Nikolaj Karamzin and François Vernes

This article focuses on a specific episode of Karamzin's 1789–1790 trip to Europe: his personal acquaintance with the Swiss sentimentalist writer François Vernes during his stay in Geneva. Dealing with Karamzin's response to Vernes's 1786 Le voyageur sentimental, ou ma promenade à Yverdun, a text typologically similar to Letters of a Russian Traveller, the present study highlights the reasons why Karamzin partially rejected it as a model for his own book, and how this rejection helped him shape his own conception of the sentimental travelogue genre.