Short answers, pulled from the story.
Fyodor Rostopchin was the Governor-General of Moscow appointed at the end of May 1812. He ordered the city's destruction on the 14th of September 1812 to prevent Napoleon's forces from occupying it, leaving behind disassembled fire engines and planted fuses before departing the city.
Rostopchin initially denied responsibility, printing a pamphlet in Paris in 1823 proclaiming his innocence. He subsequently admitted to ordering the city's destruction. In his memoirs he said his two motivations were maintaining tranquility in Moscow and expediting the departure of its inhabitants.
Tolstoy portrays Rostopchin unfavorably in his 1869 novel War and Peace, depicting him as a man overwhelmed by events who believed until the last moment that Moscow would not be surrendered. Tolstoy also argued that the fire was not caused by any single individual but was an inevitable result of a wooden city abandoned to soldiers.
After accompanying Tsar Alexander I to the Congress of Vienna, Rostopchin was disgraced. His family left Russia in 1814, traveling through the Duchy of Warsaw, the German Confederation, Vienna, and the Italian peninsula before settling in France in 1817. He returned to Russia in 1825 and died in Moscow from asthma and hemorrhoid complications.
Countess Sofiya Fyodorovna Rostopchine was Rostopchin's daughter. She married in 1819 and became a noted French novelist writing under the name comtesse de Segur. Her mother and she converted to Roman Catholicism during the family's years in Paris.
Rostopchin joined the Preobrazhensky Regiment in 1775 and fought in both the Russo-Swedish War of 1788-1790 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1788-1791. He served under Alexander Suvorov and later rose to become president of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs in 1799, receiving the title of Count that same year.