Feodor Rostopchin

Count Fyodor Vasilyevich Rostopchin ( – ) was a Russian statesman and General of the Infantry who served as the Governor-General of Moscow during the French invasion of Russia. He was disgraced shortly after the Congress of Vienna, to which he had accompanied Tsar Alexander I. He appears as a character in Leo Tolstoy's 1869 novel War and Peace, in which he is presented very unfavorably. Biography Rostopchin was born in the Kosmodemyanskoe village (modern-day Livensky District, Oryol Oblast of Russia) into a Russian noble family, the son of Vasily Fyodorovich Rostopchin (1733–1802), a landlord and former army major, and Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Rostopchina (née Kryukova) who died shortly after giving birth to his younger brother Peter. Rostopchin's date and place of birth, as well as his family roots are still questioned by biographers. While the date 12 March 1763 is written on his tombstone, other sources, including Rostopchin himself, pointed at 1765 as the real year and Moscow – as the real place of his birth. He also claimed that his family was very ancient and originated around the 15th century from Crimean Tatars, direct descendants of Genghis Khan. In Part 2 of the All-Russian Armorials of Noble Houses he named some Boris Davydovich nicknamed Rostopcha (from Russian rastopcha which means scatterbrain, blockhead) who arrived to Moscow to serve Vasili III of Russia, while in Part 4 his name changed to Boris Fyodorovich and later official encyclopedias renamed him to Mikhail Davydovich. His descendants supposedly served in Moscow, Tver, Klin and Rzhev at various army and state positions, yet none of them left any trace in Russian history, and some modern historians consider it to be a mystification. He spent most of his childhood and youth at his father's family estate in the Kosmodemyanskoe village where he received home education. He was fluent in English, German, French and Italian languages, and from 1786 to 1788 he traveled to Europe. This trip, especially the time spent in Berlin, influenced his later views and his passion for self-education. He described it in his first book The Trip to Prussia (1792–1794) which has been compared to the Letters of a Russian Traveller by Nikolay Karamzin.