# The true story of  Alexander against Napoleon



## MarkOttawa (18 Jun 2010)

Not exactly as Tolstoy made almost everyone think--an excellent, professional, and extended effort that did Bonie in.  I've read it: superb military, diplomatic and, to an exent economic and cultural history:

‘War and Peace’: The Fact-Check
_NY Times Book Review_, June 20, by MARK MAZOWER
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/books/review/Mazower-t.html?src=me&ref=books

RUSSIA AGAINST NAPOLEON
The True Story of the Campaigns of “War and Peace.”
By Dominic Lieven
Illustrated. 618 pp. Viking. $35.95
http://www.amazon.ca/Russia-Against-Napoleon-Dominic-Lieven/dp/0141009357/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276889469&sr=1-3



> Dominic Lieven, a professor of history at the London School of Economics, is a distinguished scholar of the czarist empire, and in this superb book he has written his masterpiece. The story he tells — Russia’s gargantuan struggle with Napoleon — will be known to most people through Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” and it takes a brave man to challenge the great novelist. But that indeed is Lieven’s goal, and for the most persuasive of reasons. He believes that Tolstoy’s account is badly misleading (Lieven has a historian’s natural concern for the facts) and perhaps more important has skewed our view of Russia and contributed to our tendency to misunderstand and belittle its role in international affairs.
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> In the first place, Tolstoy depicted a war in which individuals had little control over the course of events; military expertise is seen as a peculiarly German character trait, and the Russians instead depend on fate, snow and the vastness of their land to save themselves. Second, the novel essentially ends in late 1812, before the Russian Army has begun the quite extraordinary advance across Europe that led to its defeating Napoleon and entering Paris in triumph just over a year later.
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> ...



Mark
Ottawa


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