Poet, memoirist, and military theorist Denis Davydov was one of the most colorful and celebrated figures in Russian literature. He was a brilliant conversationalist, a legendary partisan hero of the Patriotic War against Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812, and a protégé of great Russian military figures General Aleksandr Vasil'evich Suvorov, Prince Petr Ivanovich Bagration, and Prince Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov. Leo Tolstoy depicted Davydov as Vas'ka Denisov in Voina i mir (War and Peace, 1863-1869) and Sir Walter Scott intended to portray him in a novel, to be titled “The Black Knight.”

Denis Vasil'evich Davydov was born in Moscow on 16 July 1784. His old aristocratic family traced its roots to Genghis Khan, specifically to Murza Minchak in the fifteenth century, and was related to the Raevskys, Kakhovskys, Ermolovs, and Samoilovs. The military arena was a family tradition, and Davydov's father, Vasilii Denisovich Davydov, commanded the Poltava Light Cavalry Regiment...