French invasion of Russia French invasion of Russia The French invasion of Russia, known in Russia as the Patriotic War of 1812 () and in France as the Russian Campaign (), began on 24 June 1812 when Napoleon's crossed the Neman River in an attempt to engage and defeat the Russian army. Napoleon hoped to compel Tsar Alexander I of Russia to cease trading with British merchants through proxies in an effort to pressure the United Kingdom to sue for peace. The official political aim of the campaign was to liberate Poland from the threat of Russia. Napoleon named the campaign the Second Polish
Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life. "War and Peace" (which is to Tolstoy really an epic in prose) therefore did not qualify. Tolstoy thought that "Anna Karenina" was his first true novel. After "Anna Karenina", Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886) and "What Is to Be Done?" develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. For all the