Alexander II and Alexander III: Vereshchagin’s 1812

During the course of the nineteenth century, the Russian narrative of the 1812 invasion changed to fit the exigencies of various rulers. Beginning in the summer of 1812, when Alexander I reluctantly left his troops to travel to Moscow to “appeal to the sentiments of the Russian people as a whole,” as Wortman explains, a myth was encouraged that conveyed that the Russian people stood united behind the emperor and the nobility to expel the foreign invader from their land. In the wake of the Decembrist Uprising at the beginning of Nicholas I’s reign, the era of Alexander II’s reforms, and the disaster of the Crimean War, the terms of this discourse shifted, particularly around the concept of the narod, or the Russian people. As Wortman explicates, Russia’s emperors avoided the transition to the Western model of national identity, and, instead, they “sought to make ‘nationality’ (narodnost’) an attribute of imperial power, reflected in the past activity and identity of the monarchy—to find in the Westernized court and monarchy a common past with the Russian people.” As I argued in the previous chapter, Russian representations of the saga of 1812 reflected these changes, particularly in the form of official battle painting.