she throws
herself into a pond hard by, beneath the ancient oaks which but a short
time before had witnessed their joys.

"Natalya, the Boyar's Daughter," is a glorification of a fanciful past,
far removed from reality, in which "Russians were Russians"; and against
this background, Karamzin sets a tale, even simpler and more innocent,
of the love of Natalya and Alexei, with whom Natalya falls in love, "in
one minute, on beholding him for the first time, and without ever having
heard a single word about him." These stories, and Karamzin's "Letters
of a Russian Traveler," already referred to, had an astonishing success;
people even learned them by heart, and the heroes of them became the
favorite ideals of the young; while the pool where Liza was represented
as having drowned herself (near the Simonoff Monastery, in the suburbs
of Moscow) became the goal for the rambles of those who were also
"gifted with sensibility." The appearance of these tales is said to have
greatly increased the taste for reading in society, especially among
women.

Although Karamzin did not possess the gift of artistic creation, and
although the imaginative quality is very deficient in his works, his
writings pleased people as the first successful attempts at light
literature. In his assumption that people should write as they talked,
Karamzin entirely departed from Lomonosoff's canons as to the three
styles permissible, and thereby imparted the final impulse to the
separation of the Russian literary language from the bookish,
Church-Slavonic diction. His services in the reformation and improvement
of the Russian literary language were very important, despite the
violent opposition he encountered from the old conservative literary
party.[6]

When Alexander I. ascended the throne, in 1801, Karamzin turned his
attention to history. In 1802 he founded the "European Messenger" (which
is still the leading monthly magazine of Russia), and began to publish
in it historical articles which were, in effect, preparatory to his
extended and famous "History of the Russian Empire," published in 1818,
fine in style, but not accurate, in the modern sense of historical work.

Karamzin's nearest followers, the representatives of the sentimental
tendency in literature, and of the writers who laid the foundations for
the new literary language and style, were Dmitrieff and Ozeroff.

Ivan Ivanovitch Dmitrieff (1760-1810), and Vladislaff Alexandrovitch
Ozeroff (1