His contemporaries regarded "Dmitry Donskoy" as his masterpiece, although in reality it is one of the least noteworthy of his compositions, and it enjoyed a brilliant success.
But the most extreme and talented disciples of the Karamzin school were Vasily Andreevitch Zhukovsky (1783-1852) and Konstantin Nikolaevitch Batiushkoff (1786-1855), who offer perfectly clear examples of the transition from the sentimental to the new romantic school, which began with Pushkin.

Everything of Zhukovsky's that was original, that is to say, not translated, was an imitation, either of the solemn, bombastic productions of the preceding poets of the rhetorical school, or of the tender, dreamy, melancholy works of the sentimental school, until he devoted himself to translations from the romantic German and English schools.

He was not successful in his attempts to create original Russian work in the romantic vein; and his chief services to Russian literature (despite the great figure he played in it during his day) must be regarded as having consisted in giving romanticism a chance to establish itself firmly on Russian soil; and in having, by his splendid translations, among them Schiller's "Maid of Orleans," Byron's "The Prisoner of Chillon," and de la Mott Fouque's "Undine," brought Russian literature into close relations with a whole mass of literary models, enlarged the sphere of literary criticism, and definitively deprived pseudo-classical theories and models of all force and influence.
Zhukovsky's own history and career were romantic.

He was the son of a wealthy landed proprietor named Bunin, who already had eleven children; when his peasants, on setting out for Rumyantzoff's army as sutlers, asked their owner, "What shall we bring thee from the Turkish land, little father ?" Bunin replied, in jest, "Bring me a couple of pretty Turkish lasses; you see my wife is growing old." The peasants took him at his word, and brought two young Turkish girls, who had been captured at the siege of Bender.

The elder, Salkha, aged sixteen, first served as nurse to Bunin's daughters.