On August 14/25, 1758, Friedrich II's army attacked Russian troops commanded by Vilim Fermor at Zorndorf, an obscure settlement close to Berlin. In the ensuing battle, one of the bloodiest of the eighteenth century, Prussian losses exceeded 11,000 killed and 7,500 wounded; the Russian dead were over 6,000, with wounded soldiers numbering nearly 12,000. The battle was strategically inconclusive, so both sides claimed victory.

Denis Sdvizhkov's distinguished book explores 116 letters by participants and observers of the Zorndorf conflict. The letters, dispatched by courier from Russian forces to St. Petersburg, were seized by Prussian guards near the Polish border and then conveyed to Berlin, where they were translated, analyzed, and later preserved in a Prussian archive. Because the letters originated almost immediately after the battle and came from a wide range of individuals in the officer corps (generals, staff-level officers, and even cornettes), they now constitute a major addition to sources on the Seven Years War. Since most of the authors were nobles writing about military affairs but also about private matters (family issues, estate management), the letters simultaneously shed light on elite mentalities and on the cultural history of Russia. Not the least significant point here is that the original letters were composed in various languages—Russian, French, German, Latin, Georgian–and therefore illustrated the multi-national, multilingual character of the “Russian” elites.

Sdvizhkov has divided the book into two parts: nearly four hundred pages of documents, and a two-hundred-page introduction. The heart of the book consists of the original letters, translations of them into modern Russian, and commentaries on each. Sdvizhkov oversaw the task of transcribing the originals, often hurriedly scrawled on torn pieces of paper. So far as I can tell, his work here is exemplary.

The wide-ranging introduction to the book is both background to, and analysis of, the epistolary sources. Its first sections discuss the letters’ origins, their formal properties (Did they carry stylized headings? Did they address military matters or “private” concerns? Were they meant to be read by one person or many?), and their place in the history of Russian epistolary culture. The middling portions treat what the letters had to say about the battle itself. Sdvizhkov provides a bracing overview of hostilities based on other published materials and the letters in his collection. From the outset, he demonstrates, the battle was exceptionally violent. The Russian sources speak of “a rain of artillery shells” that did “great harm” (79); the Prussian cavalry did no less damage to the imperial army, and were it not for the steadfastness of experienced Russian regiments, the battle might have led to the army's “complete destruction” (86). By the afternoon, the “front” disappeared, as Russians and Prussians intermingled in confused, brutal fighting. Both sides took captives: according to Sdvizhkov, Russian POWs attempted to escape; incurring Empress Elizaveta's fury, King Friedrich ordered the execution of a captive junior officer from Kurland. Friedrich also refused Fermor's request for a temporary ceasefire to treat 1500 wounded soldiers stranded on the battlefield and to bury the dead.

The introduction's concluding sections note that many Russian officers found the battle so traumatic they chose not to describe it to loved ones. Instead they expressed their longing for “peace” [pokoi]—in the form of return to family and to the management of their estates. Meanwhile, they borrowed money to replace slain horses, to purchase food, to buy souvenirs, and to purchase fashionable clothing. They also sought promotions to higher ranks decimated by the battle. Aside from these mundane activities, Russian officers thought hard about “higher values”: not patriotism in the abstract, but love of Empress Elizaveta, and about their survival at Zorndorf being a result of prayers by loved ones, especially their mothers and wives. Officers venerated the recently canonized Saint Dmitrii of Rostov but also the warrior-saint Aleksandr Nevskii. Sdvizhkov depicts the officers as caught between religious and secular values, but as making a slow transition from understanding state service as burden [povinnost΄] to seeing it as “a privilege and civic duty in the spirit of enlightened patriotism” (198).

In the long run, Sdvizhkov thinks, Zorndorf contributed to two stereotypes: to the Russian myth of its soldiers’ “indomitable courage” [otvazhnost΄], and to the German cult of national destiny (204–5). Both stereotypes proved disastrous in the twentieth century.