Sept 7, 1812: the battle of Borodino, on which War and Peace and the 1812 Overture are based

Va Viper ^ | 09/06/19 | harpygoddess

[harpygoddess]

September 7 is the anniversary of the battle of Borodino in 1812, at which Napoleon's Grande Armée grappled bitterly with massed Russian forces defending Moscow under Marshal Mikhail Kutusov during Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

Kutusov suffered significant losses, and the French occupied Moscow a week later, but in a month, Napoleon's disastrous retreat toward the west had begun.

As Tolstoy noted in War and Peace,

"The cudgel of the people's war was lifted with all its menacing and majestic might, and caring nothing for good taste and procedure, with dull-witted simplicity but sound judgment, it rose and fell, making no distinctions."

[harpygoddess]

Post includes a brief documentary and the cannon-punctuated finale of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Best movie is the 1966 RUSSIAN version of WAR AND PEACE. I have the Russian Cinema Counsel version. Excellent color, wide screen. Don’t waste your money on the KULTUR pan and scan version. Faded color and too many “de-violence” cuts for TV.

Criterion has recently released a HD version of the 1966 film.

The 1956 Henry Fonda version is the equivalent of a “Cliff’s Notes”. 10 minutes of Borodino whereas the Russian version is over an hour of battle scenes.

Then follow it up with WATERLOO staring Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plumber as Wellington.

[Calvin Locke]

Best movie is the 1966 RUSSIAN version of WAR AND PEACE.

Saw it on TV, maybe during the 1970s. ABC, I think, ran it over four nights.

Pierre at Borodino freaking out over the bloody slaughter the French artillery was wreaking sticks in my mind.

Wonder what was cut, though, now that you bring it up.

Read the novel after college.

[Jeff Vader]

Wasn’t war and peace originally going to be called war, what is it good for?

[wally_bert]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PPhny0mAL4

[SuperLuminal]

""The cudgel of the people's war was lifted with all its menacing and majestic might, and caring nothing for good taste and procedure, with dull-witted simplicity but sound judgment, it rose and fell, making no distinctions.""

Now there is the correct strategy/philosophy that will be required if we ever hope to restore the Constitutional Republic... Or, at least some semblance of it...

[BenLurkin]

Yes, but there is no Russian equivalent for “HunH!” so he had to go with something else.

[BenLurkin]

Frontal assault disaster from which you’d think Napoleon would have learned a lesson. But instead...Waterloo.

[IronJack]

Borodin is the perfect example of winning a battle at the cost of the war. Or the classic Pyrrhic victory. Although it allowed Napoleon to continue his march to Moscow, it cost him so dearly that his Grand Armee would never be the same. Then, when discipline broke down in Moscow and the city burned, the Russians simply abandoned it for the countryside, knowing that the French would have to retreat with winter approaching. They harassed the battered army to the point that it was virtually ineffective by the time it got back to Paris.

And the beginning of the end was Borodin.

[nwrep]

Borodino, not Borodin. The latter was a composer.

[Verginius Rufus]

When I was a child I was told that one of my ancestors was a survivor of Napoleon's invasion of Russia (he wasn't French but from an area Napoleon had brought under French control). When I asked my grandfather about it many years later he claimed not to know anything about it--he was very old then and may have just forgotten. I think it may be true and may have been his grandfather (who would have been 32 in 1812). If it is true, then I wouldn't be here if he had not been one of the lucky ones to survive the campaign.

I have read War and Peace and thinking about that made Tolstoy's account of the battle of Borodino more interesting to me.