At a meeting today, the 1812 overture was playing as hold music on a phone call. This prompted someone to mention that they are reading War and Peace, and that last night (August 26), she saw that it was exactly 200 years since the Battle of Borodino. So I checked on Project Gutenberg, and chapter 19 of War and Peace does indeed open with this sentence: On the twenty-fourth of August the battle of the Shevardino Redoubt was fought, on the twenty-fifth not a shot was fired by either side, and on the twenty-sixth the battle of Borodino itself took place. But! Wikipedia and a couple of other online sources I checked say that the Battle of Borodino was actually fought on September 7, 1812. So to summarize: Tolstoy says the Battle of Borodino was on 26 August 1812. Other sources say the Battle of Borodino was on 7 September 1812. Why the discrepancy? Did Tolstoy, writing 50 years later, just get it wrong? --- A possible answer occured to me while composing this post, which turned out to be correct, although I'm not sure exactly why that particular answer should apply. I'll leave it posted as a puzzle for others.
