Итальянская кампания А. В. Суворова в исторических трудах его современников

Abstract

The historiography of Suvorov's Italian campaign includes a wide range of studies in different languages. The first publications on this topic came from the pen of contemporaries of those events already in 1799-1800. At the same time, two main trends in their coverage were formed, which exist to this day. The first is to consider the events of 1799 through the prism of Suvorov's military biography. His role in them is recognized by many historians from different countries as the most significant, although many other famous generals from both the allied and French armies participated in the campaign. Most of the early biographies of the commander were published anonymously. At the end of the first decade of the 19th century, some studies began to appear. Another trend was to consider this campaign as a separate military conflict in isolation from the rest of the events of the period of confrontation between France and the Second anti-French Coalition. At the beginning of the 19th century. The relevant publications appeared very actively in various European languages, often in translations and reprints, but for the most part they were anonymous. In the 1820s – 1830s, works were published with a detailed analysis of military operations and with full text copies of archival documents in the appendix. In the context of the social and political history of Italy, the 1799 campaign was not often considered, but the book published, albeit rather late, by the Italian historian C. Botta provides many interesting details of the life of the civilian population of the region during the conflict. The authors of all these texts were contemporaries of the events they described, and in some cases their immediate participants, and therefore such works were later considered by some historians as sources, by others as historiography.