French invasion of Russia subject of much discussion among historians. The campaign's sustained role in Russian culture may be seen in Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture", and the identification of it with the German invasion of 1941–45, which became known as the "Great Patriotic War" in the Soviet Union. 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
War and Peace first-hand accounts of how the Imperial Russian Army was structured. Tolstoy was critical of standard history, especially military history, in "War and Peace". He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written. His aim was to blur the line between fiction and history, to get closer to the truth, as he states in Volume II. Although the book is mainly in Russian, significant portions of dialogue are in French. It has been suggested that the use of French is a deliberate literary device, to portray artifice while Russian emerges