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

Tolstoy says history books are like works of fiction. Great men of history like Napoleon are more like fictional heroes, created, shaped and glorified by historians. What is the main premise of Tolstoy's masterpiece War and Peace? What is it about? What is the plot? Why is it important? And why is it considered the greatest novel of all time? In this video, I'll tell you everything about this masterpiece. Здравствуйте, дорогие друзья! Hi everyone, I'm Matt. Thank you for watching this. Война и мир or War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy published in 1869 is often called the greatest novel of all time. Everyone has heard of it, but few have read it and even fewer have finished it. Tolstoy himself, however, didn't consider it a novel. Why? Because it's three books in one by combining history, philosophy and fiction. So in this video, I'll discuss all three topics. First, I'll give you a brief historical context and Tolstoy's motivation in writing such a massive novel. Second, I'll summarize the main plot in two parts. Third, I'll discuss Tolstoy's philosophical approach to history. And finally, I'll leave you with a few points of analysis and an interesting quote at the end. So get your coffee and sit back and let me take you back to Russia in 1812 as Napoleon's French army of 400,000 strong were marching towards Moscow. After watching this video, you will know pretty much everything you need to know about Tolstoy's masterpiece, a beast of a novel of 1200 pages long with almost 600 characters full of philosophical digressions and war strategies. Okay, before I summarize the novel, let me give you a little historical context. Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796, made French her official court language. So most of the Russian nobility spoke French. Here is the irony though, Napoleon didn't have to invade Russia because those who ruled Russia were all French-speaking people. The Russian aristocrats loved French culture and they even read French literature. In fact, you could say Napoleon's invasion of Russia hindered French culture from flourishing in Russia. Instead, it cemented Russian culture and nationalism even more. Tolstoy's main character in War and Peace is a francophile with a French name, Pierre, a Russian educated in France. So Tolstoy was making a point here. In the 1860s, when Tolstoy was in his mid-thirties, while visiting Paris, he met Victor Hugo, who had just published his masterpiece, La Miserable, often called the greatest French novel of all time. So upon returning to Russia, Tolstoy, a newlywed and aching, tried something big and spectacular. He settled himself behind a desk at his large country estate of Vyaznaya Polyana to write a huge novel as ambitious as Victor Hugo's La Miserable or Balzac's Human Comedies or Stendhal's Crystallization or How Things Happen. Tolstoy wanted to understand Russia, especially what led to the emancipation of Serbs in 1861, when 31 million Russians were suddenly free. Tolstoy knew this event had its root in the 1820s, especially the Decembrist revolt of 1825, when the Russian aristocrats revolted against the Tsar, but failed. Tolstoy then thought to understand 1820s, he had to look what had happened before the 1812 Russian victory over Napoleon. And to understand that, he had to go back again to 1805, when Napoleon decisively defeated the Russians and Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. So war and peace begins in 1805 and ends in the 1820s. So Tolstoy was inspired by French literature, set himself the task of writing about the French-Russian wars. When Tolstoy started to write about the Napoleonic Wars, he quickly realized there were plenty of records about the military and political leadership or people of power, but not much about the peasants or soldiers who actually fought in the wars. Here came Tolstoy's realization that historians tend to fictionalize history by focusing on while forgetting the people who do the fighting. Why? For the same reason novelists tend to create as few characters as possible, for the sake of simplicity. So Tolstoy formed his own theory of history. The official history books are fictionalized versions of history, so they solely focus on kings and generals, in other words fictional heroes. Tolstoy believed these so-called historical heroes such as Napoleon couldn't have changed the course of history by themselves. But it was the entire society, from those fighting in the trenches, to the peasants producing the food, to the farmers feeding the horses, and to the women who looked after the children, they all contributed to historical events. But historians hardly ever mention the millions of soldiers or ordinary men and women. Here's a quote. To illustrate this let me give you an example. The reason most politicians break their promises is very simple, they are unable to implement change. So it's ridiculous to say history happened because of these men at the top. Tolstoy says when looking at a steam locomotive, historians tend to focus on the smoke and ignore the rest. For example, Will Dron's history books are titled after an individual for the sake of simplicity and clarity. By focusing on these leaders, historians give them a kind of superhero power. History for Tolstoy is about entire people, not just individual heroes who are pedestalized by historians. Here's a quote. There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free, the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life, in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him. Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable and its result coinciding in time where the actions of millions of other men assumes a historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with, and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his free action. Tolstoy was a huge admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher who believed that humans on the innate level are good, but society corrupts them, and he famously said that humans were born free, but everywhere in chains. But he also used the Hegelian notion that we are the product of our time. A queen bee is not determined in the course of a hive, but slave to its rules, just as soldier bees are. Quote, History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive-life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes. So Tolstoy set himself to write a fictionalized history that focused on those people who are mostly ignored by historians. This is Tolstoy's Copernican Revolution. He uses fiction to tell the true history of the Napoleonic Wars, which is ironic. He combines the military, social, emotional, and existential history of that period. So Tolstoy's War and Peace is a novel, a history book, and also a meditation on life. There is a saying that history is written by the victors, but literature is written about the outsiders, those who are ignored by history books. To make his point crystal clear, Tolstoy treats all his characters as real people with flaws and redeeming qualities, who make mistakes, forget things, often contradict themselves. So you rarely see them as genuinely real people. But the one character the guy historians spend most time talking about is depicted by Tolstoy as almost cartoonishly square is Mr. Napoleon. Just to poke fun at history books. Or perhaps Tolstoy looked down on Napoleon for invading his country, or because he was a short man. Tolstoy himself was a tall and huge man. Even his name Tolstoy in Russian means thick or fat. But I have to be fair, Tolstoy shows no prejudice towards the French, so in that sense he is a truly universalist. So Napoleon, the superhero of history books, is caricatured in War and Peace, while other characters who don't make it into history books are depicted as real humans by Tolstoy. Ok now I'll summarize Tolstoy's War and Peace. This summary is delivered in two parts. Each part covers about half of the novel. Summary part 1. The historical background of War and Peace is the Napoleonic Wars of 1805 and 1812. But the main story is about five Russian noble families in the span of some 15 years, before and after Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. The families are the Bezukovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kuragins, and the Drobitsukois. Ok who is the protagonist of War and Peace? Tolstoy's entire philosophy was built on the importance of groups, not individual heroes. But I will go against Tolstoy here due to time constraint, and tell you that out of 600 characters, 3 are pretty important characters in the novel. Napoleon is not one of them. The first main character is Count Pierre Bezukov, a France-educated Russian, hence the name Pierre, but he is a slightly awkward Russian who mostly resembles and represents Tolstoy himself and his way of thinking. So if you have to pick a protagonist in War and Peace, it's Pierre. The second character that is pretty important in the novel is Natasha Rostova, who we meet in 1805 when she is 13 years old, and later on as a grown woman. She represents the passionate and spontaneous Russian woman, full of life and energy. The third important character is Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who is perhaps the most Russian of all male characters. He is a somewhat nihilistic intellectual who represents Russian pessimism, as well as the courage of not being afraid of death. He is perhaps the character Tolstoy wanted to be himself. Despite being a very rational person, he possesses that Russian value of bravery. Prince Andrei represents the rational side of Tolstoy, while Pierre represents the irrational, often indecisive and impressionable side, who lacks clarity of thought, and floats about until he finds an anchor among the Freemasons and also Natasha. So Prince Andrei is the Apollo, the man of reason, and Pierre is the Dionysian, man of impulsive emotion. Pierre as a character is outsider because he is an illegitimate son, and also awkward, so it's apt to say that while history books are about victors, fiction, however, is about outsiders. Pierre doesn't feel at home in Russia because he is educated in France and loves Napoleon like a hero. Of course, later on, he is transformed by Tolstoy. Okay, we are in 1805 in St. Petersburg at a soiree, a social gathering of the Russian high society, including princes and princesses, counts, and all sorts, where we meet two of the main characters. Pierre, whose wealthy father, Count Bezhukov, is on the verge of death, and is about to inherit a good chunk of money, so he finds himself quite popular among everyone. He is in St. Petersburg to find a job, but his foreign education and awkward personality make it difficult to find a job. He listens to other people talk, all kinds of shit, but he just listens. His best friend, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who is recently married, complains about his wife and his featherwood life in St. Petersburg. Here, Tolstoy draws on his own life, being married, but not satisfied with life. Incidentally, despite loving his wife, Tolstoy had a very unhappy marriage. Back then, marriage was seen as an eternal road to happiness. But of course, we know that idealized expectation leaves you disappointed, and sometimes in existential crisis. So Prince Andrei, not happy at home, decided to join the army alongside Prince Mikhail So far, we talked about people from two families, the Bezhukovs, represented by Pierre, and the Bolkonskys by Andrei. Now the action moves to Moscow, the former capital of Russia. St. Petersburg represents the new European Russia, a bit colder, being further north, and also being a bit more westernized and formal, therefore slightly fake and full of hypocrisy. Moscow, however, still has the charm of the old Russia, full of warmth and friendliness. In Moscow, we meet our third family in War and Peace, the Rostovs, mainly Count Ilya and his wife Natalia, and their four kids, one of which is our main female protagonist. Their 13-year-old daughter Natasha, a very spontaneous and vivacious girl, who is in love with Boris, a boy from another family called the Trubetskoys, our fourth family in the novel. Boris is about to join the Russian army to fight Napoleon. The teenage Natasha remains one of the most important characters in the novel. She represents a kind of Russian woman who is full of energy and passion, who dances like crazy, but she doesn't care. In fact, she falls in love with several men throughout the novel, namely the two main male characters, Pierre and Prince Andrei. Later on, she becomes a very caring wife and mother. Some criticize Tolstoy for taming her wild character, but life and aging tame you, no matter how wild you are. Tolstoy's writing always remains true to life. While we are in Moscow, the war is happening somewhere in the distance. You can't hear the gunshots yet, but it's happening in the Western Front. It's important to note that all these families know one another and have some sort of connections. The aristocrats in every country would stick with their own kind, so it's a small world, so to speak. Prince Andrei, the most pessimistic and most Russian character, tired of his marriage, leaves his pregnant wife alone to join the war against the French. Little did he know that his wife would die at childbirth and he himself would get wounded in the war. The action moves to the battleground, the 1905 Battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon inflicted a heavy defeat on the Russians and Austrians. Here we see Napoleon for the first time through Prince Andrei, when he is wounded and captured by the French army. Andrei, like all young men of that period, was fascinated by the character of Napoleon, just like the superhero of today. Here Tolstoy makes it clear how fictionalized Napoleon had become. While lying down on the ground, Napoleon happens to pass by. Here's a quote. So insignificant at that moment seemed to me all the interest that engrossed Napoleon. So mean did his hero himself with his paltry vanity in joy and victory appear, compared to the lofty, equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and understood. This is a reminder of Marcel Proust's novel, In Search of Lost Time, when Marcel goes to Venice. The build-up and expectation are crushed when he sees Venice itself. Here Tolstoy tells us the historical figures are not as big or heroic as our imaginations make them. So, in essence, history is a work of fiction because Napoleon is made bigger because we are led to believe he was greater than he was. Tolstoy says, Looking into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andre thought the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain. Summary Part 2 Ok, our first main historical battle is over, with the French having a decisive victory against Russians and Austrians. Now the second and most important battle is coming up. But right now, enough wars, we move to Moscow again with Nikolai Rostov, Natasha's father. Here Tolstoy tells us about some romances blossoming among the youth of Russian aristocrats. Men propose and women reject, parents want to marry their kids to richer kids for practical reasons, but you know kids, they are stupid to fall in love with their hearts, not head. So the topic of love, marriage, money fly around a lot. Speaking of money, our awkward main character, Count Pierre, has finally won the lottery. He has received a huge amount of money in inheritance. Now everyone wants to be friends with him, and all the ladies want to marry him. He is the biggest prize in Moscow. But for Napoleon of course, and the French army however, Moscow itself is the real prize. But more on that later. With lots of money, Pierre has gained self-confidence and charm. He finally marries Elaine or Elena Kuragina, who comes from our fifth family in War and Peace, the Kuragins. She is very beautiful, but a bit sexually liberated and often promiscuous. It's clear that she is after Pierre's money and doesn't love him. There is also a rumor that she may have had incestuous relationship with her own brother, Anatole Kuragin, a drunkard womanizer. Also possibly had an affair with another man called Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov. A psychopathic gambler. We are in Russia, so you know what happens. There is a duel of course. Pierre against Dolokhov. Pierre injures Dolokhov in the duel. This experience transforms Pierre into a philosopher. In all Russian novels, duels are the most transformative event in a character's life. You either die, get injured, or your whole outlook on life changes. Pierre is no longer interested in his wife Elaine, but instead he is seeking to find the meaning of life and how to be a good man. So what does he do? He joins the Freemasons and become a pacifist. Tolstoy himself was a pacifist and even said to have influenced Mahatma Gandhi, the biggest pacifist in the 20th century. Around the same time, his friend Prince Andre returns from the war physically wounded, but now also psychologically wounded because his abandoned wife died at childbirth, for which he blames himself and as a result has become even more nihilistic and pessimistic about life. Also important to note that his superhero, Mr. Napoleon, was nothing but a disappointing character. Now the two troubled men, Andre and Pierre, need some comfort. I mean, womanly comfort. Elaine finally persuades Pierre to take her back. Prince Andre, now a widower, falls in love with a lively Natasha Rostov. When love arrives, nihilism goes out of the window. This same thing happened in Turgenev's Father and Sons. But Andre's father tells him that the Rostovs are not nice people. Also important to note that the Rostovs, despite their pomp, are a bit penniless. Andre's father tells him if he wants to marry her, he should wait for a year to see if he still loves her. Andre, being a sensible man, thinks this is good advice, so he tells Natasha that he needs time. But he also tells Natasha that she's free to not wait for him, and that's what she does. While Andre is waiting, the energetic young Natasha has a few romantic adventures here and there, and even considers an elopement with Anatol Korogin, a hedonistic man who loves women and wine, who is supposedly have had sex with her sister Elaine, Pierre's wife. There are more rejections and scheming going on among the Russian nobility. Even Pierre, our philosopher, falls in love with Natasha. Her energy is infectious. When Andre finds out about Natasha's transgressions, he's deeply hurt. But being a rationally mature man, he nurses his wounds quietly like an injured animal, so he doesn't make a scene about it. He heads to the battlefront. Men fight wars for two reasons, in the hope of getting a woman, win victorious, or escape a heartbreak. Andre's heartbreak makes him even more determined to go to war. I talked about this in my video on George Orwell, that conflicts give us a profound purpose When you feel empty inside, you immediately look for some conflicts on the outside. Andre's heartbroken by Natasha's youthful mistakes, so he heads to the battle. Pierre, however, lives a peaceful life, thus feels very empty. We humans need a battle, a struggle, or a conflict to keep us going, or give us a purpose. Even joining the Freemasons didn't help Pierre much. So what does he do? He falls in love with Natasha, a woman who broke his best friend's heart. Ah, we humans always need some drama and chaos in our lives, don't we? In Tolstoy's novel, falling in love is like going to war. Even marriage, supposed to be peaceful, blissful, smooth sailing, is in fact conflict, contradictions, and often chaos. While the Russian high society is absorbed in their own romantic battles, Napoleon wants the whole Moscow, the whole Russia. The war is nearing. Pierre, our philosopher, connects a few dots about Napoleon being the Antichrist. So he decides it's time he helped his country, Mother Russia. We enter the Battle of Borodino, the most decisive battle in War and Peace, as well as history books. The violence is terrible, dead bodies everywhere. Tolstoy, in fact, used his own personal experience of fighting in the Crimean War of 1850s as an artilleryman and frontline soldier. So the scenes are extremely vivid and real. Even Pierre's best friend, the nihilistic Prince Andrei, is also among the casualties. His sacrifice symbolized the courage and bravery of the Russian soldiers in defending their country. But also, on a personal level, he manages to forgive Anatole Krogin for going behind his back and trying to elope with Natasha. This is a very moving scene, as Andrei again shows he is the bigger man in War and Peace, It's important to note that Andrei is wounded, but he dies later in the care of his lover, Natasha, whose betrayal he forgives, but then, just like his early nihilistic tendencies, he loses his will to live. Here Tolstoy says that life is a dream and death is like waking up from that dream, which is really beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. The Russian army finally has halted the French advance, but decides on a tactical retreat to allow the French march on Moscow. Napoleon's French army, with their allies mainly the Poles, was the most sophisticated army at the time. The Russian army, however, was a kind of ramshackle group of peasants. The difference was, one was fighting for a genuine cause, defending their country. In fact, General Kutuzov often relied on instinct and intuition. At one point, when getting ready for the battle, his men ask him how to prepare, he tells them to have a good night's sleep. Kutuzov's approach is to go with the flow like wind, so almost mystical. Napoleon represents modernity, acting like a machine, while Kutuzov represents the flow of nature. Here's a quote. Before abandoning the city, the Russians decided to burn Moscow. If we can't have it, we don't want the French to have it either. Napoleon finally enters Moscow, as the city turned to ashes. Most people have left, but Pierre has remained behind. He has a slightly crazy plan. His plan is to stab evil in the eye, I mean he wants to assassinate Napoleon himself. But he gets distracted from his big mission. In trying to be a hero to save an Armenian girl from robbers, he is captured by the French and his assassination plot is foiled. The French almost execute him, but he is spared at the last minute. While in captivity, he makes friends with a Russian peasant, Platon Karatayev, who symbolizes the Russian honesty, integrity and simplicity. For Tolstoy, innocence is better than intelligence. Peasants are connected with land, so close to nature, therefore they have that raw honesty and integrity, which the Russian nobility had lost. This reminded me of Dostoyevsky's transformation while in prison in Siberia, when he came in contact with the Odin Russians, whom he almost falls in love with and spends the rest of his life defending them. Here Tolstoy unites the Russian peasants with the aristocrats. Tolstoy paints an ironic picture here. Pierre, in prison, finds a kind of spiritual freedom that he lacked on the outside. The burning of Moscow was perhaps a tactical genius, because the French couldn't survive the harsh winter in a city of ash, so they had no choice but to retreat. When your back is against your enemy, you are most vulnerable. The Russians found the opportunity to attack them, depleting their army. Napoleon returns to France with his tail between his legs, humiliated, but most importantly While in the hands of the French army as they retreat from Moscow, Pierre witnesses the terrible tragedies of war, and even his best friend, Platon, is shot dead by the French. Pierre himself, however, is lucky and rescued by Russian soldiers. He returns home to find that his wife has died of drug overdose. His best friend Prince André is also dead, now a widower and friendless. What does he do? He finds love. He rekindles his romantic feelings with Natasha, and they get married. There are two epilogues in War and Peace, one talking about the characters, and the other explaining Tolstoy's philosophy behind the novel. Most readers find the second epilogue very annoying, anticlimactic. I think Tolstoy wanted to pre-emptively respond to his critics by giving a detailed response to how he interpreted history. Philosophical Context Now it's a good time to talk about Tolstoy's philosophical expression for War and Peace. In other words, how he understood the world and how we can understand history in the first place. Tolstoy was influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer's Will and Representation. To understand this, let's briefly look at the two major secular philosophical schools in Europe, the rationalists and the empiricists. The rationalists believe that we understand the world through reason. The best example is Rene Descartes, who sat in his armchair and rationalized. I think, therefore I am. So rationalists rely on ideas and thoughts to know what's going on. The empiricists, however, rely less on rational ideas but more on empirical data, i.e. our experience in the real world to understand the world. The empiricists were mostly English and Scottish philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. So the rationalists say reason alone is enough to know the world, but the empiricists think experience let us know the world. So in how knowledge travels, rationalist is an inside-out approach, while empiricism is an outside-in approach. Then the German philosopher Immanuel Kant tried to bring these two schools, the rationalists and empiricists, together by arguing that we humans, by rationally categorizing the world, we impose our own structure on the world. So we are not passive observers of reality but actively making reality conform to our categorizations. So according to Kant, the human mind actively uses experience as a kind of tool to probe, categorize and understand the world. Kant also made a distinction between two realms, phenomena, reality as they appear to us, and noumena, or reality as it is. Arthur Schopenhauer adopted Kantian philosophy in his book Will and Representation, which is relevant to us here as this book influenced Tolstoy and his own philosophy developed in War and Peace. Schopenhauer argued that the world that appear to us, i.e. reality or history, is not the world that actually exists independent of us. According to Schopenhauer, human will is like a lens through which we see and interpret and even study the world, which is a mere representation of the actual world. Schopenhauer also said that human will is the source of human misery, which is similar to the Buddhist philosophy that desire makes us suffer more. So to bring it full circle, Tolstoy argues that historical events are not the result of individual leaders' will or whim, but rather bigger social forces or the will of the entire society that take a country to war, not its leaders. Hitler couldn't have mobilized Germany if the socio-economic conditions weren't right. Napoleon, according to Tolstoy, was somewhat like a puppet, an accidental leader pushed forward to lead the French. If he were to come at a different period in history, he would not have been able to mobilize a small village, let alone the entire French nation. Tolstoy subscribed to Hegel's idea that we are a product of our own period. For Tolstoy, leaders are like great men pushed to the front. Historical events happen because of thousands of smaller events that lead up to that big event, i.e. great wars. This same rule applies to the decision of an individual, for example who to marry, what career to pick, even what to eat. There are thousands of conscious and subconscious triggers that lead up to you making a decision. Necessity, i.e. survival, forces us to act, but sometimes we also act because we want to thrive and dominate. Wars are often like wildfire, sometimes spontaneous and sometimes caused by arson. History is the same. Society is made up of millions of individuals. Each individual is made up of millions of cells. The unconscious universal swarm of life of humanity is often the blind force behind historical events. Tolstoy finally settles that free will does not exist. We all have to obey the strict rules of the hive we live in. Here's a quote. Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms, we cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is because it's inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so, and that is Allah. The same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur, we do not know. We only know that to produce the one or the other action, people combine in certain formation in which they all take part, and we say that this is because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other words, that is Allah. So for Tolstoy, free will is more like an illusion. He says, Now I'll discuss a few interesting points in War and Peace. Tolstoy paints his characters as real people with genuine emotions, Every human being has flaws and good qualities. Simon Schama, the British historian, sums up very well. History is a lot more random than historians tend to make. Historians tend to explain history in a way that things happen for a reason or a rational explanation, but Tolstoy thinks history is packed with emotional outbursts, spontaneous events, just like real person lives their life full of spontaneous action. History is a lot more random than historians tend to make. Life is a struggle. War and peace cannot exist without the other. In every aspect of life, there is a battle going on. Even falling in love and getting married is like going to war. Family life is full of battle. So Tolstoy juxtaposes war with family life. Family loyalty is like nationalism, being loyal to your country and society. Society nourishes us but also corrupts us. Humans are the same in every country. You just need to peel a layer to recognize that we're all the same. Tolstoy contrasts social warmth, friendship, family and camaraderie among soldiers with the cold of unhappy family, enemies and violence. So society is the cause of our happiest experience in life and also unhappiest experiences. Tolstoy points out that those at the top, aristocrats, have a fake kind of honor and courage, while the common soldiers and peasants have real courage and make real sacrifices. War and peace is a great mirror of society, how people decide their priorities and cope with their mistakes and how they amend those mistakes. The Russian title of war and peace could also mean war in the world. Война means war, мир in Russian means both peace and the world. So the name Vladimir literally means a boy who rules the world. So Tolstoy's novel is really about how society functions. Of course today, war and peace is used to torture Russian kids in schools, as it is a compulsory read as far as I know. Be happy that you don't live in Russia. Tolstoy was interested in Europe and he characterized each nation thus, which is pretty funny I thought. Here we go. Only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion, science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured as being a citizen of the best organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he's excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other because he imagines that he knows the truth, science, which he himself has invented, but which is for him the absolute truth. Do you agree with Tolstoy's assessment of these Europeans? It took Tolstoy 5 years to write War and Peace. I spent about 90 hours making this video, from reading, researching, writing the script, editing and making and publishing the video. If you enjoyed it, give this video a like, and also consider supporting the channel by donating on my Ko-fi page. A generous viewer donated a big sum this week. You know who you are. I was really astounded and extremely grateful to the donation. Thank you as always for watching.