The Harrowing Retreat from Moscow
Poets involved
What happened
Following his occupation of a deserted, burning Moscow, Russia, Napoleon Bonaparte was forced to order his Grande Armée to conduct a catastrophic winter retreat across hundreds of miles of devastated countryside. The retreating soldiers faced the onset of an exceptionally early and severe Russian winter, with temperatures dropping below minus thirty degrees, causing thousands to freeze to death in their sleep. Harassed relentlessly by Russian Cossacks, suffering from typhus and severe starvation, and forced to cross the icy, body-choked Berezina River, Napoleon's army of half a million men was reduced to a few tens of thousands of broken survivors in an absolute disaster of military hubris.
Literary impact
This immense tragedy reshaped the European literary imagination, dealing a fatal blow to Enlightenment rationalism and fueling the dark, apocalyptic currents of late Romanticism. In Russia, the collective endurance of the population inspired Aleksandr Pushkin's patriotic verses and Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace', while British poets like Lord Byron and Robert Southey wrote scathing satiric verses mockingly celebrating the freezing downfall of Napoleon's imperial ambitions.
Source: Wikipedia
