The Great Patriotic War of 1812

Abstract

The War of 1812 is the brightest page in the military history of our motherland before the October Revolution. That war has been the subject of more study than any other event in the thousand-year history of prerevolutionary Russia. A complete bibliography of the literature on the War of 1812 is yet to appear. Information compiled by Soviet historians, who accounted for 2,500 books and articles published before 1917,1 is far from complete. I. Kh. Kolodeev's bibliography covering the years before 1904 contains more than 5,000 books alone.2 N.M. Zatvornitskii recorded 3,122 articles published before 1915 in just a small portion of Russian periodical publications, which he intended but was never able to examine.3 Hence, the number of books and articles about the War of 1812 published prior to the October Revolution can be set, at minimum, at 10,000 to 15,000. Soviet literature on our subject, which virtually exploded in the jubilee years of 1962 and 1987, is only slightly less than Russian prerevolutionary literature. Moreover, this does not take into account the great number of works appearing in world literature concerning Napoleon and his times. By 1908 these included 200,000 titles4 and the number has grown considerably since then.