Napoleon Bonaparte: 'I Should Have Died in Moscow...'

The great emperor, conqueror, the man who laid the foundations of the modern French state—everything points to one person: Napoleon I Bonaparte. Russian and French histories have always been closely connected—culturally and politically. And we mustn’t forget that for a long time, the main spoken language for the Russian nobility was precisely French.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s personality in Russian art and historiography is reflected in a highly contradictory way. Still, it would hardly be possible to expect consistent assessments of a figure of such magnitude. On the one hand, the hero of the French Revolution, a great commander, an unbelievable-scale statesman—poems and even cycles of ballads were devoted to him. On the other hand, a villain who invaded the territory of the Russian Empire with the aim of conquest—a cruel tyrant. And, thirdly, at the end of his life, a defeated, lost man— a confused “captain of an air ship” who looks back with bitterness at his great past and at his France.