THE GRANDE ARMÉE entered Russia in the summer and fall of 1812. It has been estimated that 400,000 of its troops died for a cause that had lost meaning even before the crossing of the Niemen River of Belarus and Lithuania into Russia. Perhaps the same number of Russians lost their lives, perhaps more. The struggle was not, as it tends to be constructed, ideological, pitting the forces of revolution against monarchic rule. By 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte had declared himself emperor and exercised powers no less absolute than the Russian tsar. His relationship with Alexander I had at times been respectful; their emissaries had mooted the signing of the equivalent of a nonaggression pact. Even the possibility of a dynastic liaison through marriage loomed. But Alexander’s decision to move his troops to the western borders of the empire created the pretext for the French invasion. Napoleon interpreted the move as a provocation and used it to recruit Polish forces for the battles in Smolensk, Borodino, and Moscow.
The war was a catastrophe for both sides. Cossack and Russian peasant conscripts under the control of Field Marshal Barclay abandoned their positions over and over again, ceding the soil of Holy Rus to the French without a fight. The behavior was passive-aggressive: the Russians neither laid down their arms nor engaged in traditional warfare. Instead, Barclay ordered the Cossacks to burn everything left behind: food sources, houses, modes of transport, and communications equipment. Barclay’s aides, seeing the wasteland of overturned carts and dead or dying horses and men, challenged his judgment. The tsar sacked him, appointing Prince Mikhaíl Kutuzov in his place. Kutuzov was not a brilliant strategic thinker—by most accounts he was inert and rather clueless—but he benefited from being in the right place at the right time. He achieved victory after Napoleon essentially defeated himself by overextending his troops in hostile Russian territory. The scorched-earth practice deprived Napoleon of the spoils of his conquest. Supplies dwindled. Marauding Cossacks harassed the French encampments at night and captured and tortured to death those soldiers caught foraging for food on their own. Napoleon persisted, insisting upon the eight days’ march from Smolensk to Moscow. When Napoleon’s aides second-guessed his thinking, he fatefully declared, “The wine has been poured, it has to be drunk.”13 The horrendous battle of Borodino delayed, but did not stop, the French siege of the city. The cost in terms of lives and materiel on both sides was exorbitant.
Napoleon’s soldiers entered Moscow on September 14, 1812, after exchanging grapeshot and cannonballs with the surrounding Russian positions. The colorful cupolas and golden spires of the city had made a fairy tale–like impression on the French from afar. But the streets were quiet, save for scattered drunkards and assorted ne’er-do-wells. Napoleon established quarters in the Kremlin without fanfare the following morning; he assumed administrative control of the ancient capital without such control having been ceded to him. The tsar and Moscow’s ruling class ignored his arrival and refused to meet with him. Tolstoy imagined Napoleon’s disappointment in a single sentence: “The coup de théâtre had not come off.”14
Two-thirds of the population of just over a quarter million had evacuated. Before the invasion, the muddle-headed governor general of Moscow, Fyodor Rostopchin, had regaled the population with tales of French sadism. He acted surprised, however, when the terrified masses packed up and left. Rostopchin predicted Napoleon’s defeat in his proclamations, but also pledged to leave him nothing but ash. The noble class locked up their stone manor houses and headed to their rural homes. Their carriages clogged the road. They packed up their human goods (cooks, maids, nurses, footmen, and jesters) along with their dressing tables and portraits. The carriages mingled with carts containing merchants and tradesmen and their families, along with injured Russian soldiers and—according to anecdote—deserters disguised as women. “Moscow was shaken with horror,” a noblewoman recalled of her pampered exodus. She responded to Rostopchin’s exhortations to stay in the city and accusations of treason by planning her “flight” and the packing of her precious objects.15 The poor had no choice but to heed Rostopchin and take shelter in churches. Shopkeepers guarded their shelves against looting. The governor general ordered saboteurs, traitors, and spies for the French captured. Then he unlocked the prisons and madhouses. He ordered business papers destroyed and treasuries emptied. The looting began.
Rostopchin had been told by Kutuzov that Moscow would not be defended, so he fulfilled his promise to burn it down. The city had been tactically abandoned; sacrifice would be the price of its survival. Rostopchin ordered water tanks drained and charges placed in the granaries, tanneries, dram shops, and storehouses. Small fires illuminated the cart-jammed bridges, the shredded, discarded uniforms, and the human and animal waste on the streets. The flames spread easily in the late-summer breeze, ravaging block after block of wooden buildings, engulfing a hospital, and forcing the rabble onto the river’s edge. Voices of the doomed mingled with the echoes of prayer and discordant singing. The flames increased the strength of the wind and the wind the strength of the flames. When the fire threatened his quarters in the Kremlin, Napoleon gathered his precious articles de toilette and left. He and his commanders took in the spectacle of the city in self-immolation from a suburban palace.
One of Valberg’s (and Didelot’s) distinguished students, Adam Glushkovsky, would become the first great ballet master of the post-Napoleonic era; during the war, he served as a teacher and ballet master in Moscow, reporting firsthand from the front lines. Relying on his own memories and those of his peers, he compiled a harrowing true-life account of the Napoleonic invasion.
Nine months before the Napoleonic invasion, in January of 1812, Glushkovsky arrived in Moscow. A mustachioed man with a wide-open face and the wardrobe of a musketeer, he was touted less for his leaps and jumps than for his acting. He danced at the Arbat Theater and taught at the Imperial Theater College, passing the lessons he had received from Didelot on to the children in his classes. He lived at the college but took his meals gratis in the home of the ballet master Jean Lamaral. When word came from the Moscow governor general that he would have to evacuate, he buried a trunk of his belongings in the woods. (The trunk stayed safe; he found it intact upon his return.) He spent his final wages, a bag of copper coins handed to him on the eve of the French attack, on boots and a coat for the road. Then he seated himself in a cart with his students, bound for the church towns northeast of Moscow known as the Golden Ring. The famished horses could barely lift their hooves, and the procession bogged down. He and the students settled for the night in a refugee camp before receiving word that the French would soon be upon them. The convoy lurched onward.
They moved through hamlets to the town of Vladimir, in hopes of taking shelter and refreshing their horses. The town was crammed with Russian soldiers, French captives, and assorted people of rank. The scene was repeated farther along the road, in the town of Kostroma. There the vagabond entertainers performed in the local wooden theater in exchange for food, a bath, and a bed. After just two days, however, the regional governor announced that he could not accommodate the theater school refugees in Kostroma, despite being directed to do so, on official paper, by the theater directorate in Moscow. Housing was instead found in the picturesque fishing village of Plyos. For three months, the students occupied merchant dwellings built into the hill above the Volga River. Glushkovsky and the other teachers who had evacuated (the instructors of holy law, diction, voice, and drawing) settled into buildings on the shore. To the horror of the eavesdropping local crones, Glushkovsky’s girls lifted their skirts above their ankles and hopped about while practicing their fandangos with the boys. Word spread of the “unclean spirit” that had taken hold, and of the “devil’s helper” teaching them their steps.16
Snow fell, and the students sledded down the hill to their classes. News of their presence spread to the aristocratic families residing in the area, and Glushkovsky became the featured entertainment as well as the instructor, in character dancing, of the darlings of the households. He took sick, however, after performing a solo from an Anacreontic Didelot ballet in a cold hall wearing only a light silk tunic. The fever threatened his life, but he declined the treatments offered by the village doctor—tea laced with vodka and bloodletting—in favor of hot wine and chest compresses soaked in vinegar. He convalesced back in Kostroma, where the governor finally found space for him and his students. The governor