War and Peace - How Tolstoy Challenges Historians (summary & analysis)

You are a beast! Thank you

Regards from Brazil

Borodino was NOT a decisive battle. That's kinda the point.

If it is not the greatest novel, then what is?

hello from mongolia i really love your contents and what is your ig or facebook ?

CIA I am a poor ass motherfucker again in my life and completely understand that you are not able to help yourself with your beautiful face and soul and happiness in your life as a friend and your life is very important to us together for the rest of your life and my love is always in your mind and I love you and I will always be loyal to you and I will be a Christian girl who loves God and God's blessings. That's good. False hopes and fake hypes. I am still poor after all of this hope and prayers for you and the CIA family and friends for you and I pray for you.

I preferred Anna Karenina.

Я все таки надеюсь, что это не останется самым лучшим произведением, с которым мне суждено было и будет столкнуться. Вся надежда на зарубежную литературу, потому что в русской ничего более совершенного действительно не существует.

"Novels are written by the outsiders"

I heard Tolstoy was never satisfied with how War & Peace ended up after the publishers made him cut all the parts about the giant robots.

Excellent!Loved this!

Love from India. I just love the way you smoothly summarize the novels.
From hindi you much read the godan novel by munshi premchandra

I challenge that. Najeeb mahfoz ,sons of our ally,is better

As a piece of art I have to say I preferred Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy with his novel War and Peace, strongly opposed some of my ideas like individualistic heroism and made me rethink about my takes on historical figures. And I think this is a huge part that makes a novel GREAT: The capacity to challenge it's readers thoughts and revolutionize their mindset.

Thanks!

I wish modern books were more like this . I've read war and peace twice. It's one of my favorite books .

Brilliant! Please keep up with the great work. Your videos are phenomenal!

Amazing thank you!

A brilliant man and thinker and I assume writer. I find him foolish and his love story banal. But someone smarter than me has to make that conclusion.

War and Peace is a great book and read. Why try to tear it down? I first read it as a teenager in just a few days (I did nothing else.) Anyone can read this book. Much easier to read than most post-modern fiction. Don't let people like this guy discourage you from reading it. Just do it.

Excellent! I just finished watching the immense Russian film "War and Peace", and was thus drawn to watch your video. What I need to do now is read the book. Thank you for your very clear analysis! I agree with Tolstoy that "Life is a dream and death is waking up from that dream." That is, I think that is probably correct. I will see for myself....when death comes.

Great video! I love your content. Keep them coming ❤

Tolstoy unlike Dostojewsky was not fond of the Germans, but one he admired, said Arthur Schopenhauer, but for a different little writing. That is "On females - in German Über die Weiber." Not a single woman is doing well as a character in the whole novel. Natasha Rostova is an adorable girl, that too, the moment she morphs into a woman, gets stupid as possible and as a wife she is just a breast feeding animal, interested in nothing but her family. More Schopenhauer is not possible. Late in life Tolstoy was so full of disgust for his aging wife, that he left Yaznaya Polyana with a daughter to not return. This hatred for an aging wife he transmitted to, or shared with, said Mohandas Ghandiji. Tolstoy and Ghandi fathered both many children, but could not get along with their wifes. Schopenhauer otoh lacked any experience with females as a wife, he prefered poodles all his life. Btw. in German girls are not female genderwise, but neuter or things, cockroaches, though, are female, I guess even the males of them.

This summary of the novel is just so-so. Henri Troyat's chapter on War and Peace in his biography of Tolstoy gives a much better indication of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. It is surely false to say that it was written without prejudice against the French. Troyat, a Russian by birth but a French citizen, makes clear what a slanted portrait it gives of Napoleon, clear even from the brief quotes given in this video. By contrast, it gives a hagiographic portrait of the rather devious Russian tsar, Alexander I. Borodino was not a decisive battle in the French invasion of Russia and it is absurd to call it that. The plot summary was more than a little misleading. Pierre's wife was pregnant and she died by taking too much of a drug designed to get rid of the foetus. She wasn't like a heroine addict who died of an overdose.

Thank you for sharing all your thoughts concerning Tolstoy's "War and Peace".

Tolstoy did not write War and Peace as a novel. This might help you when reading this masterpiece.

First I read it at 30 in Russisn … too long … didn’t understand a thing .. now at 75 eventually matured enough … to get it … but why is it the grestest novel did not get the Nobel, twice ?
Maybe because he is Russian ?

I think Tolstoy is very interesting assuming Fiction Beast has correctly interpreted Tolstoy's War and Peace. I am a bit concerned about Tolstoy's assessment of different Europeans. Tolstoy is an artist. Like all artist he does not spend a lot of time studying the sciences. I know Peter the Great forced Russia to change. Peter wanted Russia to be more like Western Europe. Peter forced the traditional Russian nobility to be more European specifically more like England, France, Netherland, ... After adopting Western European technology like ship building and fighting wars Peter led Russia into expansion by taking land from its neighbors. From Sweden he took land to the north-west of Russia. In that area he built St. Petersburg, Peter's new capital. St. Petersburg is the most Western European city in Russia while Moscow remained traditional Russia. As Fiction Beast pointed out a couple of famous Russian writers favor Moscow over St. Petersburg as authentic Russian and more friendly. Sounds like famous Russian writers are very nationalistic. Love for traditional mother Russia and reject sterile, fake Europe. That is okay. Everyone is like that. We are all human. But Peter did force Russia to modernize to catch up with the most developed countries in Europe. Catherine the Great could not have taken land away from the Ottomans and Iranians if Peter did not modernize Russia's military. The Bolsheviks could not have repelled Nazi Germany without Peter pushing Russia forward. The Bolsheviks returned Russia's capital back to Moscow. I guess the Bolsheviks have something in common with the Russian Romantic writers. It is about a feeling, the soul of mother Russia. Not the cold, sterile reasoning of science.

Incredible, you have done it so beautifully so succinctly

You were doing good up explaining Tolstoy's philosophy, up until you stumbled at the Fire of Moscow. "The Russian decided to burn it" — that's precisely the point of view Tolstoy vehemently opposes in the book. Tolstoy's idea was that Moscow could not have not burned, it happened naturally, because it's natural that a largely wooden city of several hundert thousand population burns when almost every citizen decides to abandon it and leave the homes unattended. The French would see the fire as an example of Russian barbarism, says Tolstoy, the Russians — as an example of Russian heroism and self-sacrifice, but in fact it was neighter, it was simply a natural turn of events, just like everything in history. And if we must look for an example of the defiant collective Russian will, it wouldn't be burning Moscow, it would be LEAVING Moscow.

I read War and Peace 45 years ago, and my overall sense of the writing was that Tolstoy needed an editor to help organize the book...there were just too many "asides" and too much of the "purple pen"...over long sentence structures with inadequate punctuation because there are no proper punctuation structures for run-on sentences. Anna Karenina was a much better read from a technical perspective. I wouldn't call W&P the greatest novel ever written, perhaps the greatest Russian novel ever written. Certainly the Illiad and the Odessy are the greatestest novels ever written for their all-encompassing allegorical representations and ancient mythological truths. I enjoyed W&P, nonetheless.

The key to understanding history, is to read A LOT of history books. Dense, heavy, intellectually demanding history books at that. Therefore, no history book, or a single historian's work, can produce a history book/s on a particular subject/s and is 100% reliable. The only way to understand history is to read a lot of it.

Napoleon was not small by any measure. Napoleon was probably closer to 5’6” or 5’7” (1.68 or 1.7 meters) than to 5’2”. Although the range may seem short by 21st-century standards, it was typical in the 19th century, when most Frenchmen stood between 5’2” and 5’6” (1.58 and 1.68 meters) tall. Napoleon was thus average or taller, no matter the interpretation. He was depicted as very short by enemy countries. It was given fuel, due to Napoleon by surrounded by a lot of tall men, especially his Consular Guards and later, his Imperial Guards, with tall bearskin hats /helmets topped with plumes.

War and Peace is a profoundly anti-military book. It's a got an excellent coda at the end, which is a critique of historiography.

Napoleon most certainly DID have to invade Russia. Simply because Russia's aristocrats were infused with the French language & its culture, making an invasion superfluous, is ludicrous. The actual reasons behind that invasion, i.e. the breaking of a pledge by Russia, at the Treaty of Tilsit, not to trade with Great Britain are well known. YOU ARE NOT FIT TO MAKE THIS VIDEO, AS YOU MISINFORM WITH YOUR IGNORANCE!

such an amazing channel

Certainly one of the longest novels ever.

Long live Russia 🇷🇺. Long live Putin . Huraa

Tolstoy was a young man when he wrote W & P. Maybe your thumbnail should reflect that, so the book would be more appealing to the younger generation.

Napoleon was not short. He was 5’6” which was average for a man of that time.

Thank you for post that, finally I undertand Tolstoy, I thing!

Pierre — “One must live, one must love, one must believe.”

Reading the book War and Peace at the age of 71 for the first time I really have to say — It’s a treatise on the story of history thru men as the Almighty moves them to accomplish His purposes. Most spectacular classic I’ve ever read.

History records that Napoleon was in fact, an average-sized man. Five foot eight inches was the average of the time. Napoleon was 5'8". That Napoleon was short and had a "little man complex" is fictional history.

Edward Gibbon created the Historical Method which is like the forensics of historical priorities. This has also enabled modern historians to examine the biases and arrive at the nearest to truth, by also incorporating evidence such as archeology. Also, there are many social histories that do investigate the lives and conditions of average people.

Leo Tolstoy was 35 y.o. on fihishing the novell.
Why do people always show him as 90 y.o., at his oldest age?

Thanks a lot for this analysis.

"Мир" and "мiр", are two different words in Russian. One means peace, and the other means world. Original title had the "world" meaning. In 1920s letter "i" was removed from the alphabet. So now you have to infer from context, or just guess