Reluctantly I turned from the present to the year 1825, the epoch of my hero's mistakes and misfortunes, and abandoned what I had begun.
[2]The story was to contrast the physical and moral vitality of the returning Decembrist exiles with the decrepitude and artificiality of his contemporaries who had stayed in Moscow's "club society".
"Late on a winter's night of 1856 one of the 'criminals of 1825' returns 'to Moscow, to the heart of Russia ... after thirty-five years' exile and a journey lasting one and a half months' accompanied by his wife and their son and daughter who had been born and brought up in Siberia.
"[2] Geographically they had been transported three thousand miles into completely different, alien surroundings, but morally they were, this evening, still at home, just the same people as their special, long, secluded family life had made them.
[2]During composition, Tolstoy decided to begin with what he saw as the roots of the Decembrist movement in the 1812 Napoleonic invasion of Russia.