Tag Archive: 0Napoleonic Wars

One rare item I shall have with me next week at the New York book fair is this: It’s a work I’d never heard of before: the first edition (there was also a reissue, with a cancel title-page, in 1816) of supposedly a translation of a poem, in which ‘a Russian Boyar adopts the son of […]

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a piece of music written in celebration of Russia’s victory over Napoleon in 1812.  Here’s another book produced in the wake of the campaign, but this time it’s a novel.  In fact, according to Anthony Cross (The Russian Theme in English Literature, p. 23), it’s the first English […]

The story goes that, after his defeat in 1814 when he was deliberating whether to contest his banishment to Elba or not, Napoleon was given a bunch of violets by a child.  Taking this to be a sign that he should accept exile meekly, as a ‘shrinking violet’, he declared the violet to be his […]

The most famous musical response to Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in December 1812 is, quite rightly, Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’.  That was composed almost seventy years after the event, but there was also music written at the time to celebrate the Russian victory. This is A military song in honour of General Count Wittgenstein dedicated to […]