The Moscow Kremlin is more than Napoleon’s lodging in the poem’s account of the burning of Moscow: it becomes the imagined center of a conquest that Moscow refuses to acknowledge. Its keys, conventionally associated with surrender, are withheld; the speaker insists that the city did not approach its conqueror with a bowed head or bring gifts and feasting. Historical detail then gives that refusal a physical setting: Napoleon occupies the Kremlin, leaves it as fire spreads through the city, and later returns.

Seat of Expected Surrender

The Kremlin enters the passage through the expectation that Moscow will present its keys to Napoleon. That image frames the city as a possible supplicant and the Kremlin as the emblematic prize of conquest. The speaker immediately overturns the expectation: Moscow did not go to seek Napoleon with a lowered head. The refusal is not described as a military encounter but as a denial of the ceremonial submission the conqueror anticipates.

The absent welcome sharpens the contrast. Moscow bears no gift and proclaims no feast; the Kremlin’s keys are not offered as the sign that the city has accepted a new master. The passage thus makes the meaning of the place depend as much on what does not happen as on its occupation. The building stands at the center of imperial expectation, while the city’s refusal strips that expectation of its ritual confirmation.

Napoleon and the Conflagration

The historical note places Napoleon in the Kremlin after his arrival in Moscow on 14 September. He took up quarters there, but the conflagration that broke out across the city forced him to leave on 16 September for the Petrovski Palace, outside Moscow on the road to Tver. He returned to the Kremlin on 19 September. These movements give the site a brief, unstable sequence: occupation, flight from the spreading fire, and return.

The poem’s image of Napoleon frowning over the conflagration connects the ruler’s presence in the Kremlin to a city burning around him. The historical note identifies the fire as the reason he had to remove to the Petrovski Palace; the return two days later shows that his departure did not permanently end his occupation. Yet the episode does not turn the Kremlin into proof of an uncomplicated victory. The expected presentation of the keys never occurs, and Napoleon’s stay is interrupted by the conflagration.

Narrative and Historical Significance

The passage sets ceremonial conquest against the material disorder of fire. A city that might have appeared ready to yield in the image of the offered keys instead refuses the posture of submission, while the conflagration unsettles the conqueror’s actual possession of its central stronghold. The Kremlin therefore concentrates two different kinds of power: the authority Napoleon seeks to claim and the Russian city’s refusal to enact his triumph.

The note also links the Kremlin’s surroundings to the poet’s own remembered geography. The Petrovski Palace stood amid extensive grounds just outside the city, on the northwest road to Tver, the route by which the poet would have approached Moscow from his country residence at Mikhailovskoe in Pskoff province. This biographical aside draws the historical episode into the poem’s own landscape of experience without changing the event’s central contrast: Napoleon occupies the Kremlin, but Moscow does not greet him as a willing subject.