I'm currently reading War and Peace (currently on the third part of the first volume), and was looking to use the opportunity to get to know better the most important historical events that are background for the book (most of all the Napoleonic Wars).
I don't have time to do a truly profound research on the topic, but I also detest the shallow narrative that some high school textbooks and pop books have. I was looking for a book that would guide me through the events, sometimes quoting records and source material, and that could give me ample opportunities to reflect. Do you guys know a book similar to that? In absence of such material, other suggestions would be appreciated.
Thank you in advance.
While the title is a bit pop-historyish (I suspect the publisher forced the subtitle), Dominic Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace is a decent summary of the war. Lieven is pretty notable for examining sources from the Russian side of the hill and Russia Against Napoleon is an incredibly readable volume. Alexander Mikaberidze's trilogy on 1812 (Borodino, Moscow, and Berezina) are models of some of the newer Napoleonic scholarship. Mikaberidze's book on the burning of Moscow would be especially important to combat some of Tolstoi's thoughts on the fires in the city and the historian does tackle the novel at a few points. One of the things that both Mikaberidze and Lieven have done is make Russian-language sources and data more available. Much of the older historiography on 1812 was dominated by French and German sources, which often subsumed the campaign into a quasi-Romantic event in which Napoleon's hubris found its nemesis in the burning of Moscow and the Russian winter. Finally, the anthology Russia and the Napoleonic Wars is a good collection of various essays on Russia's experience of this period.