Abstract: Moscow and St. Petersburg have repeatedly been the subject of comparative characterization in Russian literature. Leo Tolstoy in his novels also tried to outline and compare the characters of the two Russian megacities, which have traditionally been rivals. In War and Peace, Moscow is depicted in detail and with love, while St. Petersburg is shown in a schematic and aloof manner. The comparison of the two capitals is extremely contrastive here: aristocratic Petersburg and “folksy” Moscow are presented as antipodes and remain so during the Napoleonic invasion. This article traces the ideological and psychological roots of this mythologeme. It shows that it is based on both objective historical reasons (the vigorous development of St. Petersburg in the 19th century and the lag of Moscow, which at the time had a “provincial” look), and Tolstoy’s deeply personal sympathies and antipathies, to which he strove to impart a universal character.

1

We know the Petersburg of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, Blok, Andrey Bely, Akhmatova… But we do not know the “Petersburg of Tolstoy.” Such an artistic notion simply does not exist. And yet, much of the action in Tolstoy’s novels takes place in Petersburg.

The characters in War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Resurrection arrive in Petersburg, leave Petersburg, ride through Petersburg’s streets, but they do not see Petersburg. Nor does the reader. At any rate, Tolstoy describes this space in a perfunctory manner. Here is Pierre Bezukhov heading for Anatoly Kuragin’s place: “It was a duskless Petersburg June night” (WaP, vol. 1, part 1, IX; [17, p. 48]). And this is Natasha Rostova going to a Petersburg ball: “The dignitary’s well-known house on the English Embankment shone with countless light” (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, XIV; [17, p. 471]). A little further there is a mention of Tavrichesky Garden near which lives maid of honor Peronsky at whose house the Rostovs have to make a brief stop. Tavrichesky Garden is again mentioned in the next chapter because Speransky’s house is located nearby (Tolstoy extracted this detail from The Life of Count Speransky [6, p. 353]). This is about all that the huge novel has to say about Petersburg.

There is no mention of Petersburg’s sights in War and Peace-no bridges, spires, churches, palaces or squares. Not even the Neva River. Tolstoy has no interest in Petersburg as an architectural or natural landscape. He does not show it to us, merely using deft touches and patches to create an illusion of a lived-in place with which almost everyone has some personal associations, confidently counting on the reader to fill in the missing details in his imagination.

There is practically no mention of Petersburg landscape in Anna Karenina, a novel about Tolstoy’s contemporaries: “a deserted Nevsky Avenue” is mentioned once (part 4, XVII). Vronsky, we are told, had a “large apartment on Morskaya” (part 1, XXXIV),1 and there is a mention of a large house of Princess Betsy Tverskoy on Bolshaya Morskaya (part 2, VI). Nevsky and Morskaya are mentioned once each in Resurrection.

Nikolay Antsyferov, an inspired researcher of “the soul of Petersburg,” noted that Tolstoy

has contributed nothing of substance to the description of Petersburg… Constantly choosing Petersburg as the place of action in his novels, he nowhere touches upon the individuality of our city… It remains to lament the fact that we have been left without an image of Petersburg created by L. N. Tolstoy [1, pp. 131-132].

As a source of creative inspiration, Petersburg did not exist for Tolstoy. Unlike Pushkin or Gogol, he had no superlatives for it. For Tolstoy, it is simply a city inhabited by people, and he likes these people less than others.

Among the innumerable subdivisions that can be made in the phenomena of life, one can subdivide them all into those in which content predominates and those in which form predominates. Among the latter, as opposed to the life of a village, a zemstvo, a province, even of Moscow, can be counted the life of Petersburg, especially its salon life (WaP, vol. 3, part 2, VI; [17, p. 726]).

Indeed, in Tolstoy’s works Petersburg is a city of salons, dignitaries, courtiers and balls; the rest of Petersburg-the world of merchants, petty clerks, artisans, cabmen, servants and Petersburg beggars-did not interest Tolstoy and was largely unfamiliar to him. In a rough draft of the preface to War and Peace he wrote : “The life of civil servants, merchants, seminarians and muzhiks does not interest me, I only half understand it; the life of aristocrats of the time thanks to the artifacts of the time and other reasons, I understand, find interesting and likable” [14, vol. 13, p. 55].

The life of Petersburg’s high society, too, he largely knew as an outsider who had grown up in the province and preferred rural life to city life, although as a man of letters and a count he was well received in some of Petersburg’s drawing rooms, for example, by his relative Aleksandra Tolstoy, a spinster and a lady-in-waiting whose interests revolved around the imperial family and religion. “The five children of Alexander II and Empress Maria Aleksandrovna occupy the main place in my life,” she wrote [13, p. 230]. Aleksandra Tolstoy may have been one of the prototypes of the lady-in-waiting Anna Pavlovna Scherer and in any case she reinforced Tolstoy’s notion that Petersburg was peopled by “phantoms.”

In War and Peace Petersburg is the Mecca of career-seekers of every stripe. Of Boris Drubetskoy, that “high-society Molchalin,” as Pisarev aptly called him (“The Old Gentry,” 1868; [8, p 77]), Tolstoy writes: “He loved Petersburg and despised Moscow” (WaP, vol. 2, part 2, VI; [17, p. 382]). Another social climber, Adolf Berg, receives in Petersburg decorations for fictitious military exploits and holds “some sort of especially profitable posts” (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, XI; [17, p. 464]).

In the lives of the main characters of War and Peace Petersburg plays either a harmful or useless role: here Prince Andrey takes part in the Speransky commission and comes to the conclusion that it is “idle work;” here Pierre first attends booze parties, then marries unhappily and then wastes time on symbolic Masonic “works.” “His life meanwhile went on in the same way, with the same diversions and licentiousness” (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, VII; [17, p. 451]). The only Freemason whom Pierre respects and loves, Iosif Alekseevich Bazdeev, does not take part in the activities of Petersburg’s masonic lodge and “permanently” lives in Moscow.

The Moscow family of Count Rostov (in many ways copied from the Tolstoy family) feel like strangers in Petersburg.

Despite the fact that in Moscow the Rostovs belonged to high society… in Petersburg their society was mixed and indefinite. In Petersburg they were provincials to whom the very people that the Rostovs fed in Moscow without asking what society they belonged to would not lower themselves (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, XI; [17, p. 464]).

The young Count Tolstoy was such a provincial when, at the age of twenty, he came to the capital city intent on conquering it.

At first, the city made a very favorable impression on him. On February 13, 1849, Tolstoy wrote to his brother Sergey that he intended to stay in Petersburg “forever,” that Petersburg life was having “great and good influence” on him, making him “accustomed to activity” and order:

Somehow you cannot do nothing; everybody is busy, bustling, and you won’t find anyone to lead a dissolute life with… for him who wants to live and is young there is no place in Russia like Petersburg [14, vol. 59, pp. 28-29].

Young Tolstoy intended to sit for candidate’s exams at Petersburg University and join the civil service in Petersburg, but then abruptly changed his mind about the civil service and decided to become a cadet of the cavalry regiment. At the time, he was prone to change his plans quickly. Eventually he failed to choose a métier and left Petersburg after five months of a life of dissipation (gambling, Gypsies, dinners at expensive restaurants) leaving behind huge debts in the amount of 1,600 rubles, including a debt to a fashionable restaurateur (Dussaut) and an equally famous tailor (Scharmer). In a letter dated May 1, 1849, he asked his brother Sergey to sell the village of Malaya Vorotynka so that he could pay off his debts [3, pp. 255, 259]. He led the same dissolute kind of life in Petersburg again in 1855-1856 when he came there as a young officer from Sebastopol. Tolstoy drew on this life experience in describing the young Pierre Bezukhov and his cavorting in Petersburg: “Pierre had not managed to choose a career for himself in Petersburg, and had indeed been banished to Moscow for riotous behavior” (WaP, vol. 1, part 1, XIII; [17, p. 69]).

Tolstoy, who always sought to improve himself, tried to avoid Petersburg as a city of temptations and vices. This is what he wrote to his wife about his son Lev in a letter of November 5, 1882:

I am constantly anxious for him lest he gets misled in this morally despicable city. Here are all the temptations of a luxurious capital… I remember myself as a young man going crazy with a special immoral kind of craziness in this luxurious city without any principles other than depravity and servility [14, vol. 84, p. 168].

After 1861, Tolstoy came to Petersburg only a few times on short business visits. He never had a house in Petersburg. Nekhlyudov’s perception of the northern capital might very well be Tolstoy’s:

Petersburg in general affected him with its usual physically invigorating and mentally dulling effect. Everything so clean, so comfortably well-arranged and the people so lenient in moral matters, that life seemed very easy (Resurrection, part 2, XV; [15, p. 394]).

2

Petersburg in War and Peace is a capital city in which people “are living, but can’t feel the land where we stay” (Osip Mandelstam)-without being aware of the vital interests of Russia and without taking its woes close to heart.

The top news in Petersburg are secondary events, such as General Bennigsen’s imaginary victories over Napoleon during the 1807 campaign or the meeting of two emperors. Tolstoy never misses an occasion to make an ironic remark: “In 1808 the emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a new meeting with the emperor Napoleon, and there was much talk in Petersburg high society about the grandeur of this solemn meeting” (WaP, vol. 2, part 3, 1; [17, p. 436]).

Even during the Patriotic War against Napoleon Petersburg lives its usual life:

The calm, luxurious life of Petersburg, concerned only with phantoms, with reflections of life, went on as of old; and beyond this course of life it took great effort to realize the danger and the difficult situation the Russian people were in. There were the same levees and balls, the same French theater, the same interests of the courts, the same interests of the service and intrigues (WaP, vol. 4, part 1, I; [17, p. 955]).

Tolstoy’s depiction of Petersburg society is always marked by affectation verging on satire. The “enthusiast” Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the weathervane of court opinions Vasily Kuragin and his wayward children (the “idiot” Hyppolite and the adulteress Helen) embody the pointless activities of outsiders who have no strong bonds with their people. News from the theater of hostilities reaches them in a distorted and biased form as if learned from European newspapers. Here they honor Wittgenstein with great pomp and circumstance as le héros de Petropol after his success in a few local battles; they read the grandiloquent letter from the Reverend Platon as if it were the Gospel; after the battle of Borodino they discuss the sovereign’s anxieties, the death of Kutaisov and the illness and death of Helen Kuragin. The General Staff sitting in Petersburg makes “useless” plans of defeating the enemy even as impossible or belated orders are sent from Petersburg to the front. Petersburg occupies considerable space in War and Peace, yet remains on the periphery of Tolstoy’s artistic vision, and Tolstoy does it deliberately: he thinks of it as a city that exists separately from the Russian people and Russia’s destiny.

Needless to say, this is no more than a mythical-poetic construct which has little in common with the real Petersburg of the early 19th century. Many prominent Petersburgers saw their houses and apartments in Moscow pillaged by the French, all Petersburg youth took part in the Patriotic War, a large militia (16,500-strong) was formed, it being the second such sacrifice (Petersburg had put up an 11,000-strong militia during the second war against Napoleon in 1806-1807), Wittgenstein’s army was engaged in heavy fighting against Marshals Oudinot and Saint-Cyr who were pushing toward Petersburg; during the Patriotic War Petersburg did not feel safe even for a day, especially after the enemy occupied Moscow and there were fears that Napoleon would strike at Petersburg (Napoleon considered this option).

In a word, Tolstoy chose to ignore many important features of Petersburg’s life in 1812 not to compromise his conviction that Moscow bore the brunt of the Patriotic War while Petersburg looked on its woes from outside.

3

It is telling that Tolstoy’s Petersburg, the most densely populated city in 19th century Russia, turns out to be a city without people: if War and Peace is to be believed, its inhabitants are either ladies-in-waiting or dignitaries or guardsmen.

Moscow, on the contrary, is depicted as the focus of people’s life and an arena of mass scenes, be it Alexander I’s appearance before the people at the Kremlin (where people fight over the biscuits he throws to them) or the murder of Vereshchagin, or epic scenes of the Russian army leaving Moscow in which the people is invariably presented as a great ungovernable mass that determines the course of history.

The cold, spare and superficial depiction of Petersburg is in striking contrast with the thoroughness and warmth Tolstoy brings to the description of Moscow:

In Moscow, as soon as he [Pierre] moved into his huge house with the dried- and drying-up princesses, with its enormous staff, as soon as he saw-on driving through the city-the Iverskaya Chapel with countless candles burning before the gold casing, saw the Kremlin Square with its untrampled snow, the cabbies, the hovels of the Sivtsev Vrazhek, saw old Moscow men, who desired nothing and were not hurrying anywhere as they lived out their lives, saw little old women, Moscow ladies, Moscow balls, and the Moscow English Club-he felt himself at home, in a quiet haven. For him Moscow was comfortable, warm, habitual, and dirty, like an old dressing gown (WaP, vol. 2, part 5, I; [17, p. 555]).

As early as 1865, the critic Nikolay Solovyov, discussing the merits of Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, wrote:

One wonders, though, why the author has placed his hero in Petersburg and, of all places, in the most crowded Gorokhovaya Street; his proper place is in Moscow in Spiridonovka, everything that seeks rest heads for Moscow. In this mass of small houses and crooked, narrow streets it is easy to get lost and feel protected from everything that worries and nags. You can hardly hole up like this in a provincial town because there everything is in view, people all know one another; and finally, these towns, in spite of their smallness, are sometimes so full of life, such growth that you cannot help feeling invigorated. Likewise, Petersburg, because it is so crowded and cramped, does not offer calm places: not having a single hill, people there live as if they are in the mountains, one above the other; climbing, bumping into each other. You lose your guard for a moment and before you know it you are tumbling head first. Petersburg is largely a seaside city: a city of anxiety and movement. Quick changes of climate, constant diseases, the danger of floods and so on-all this may have formed the troubled, active character of which there is too much in a Petersburg denizen. Petersburg is a totally inconvenient place for Oblomov (The Art Issue. The works of N. A. Dobrolyubov, 1865; [11, p. 440]).

Moscow with its suburbs of wooden houses, measured and unhurried life as it was in Tolstoy’s time was far closer to him, more congenial, more simple to understand and more convenient than Petersburg. War and Peace, which brought him great fame, was published in Moscow. Anna Karenina was published there too. Tolstoy frequently visited Moscow and since 1882 had a house in Khamovniki, a wooden house with a fruit-bearing garden, which partly reconciled him with the city’s hustle and bustle.

Petersburg, the summit of Russian urbanism, oppressed and repelled Tolstoy. On that point he was on the same page with the Slavophiles. Aleksey Khomyakov wrote: “Petersburg has always been and will be solely a government city… The life of government power and the life of the people’s spirit are separate even in their location” (“On the Old and the New,” 1839; [5, p. 26]). It was not for nothing that the democrat Nikolay Shelgunov described War and Peace as “a Slavophile novel” (“The Philosophy of Stagnation,” 1870; [7, p. 359]). At least at the time of writing his epic novel Tolstoy was much closer to the Slavophiles than ever, which was not lost on Nikolay Strakhov, a “native soil” Slavophile who wrote a glowing review of War and Peace.

4

Moscow is portrayed in War and Peace as the center of the Russian cosmos and a magnet that attracts all the forces of Europe. Napoleon is entranced upon entering Moscow and almost does not believe his eyes surveying its grand panorama from Poklonnaya Hill: “In the clear morning light he looked now at the city, now at the map, checking the details of the city, and the certainty of possession excited and awed him” (WaP, vol. 3, part 3, XIX; [17, p. 891]).

The image of Moscow as seen with the eyes of the conqueror has erotic associations, stressing its femininity: “Napoleon saw from Poklonnaya Hill the quivering of life in the city and felt, as it were, the breathing of that big and beautiful body.” The author then quotes Napoleon’s real sentence in his conversation with captive General Pavel Tuchkov: “Une ville occupée par l’ennemi ressemble a une fille qui a perdu son honneur” (“A capital occupied by the enemy is like a young woman who has lost her honor”). “And from that point of view he looked for the first time upon the Oriental beauty lying before him” [Ibid.].

On the very same page (though not in all the editions) is perhaps the most famous place: “Every Russian person looking at Moscow feels that she is a mother; every foreigner looking at it and not knowing its maternal meaning, should feel the feminine character of this city, Napoleon felt it” [16, vol. 5, p. 79].2

In the typesetter’s copy of the manuscript Tolstoy speaks about it at greater length and even more ardently:

Moscow is a ‘she,’ anyone who feels it is aware of this. Paris, Berlin, London, especially Petersburg, are a ‘he.’ Although la ville, die Stadt are feminine gender and the word for city (in Russian-V. S.) is masculine, Moscow is a woman, she is a mother, sufferer and martyr. She suffered and will suffer, she is not graceful, not well-built, she is not a virgin, she has given birth, she is a mother and therefore she is meek and magnificent. Every Russian feels that she is a mother, every foreigner (and Napoleon felt it) feels that she is a woman and she could be insulted [14, vol. 14, p. 370].

As we see, the image of Moscow in War and Peace is highly mythologized: Tolstoy’s Moscow, like goddesses in ancient cultures, oozes the symbolism of gender, the maternal element, sexual energy and reproduction of life.

Upon entering Moscow, the unstoppable enemy army is absorbed, diluted and depleted in its huge organism. During the month it stays there, it loses its strength such that it can think of nothing but flight. This was how Tolstoy saw things. From the purely historical point of view this is to a large extent an exaggeration, like Tolstoy’s conviction that the Battle of Borodino had determined the outcome of the war and the fate of Napoleon’s empire. Tolstoy does not even mention the bloody battles of 1813-1815 beyond noting that all of them were the death throes of a beast mortally wounded in Moscow (WaP, vol. 4, part 2, II; [17, p. 729]). In Moscow scenes, Tolstoy comes across as an ardent patriot for whom no hyperbole is excessive.

After the flight of the French the burnt-down Moscow remains as much of a magnet as before. Tolstoy compares it to a stirred anthill, which the industrious insects instinctively try to rebuild seeking to restore the habitual way of life:

Moscow, in the month of October, despite the fact that there were no authorities, no churches, no holy objects, no wealth, no houses, was the same Moscow it had been in August. Everything was destroyed, except for something immaterial but mighty and indestructible… In a week there, were already fifteen thousand inhabitants in Moscow, in two-twenty-five thousand, and so on. Rising ever higher and higher, this number, by the fall of 1813, had reached a figure exceeding the population of the year 1812 (WaP, vol. 4, part 4, XIV; [17, p. 1129]).

Tolstoy frequently used factual material, but in this case, his “figures” are fictitious. No such statistics exist. Indeed, authoritative sources say that the size of Moscow’s population was growing slowly. By the beginning of 1812, Moscow had a population of 275,000, and after the Napoleonic invasion (in December 1812) it had dropped to 162,000. In 1816 it stood at 166,500, in 1822 at 234,000, and in 1825 at 257,700; it was not until 1829 that the population exceeded the prewar mark of 303,600 [4, p. 162; 12, p. 33; 9, p. 9]. Other than that, Tolstoy was right: Moscow did not perish, like ancient Ryazan,3 and was largely built back by the end of Alexander I’s reign.

5

The Napoleonic invasion was a watershed event that divided Moscow’s history into “before” and “after” the fire. The flames of 1812 destroyed not only more than two-thirds of its buildings, but in many ways the traditional pattern of Moscow life.

However, in place of burned-out antiquity Moscow got something larger, a second lease of life, a development impetus. After 1812, Moscow lived through a second period of resurgence, which dramatically changed its character and role.

Having lived through a catastrophe and realized the fickleness of all earthly things, Moscow developed an appetite for change. Construction and repair were pursued with a vengeance. Since then for more than two centuries, Moscow has been building and rebuilding itself non-stop, even its historical center has never settled in its architectural forms.

This was remarked already by Vissarion Belinsky in his 1844 article “Petersburg and Moscow”:

Moscow is proud of its historical artifacts, monuments, it is itself a historical artifact in external and internal terms. But like its pre-Petrian artifacts, it is an odd mixture with the new: of the Kremlin only the original drawing has survived, for it is altered every year and new buildings appear. The wind of change is blowing toward Moscow as well, erasing little by little the imprint of antiquity [2, p. 393].

In the 177 years since these words were written the principles of Moscow urban development have remained the same: the historical center (including the Kremlin) was redeveloped under Nicolas I, and again afterward, it was destroyed and redeveloped in the Soviet time, restored and rebuilt in the 1990s and it is being redeveloped today. To be sure, many old landmarks have been preserved, there are churches and monasteries that are older than Petersburg, and there are well-preserved 18th-century townhouses and 17th century chambers, but they do not determine Moscow’s present-day look, antiquities more and more being pushed into the background of modern life or reconstructed to look like new.

Paradoxically, Petersburg, founded 556 years after Moscow, looks like a much older city frozen in its forms because its historical center was much less affected by redevelopment, and indeed the city itself has not been developing so dynamically over the past hundred years. Moscow’s permanent development, in spite of the losses and occasionally ugly extremes of new construction, is living proof of the fact that Moscow is still a vibrant city, which lives more by its present than by its past.

The traditional rivalry between the two capitals resulted in the two cities swapping their places, as it were. While formerly Moscow was the custodian of traditions, today it is Petersburg that is regarded as “the cultural capital.” Whereas formerly Petersburg was the business center of Russia where provincials flocked “to catch their fortunes and ranks” and Moscow was considered by Petersburgers to be a “backwater,” today things have reversed: the government, the bureaucracy and the business elite are in Moscow and today’s provincials usually come to Moscow in search of fortune. No wonder Moscow’s population is growing steadily (even though overall population statistics are not comforting) more than twice exceeding that of Petersburg.4

The characters of Moscow and Petersburg citizens have also changed significantly over the last 150 years, and again, they have not only changed but swapped places, as it were. Whereas in the 19th century Petersburg citizens were considered businesslike and arrogant, engrossed in the interests of the moment and Muscovites were thought to be slow and traditional, today these reputations are no longer relevant and are barely discernible-in reverse. This of course has much to do with clichés and myths, but there is no denying that today Moscow embodies the political and business Russia, the role Petersburg played in the 19th century.

In the above-mentioned 1844 article Belinsky wrote about the “quiet, provincial” status of Moscow [2, p. 413], which shows how much water has flown under the bridge over the last 177 years. Today’s Moscow can least of all be described as “provincial,” “archaic,” and “quiet.” The fact that at the very beginning of the 20th century Chekhov’s three sisters longing to get away from a provincial city wanted to go “to Moscow” and not to Petersburg is a telltale literary sign of the changed reality which put the ancient capital to the forefront of Russia’s life.

For three centuries, Moscow and Petersburg have been rivals symbolizing the struggle and unity of opposites. Pushkin, Gogol, Belinsky, Herzen, Khomyakov, Evgeny Zamyatin have left vivid comparative descriptions of Moscow and Petersburg. Leo Tolstoy also gave due to this topic, in fact, in War and Peace we find not just a comparison, but a stark juxtaposition of the two capitals. This is very much in the spirit of Tolstoy, his antinomy-based thinking and character.

Tolstoy wrote a great deal about love (often in the lofty Christian meaning) but himself he was not a source of all-embracing and all-forgiving love. There was much in this world that he did not love and he said so openly. Petersburg was the embodiment of everything Tolstoy did not love.

References

1. Antsyferov N. P. Soul of Petersburg. St. Petersburg: Brockhaus-Efron, 1922. (In Russian.)

2. Belinsky V. G. Complete Works. Vol. 8. Moscow: USSR Academy of sciences, 1955. (In Russian.)

3. Gusev N. N. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Materials for Biography. 1828-1855. Moscow: USSR Academy of sciences, 1954. (In Russian.)

4. History of Moscow. Vol. 3. Moscow: USSR Academy of sciences, 1954. (In Russian.)

5. Khomyakov A. S. Complete Works. 3rd ed. Vol. 3. Moscow: Universitetskaya tipografiya, 1900. (In Russian.)

6. Korf M. L. The Life of Count Speransky. Vol. 2. St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaya publichnaya biblioteka, 1861. (In Russian.)

7. The novel “War and Peace” by L. N. Tolstoy in Russian Criticism. Leningrad: LGU, 1989. (In Russian.)

8. Pisarev D. I. Complete Works. Vol. 10. Moscow: Nauka, 2007. (In Russian.)

9. Sakharov A. N. (Ed.) History of Moscow from Ancient Times to the Present Day. Vol. 2. Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1997. (In Russian.)

10. Shcherbakov V I. The War of 1812 in Leo Tolstoy’s Novel War and Peace. 1812 and World Literature. Moscow: IWLRAS, 2013, pp. 235-318. (In Russian.)

11. Solovyev N. I. The Art Issue. The Works of Nikolay Dobrolyubov. Otechestvennyye zapiski. 1865. No. 8, pp. 416-444 (1st pgn). (In Russian.)

12. Sytin P. V. The Moscow Fire of 1812 and the Construction of the City for 50 years. Moscow: Moskovskiy rabochiy, 1972. (In Russian.)

13. Tolstoy A. A. Notes of a Lady-in-Waiting: A Sad Episode of My Court Life. Trans. by L. V. Gladkova. Moscow: Entsiklopediya rossiyskikh dereven’, 1996. (In Russian.)

14. Tolstoy L. N. Complete Works. 90 vols. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1928-1958. (In Russian.)

15. Tolstoy L. Resurrection. The Floating Press, 2011.

16. Tolstoy L. N. War and Peace. 6 vols. Moscow: Tip. T. Ris, 1868-1869.

17. Tolstoy L. War and Peace. Trans. by R. Pevear, L. Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Notes

1 The reference is to Bolshaya Morskaya Street, often called simply Morskaya in the 19th century.

2 Quoted from the first edition of War and Peace [16; Vol. 5, part 1, XIX]. The words about Mother Moscow were deleted from the 1873 edition. The 90-volume Complete Works cites “variants” of this passage [14, vol. 11, p. 444].

3 Today’s Ryazan is the former Pereyaslavl-Ryazansky, which in 1778 was named after the ancient Ryazan destroyed by Batu Khan in the winter of 1237. The archeological preserve Staraya Ryazan (Old Ryazan) is located 50 km from the modern Ryazan.

4 12.7 million versus 5.4 million (2021).