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 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