About the book: 2013 / Ivan Ivanovich Lazhechnikov (1792–1869) is widely known as a historical novelist. However, he is little known as a military memoirist. But literary fame was brought to him by his first major work, “Marching Notes of a Russian Officer in 1812, 1813, 1814 and 1815,” which are distinguished by high patriotic pathos and a view of the Patriotic War as a national cause, and not as “the history of the generals of 1812.” Burnt and deserted Moscow, the destroyed Kremlin, the Russian pursuit of the retreating enemy army, the starving and freezing French, night bivouacs, officer conversations, pictures of life abroad appear vividly and vividly from the pages of “Marching Notes.” The reader also faces the figure of the author himself, who “kneaded the Lithuanian snowdrifts, stumbling over frozen corpses, in severe frosts that took the breath away, in a traveling greatcoat, through which the wind blew like through a sieve,” and wrote his notes “in the light of the bivouac bonfires, on drums and often with the noise of troops walking nearby».