Napoleon in the Russian Imaginary: The Idea of the Great Man in the Works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Merezhkovsky, and Evgenii Tarle

Napoleon today is still a figure who fascinates both his admirers and detractors because of his seminal role in European history at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, straddling the French Revolution and the enormous empire that he fashioned through military conquest. Napoleon in the Russian Imaginary focuses on the response of Russia's greatest writers—poets, novelists, critics, and historians—to the idea of "Great Man" as an agent of transformational chan...