Volume 51, Number 19 · December 2, 2004
What a Disaster!
By Orlando Figes
Moscow 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March
by Adam Zamoyski
HarperCollins, 644 pp., $29.95
'Oh please, Nurse, tell me again how the French came to Moscow.' Thus the writer Alexander Herzen starts My Past and Thoughts, one of the great works of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Born in 1812, Herzen had a special fondness for his nanny's stories of that year. His family had been forced to flee the fire that engulfed Moscow on its capture by the French, and it was only through a safe conduct pass from Napoleon himself that they managed to escape to their country residence. Herzen was proud to have 'taken part in the Great War' (he had been carried out in his mother's arms). The story of his childhood became part of the national drama he so loved to hear about: 'Tales of the fire of Moscow, of the battle of Borodino, of the Berezina, of the taking of Paris, were my cradle songs, my nursery stories, my Iliad and my Odyssey.'[*]
Review, 3624 words
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