as well as its polemical possibilities. The voluminous Letters of a Russian Traveler not only established a dolce stil nuovo for Russian prose, but they crystalized those standards of good taste and sensibility which are generally associated with the Sentimental School in Western Europe. Writing the Letters at the age of twenty-one, Karamzin did more than merely adapt certain Western aesthetic standards to the Russian scene. Concentrating on the narrator’s (his own literary alter ego) subjective reactions to external places, people and events as well as dramatizing love as the central force behind human relationships, Karamzin facilitated the movement of Russian prose toward greater psychological development of character. Although his characterizations seem overly schematic to the modern reader, his interest in human types (in both the anecdotal and theoretical parts of the Letters) must have been refreshing to contemporary readers accustomed to the heavy, predominantly satiric approach to character that had heretofore prevailed in eighteenth century Russian literature.