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Updated: July 13, 2025
In 1872 Count Anatole de Segur, grandson of Rostopchine, the author of a biography of the latter, wrote, concerning these memoirs, that they were seized, together with all the papers of his grand-father, by order of the Emperor Nicholas, immediately after Rostopchine's death in the year 1826, and were locked up in the archives of the Imperial Chancellor where they would remain, perhaps forever.
The documents which Popof has examined leave no doubt concerning Rostopchine's part in regard to its conflagration. But, after all, it was caused by those who had a right to do it, those who, beginning at Smolensk, burned their villages, their hamlets, even their ripening or ripened harvest, after the Russian army had passed and the enemy came in sight. Who?
These same fragments, three in number, were reproduced by Count Anatole de Segur in the biography of his ancestor, of which we have spoken. Aside from these extracts nothing was known of Rostopchine's memoirs until Popof had made his researches. To verify the memoirs Popof quotes long passages which he compares carefully with other documents of that epoch.
Here Rostopchine's inborn talent as tribune and publicist, as comedian and tragedian, showed itself to perfection. He gave a free rein to his imagination in his placards, in which he affected the proverbial language of the moujik, made himself a peasant, more than a peasant, in his eccentric style, to excite patriotism.
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