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 is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle". Large sections, especially the later chapters, are a philosophical discussion rather than narrative. Tolstoy also said that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call "War and Peace" a novel. Instead, he regarded "Anna Karenina" as his first true novel. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" states: "It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace"". Tolstoy began writing "War and Peace" in 1862, the year that he finally