oud-sounding declamation and wordy
ecstatic despair of the stage heroes were drowned in the deep-drawn
sighs and plaintive wailings of amorous swains and peasant-maids
forsaken. The mania seems to have been in Russia even more severe than
in the countries where it originated. Full-grown, bearded men wept
because they had not been born in peaceful primitive times, "when all
men were shepherds and brothers." Hundreds of sighing youths and maidens
visited the scenes described by the sentimental writers, and wandered
by the rivers and ponds in which despairing heroines had drowned
themselves. People talked, wrote, and meditated about "the sympathy
of hearts created for each other," "the soft communion of sympathetic
souls," and much more of the same kind. Sentimental journeys became
a favourite amusement, and formed the subject of very popular books,
containing maudlin absurdities likely to produce nowadays mirth rather
than tears. One traveller, for instance, throws himself on his knees
before an old oak and makes a speech to it; another weeps daily on the
grave of a favourite dog, and constantly longs to marry a peasant girl;
a third talks love to the moon, sends kisses to the stars, and wishes to
press the heavenly orbs to his bosom! For a time the public would read
nothing but absurd productions of this sort, and Karamzin, the great
literary authority of the time, expressly declared that the true
function of Art was "to disseminate agreeable impressions in the region
of the sentimental."

The love of French philosophy vanished as suddenly as the inordinate
admiration of the French pseudo-classical literature. When the great
Revolution broke out in Paris the fashionable philosophic literature in
St. Petersburg disappeared. Men who talked about political freedom
and the rights of man, without thinking for a moment of limiting
the autocratic power or of emancipating their serfs, were naturally
surprised and frightened on discovering what the liberal principles
could effect when applied to real life. Horrified by the awful scenes of
the Terror, they hastened to divest themselves of the principles which
led to such results, and sank into a kind of optimistic conservatism
that harmonised well with the virtuous sentimentalism in vogue. In this
the Empress herself gave the example. The Imperial disciple and friend
of the Encyclopaedists became in the last years of her reign a decided
reactionnaire.

During the Napoleonic wars