Karamzin as the Creator of the French Culture of Sensibility in the Russian Language

Abstract

The article examines the language of intimate feeling in Russian, which endowed the language with expressiveness and psychological depth. Classicism and sentimentalism represent stages in the assimilation of the French literary tradition. While the classicist tradition shaped the language of “high” art and state rhetoric, sentimentalism developed a vocabulary associated with the intimate and personal spheres. These two stages of French influence did not exclude one another but complemented each other: the former ensured terminological precision and structural coherence, whereas the latter enhanced expressiveness and psychological depth. Whereas classicism borrowed primarily a system of concepts associated with art and state ideology, late eighteenth-century sentimentalism introduced an entirely different lexical layer – the vocabulary of feelings and emotions. The vocabulary of the intimate and personal spheres is associated with N.M. Karamzin, the founder of Russian sentimentalism. The work of N.M. Karamzin and his followers contributed to a substantial renewal of the literary language, the expansion of its expressive potential, and the development of new principles governing the linguistic organization of literary texts. N.M. Karamzin systematically introduced French vocabulary denoting emotions and psychological states into Russian literary usage, creating a language of intimate feeling that had not previously existed in Russian prose and creatively adapting it to the Russian linguistic context.