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Cover of the first edition of
War and Peace [source: wikimedia.org] |
It was on holiday this summer that I unexpectedly stumbled across a reference to Svintsyan, the shtetl (Jewish town) of my forefathers and Aunty Betty's birthplace. I was reading War and Peace when to my astonishment I came across events which took the Russian army through Svintsyan. War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy, a masterpiece of modern literature, cleverly combines the tale of three families, the Bezukhovs, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, with the history of the Russian involvement in the Napoleonic wars spanning the period from 1805 to 1812. In the summer of 1812 the Russian army was retreating from the advancing Grande Armée through what is present-day Lithuania, then a Polish frontier region of the Russian Empire. After having retreated through Vilna, Nicholas Rostov and the rest of supreme commander Barclay de Tolly's
* troops stopped in 'Sventsyani', the Russian name for Svintsyan. According to Tolstoy's account the Svintsyan encampment was one big drunken orgy: 'many complaints were made against the troops, who taking advantage of the order to collect provisions, took also horses, carriages, and carpets from the Polish proprietors'. In actual fact at least half of the 'Polish proprietors' referred to by Tolstoy were Jewish. The quiet of this tranquil rural town and it's peaceful inhabitants would have been disrupted by the debauchery of hundreds, perhaps thousands of drunken soldiers.
Following the retreating Russian army at the end of June 1812, Napoleon took the same road into the heart of Russia. Having difficulty crossing the River Kuna, he also stopped with his troops in Svintsyan. The house below, opposite the Orthodox church on Vilniaus gatvė (Vilna Street), was unfortunately not preserved. From this house Napoleon watched his troops pass by, not knowing the disaster that was to befall him and his mighty army later on in that fateful year.
*Barclay de Tolly was notably a Lithuanian nobleman of Scottish descent.
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| Napoleon's House [source: JewishGen.org] |
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The Orthodox Church still stands as a silent witness to war and peace
[source: The Aunty Betty Project] |
