Tolstoy family at the Marquesas and debauched all the crew, captain Krusenstern had to maroon him on the Aleutian Islands near Kamchatka. When he returned to St Petersburg, Count Fedor was nicknamed "Amerikanets" ("the American"). He fought bravely in the Patriotic War of 1812 but scandalized his family again by marrying a Gypsy singer in 1821. Alexander Griboyedov satirized him in "Woe from Wit", and his cousin Leo Tolstoy — who called him an "extraordinary, criminal, and attractive man" — fictionalized him as Dolokhov in "War and Peace". Many of the Tolstoys devoted their spare time to literary pursuits. For instance, Count
War and Peace exposes numerous scoundrels, worthless goons and fools", he added. In 1876 Dostoyevsky wrote: "My strong conviction is that a writer of fiction has to have most profound knowledge—not only of the poetic side of his art, but also the reality he deals with, in its historical as well as contemporary context. Here [in Russia], as far as I see it, only one writer excels in this, Count Lev Tolstoy." Nikolai Leskov, then an anonymous reviewer in ("The Stock Exchange Herald"), wrote several articles praising highly "War and Peace", calling it "the best ever Russian historical novel" and "the pride of