Die Geschichte der Zerstörung Moskaus im Jahre 1812 by Anton Wilhelm s> Nordhof Claus Scharf , J�rgen Kessel (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I49 became navy minister under Alexander I at the end of i802 and remained one of the tsar'smost intimate associatesuntil about I 807. His enthusiasmfor navalreform,however,made him many enemies. Over-scrupulous,incorruptible , prickly,and solipsistic(except in the family home on Vasil'evskiiIsland), he eventuallyfound bureaucraticpoliticstoo much forhim and took indefinite leave from his ministry in I809. Conservatives in St Petersburg were not inclined to change theirview of him when he proceeded to spendthe next two years in Napoleonic France.Woods'sstudyconveys the clear impressionthat, but for the calming influence of Elizabeth Proby, Chichagov would. have antagonized many more people in St Petersburga good deal sooner than he did. He certainly fell apart when his wife died in Paris in July I8I I (in childbirth).Although he earnedplauditsin St Petersburgforgoing backthere, and although he and the tsar re-establishedtheir close relationship,the blow on the Berezina proved too much for him and in I814 he moved from Russia to Francefor good. Woods narratesall this with verve and insight, providing along the way many vignettes of life in the upper echelons of Russian society at the turn of the nineteenth century. Because Proby and Chichagov were close to Joseph de Maistre, Roxana Sturdza, and various members of the Vorontsov family, and because Chichagov got on poorly with Nikolai Mordvinov and Mikhail Speranskii,at times the book's arrayof charactersis Tolstoyan. Although its source-base is incomplete it is weak on Russianlanguage memoir material, and seems not to referto the publishedversion of the correspondence between Alexander I and Chichagov in I812 (Sbornik imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, 6, I87I, PP. I-73) - it nevertheless succeeds in explaining many things which have not always been made clear by other investigators,notably the tsar'sreasonsfor giving Chichagov a command on land in I812 in the firstplace (he was planning an amphibian operation against Istanbul in which Chichagov would have had charge not only of the army of the Danube but also of shipsfrom New Russia).In short, TheCommissioner's Daughter shedsvaluablelight. If the presentreviewerfeltthat it delineated Elizabeth Proby less sharply than her husband, that is undoubtedlybecause he is a man. University ofNfewcastle DAVID SAUNDERS Nordhof, Anton Wilhelm. Die Geschichte derZerstdrung Moskaus imJahreI8I2. Edited and with an introduction by Claus Scharf and Jurgen Kessel. Deutsche Geschichtsquellen des I9. und 20. Jahrhunderts, herausgegeben von der Historischen Kommission bei der BayerischenAkademie derWissenschaften,6i. HaraldBoldt im R. Oldenbourg, Munich, 2000. 343 pp. Figure.Notes. Bibliography.Index. DMI 28.oo. IN recent years, students of Russia in the Napoleonic Wars have benefited from the publication of critical editions of previously unknown or neglected primary sources;examples include I8I2 god. Vospominaniia voinov russkoi armi, edited by F. A. Petrov (Moscow, i99i), or the late Andrei G. Tartakovskii's 18I2 godv vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow, I 995). Claus Scharf, assisted by Jurgen Kessel, has now made a major contribution to this literaturewith I50 SEER, 8o, I, 2002 the memoirof AntonWilhelmNordhof(I778- I825), a Germanphysician andMoscow resident.As Scharfexplains(pp. 30-34), a substantiallymodified version of Nordhof's account was published in Paris in I822 as Histoire dela destruction deMoscoueni8I 2, etdesevenements quiontprecide, accompagne' etsuivice desastre parA. F. deB-ch/, traduit del'allemandpar M. Breton, but the presentedition is the first to identify the author, restore Nordhof's original I8I5 text, and accompany it with a biographicalessay(by Kessel), a long, highly informative historicalintroduction(by Scharf), and exhaustiveexplanatoryfootnotes. Nordhof's work deserves attention on several levels. To begin with, for those interested in urban Russian society around i8oo, it forms a valuable addition to such sources as Engelbert Wichelhausen's Zige zu einemGemdhlde vonMoskwa(Berlin, i803), Robert Lyall's TheCharacter of theRussiansanda DetailedHisto?yof Moscow(London, Edinburgh, I823), Johann Richter's Description historique ettopographique deMoscow (Paris,I8I 2), or Heinrich Storch's Gemaehlde vonSt.Petersburg (Riga, n.d. [I793-94]). Likethose authors,Nordhof was a university-trained European (he, Wichelhausen, and Lyall were all physicians)of moderatelyliberalviews,trainedin the artof carefulobservation and description, and critical of Russia in an 'enlightened', bourgeois spirit that considered Russian society xenophobic, corrupt, and despotic, and criticized its people for lacking cleanliness, personal modesty, sobriety, and thrift,but thatwas not reflexivelyrussophobic.Although (orperhapsbecause) his biases...