This article considers the intersections between walking, literary writing, and homeland as central to understanding Letters of a Traveller and the importance of walking in the nineteenth-century Russian empire. I suggest that the act of walking is connected to the ideas of national identity and writing in Chavchavadze’s text. I choose Letters of a Traveller in support of my argument because this text provides us with multiple literary, metaphorical and physical meanings that walking contains across the Empire’s different regions. It further allows defining the act of walking beyond an exoticized, orientalist vision.