Transcript for:
Exploring Themes in War and Peace

war and peace something that is on the top of all these lists of top books that you must read and literature that will change your life by all accounts this is a novel as someone who is really into history someone that loves philosophy is set up to be the ideal book for a person like me to read but what's that mean for you so myself and my recording partner crypto who i'll introduce to you in a minute have gone through this book crypto being a by trade historian and me myself being very passionate about the subject we wanted to really dive into this and kind of look at you know what was the conversation around war and peace there's even like this podcast that does like 365 days of war and peace one for each section kind of interesting how that broke out but as we got into it just the sheer size of this the the the way you're thrown into the chaos of the narrative at the time it just didn't work for me it was too much to juggle i couldn't keep it all straight my goal with this video here was to create one video that encapsulates our entire four or five month journey through this all of our discussions as we're learning about these characters and what do we think they mean and as tolstoy just like toys with you and gives you ideas just to rip them down later and then give you another idea and you're like oh okay i'm on board and then he rips that idea down later it's fascinating the way that tolstoy takes you through a narrative that makes you question your own expectations of how you interpret events so obviously if this is your favorite book feel free to consume all the hours of this all at once but we fully understand that if you are coming back and forth to this as you read or even just bite size points throughout your day feel free to leave time codes down below to know where you are and trust me i would want to sit here and look at my face i've kind of got a face for a podcast if you know what i mean but feel free to ask questions obviously as you move through this because that was the biggest part for me is having a conversational part through war and peace so here's the thing as i said the book plops you off in a very tumultuous time and not just russia's history but europe and the world evens history i'm going to leave a link to a before you read video that is a quick little presentation of all the information that i think really will help open this up but let's kick off today's discussion with the french revolution what was it well like most of europe france at the time had a monarchy that led the country to poverty poor economic policies and resulted in somewhat limited resources so the french people said yeah we don't like this let's get rid of the king but that's when napoleon swooped in and eventually crowned himself the new emperor of france contention filled the air across the continent as the elephant france threatens the whale britain for many reasons occupation of malta distribution of resources and trading and oh yeah there's that whole assassination attempt on napoleon that i don't think went over too well but it's with this news the assassination of dukedom gyon that we murder the last of the possible return to bourbon monarchy the death of monarchies war was inevitable in europe napoleon even writes to king george and i quote peace is the desire of my heart but war has never been contrary to my glory and this was the precursor to this novel a precursor to what historians argue might be the first total war a war that encompasses an entire nation from thoughts to resources everything almost changes to be dedicated to ensuring your nation wins the war this event changed warfare in europe forever so many authors will present things to you and kind of let you make up your own mind on things well that's kind of not what's going to happen with tolstoy he was a very opinionated person so we encourage you to join us as we maybe look at what tolstoy's arguments are what his thesis of history and philosophy of life of morality even is as this is a book that is so broad you can spend a lifetime studying it so join us in challenging that questioning ourselves and even looking at how do we potentially look at things differently or need to re-evaluate things in the same way that these countries were really evaluating their lives their monarchies their morality even in this culture so we invite you to join us and we find out together what is war and peace all about so part one we have the shearer party the bear party the rostoff dinner party party in the night well and funeraling oh yeah and we got the bolhansky estate in the in the uh rural areas of russia i guess did the funeral really feel like a funeral it didn't feel like a downer to me too much it was more like a thriller it was whoo it's it's a dude i didn't feel very somber that's what i'm saying so we open up in july of 1805 and what would a russian party be without some philosophy and discussion of the death penalty right i mean i know i throw all my parties with a little philosophy in the beginning before we get to the crazy part so anna believes that war is coming to the east right and russia is going to be europe's savior and you know we've talked about the the you know the first two wars of the coalition and how that this has impacted things but what's interesting here is russia is going through this identity question right because you know this is still fresh on the mind of catherine the great who just recently had passed away and she did a lot of bringing french culture radical changes for what russia was used to right especially in the realm of aristocrats and monarchs and women in power and choice and freedoms and bucking the system and changing the norms things are getting crazy in russia at this time right and a lot of that is due to catherine i mean catherine loved french culture she loved the enlightenment the ideals of it liberty and all but hey uh yeah i'm still gonna maintain power and i couldn't quite free the serfs but hey there was a lot of other elements that i liked i think it's important to note that catherine the great is somebody that is very well educated and is polish uh born and she's educated by all of these other you know uh western philosophers and ideas in europe and when she brings them to russia it is something that is new for them but is a standard way of life for her and if we're going to talk about patriotism or even nationalism in a sense you and i have discussed before george orwell and i'll put a link down below to all the citations as we move through them but he had a great little essay if you will his notes on nationalism and he says by patriotism i mean devotion to a particular place in a particular way of life which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people patriotism is of its nature defensive both militarily and culturally and i think that's where we're starting to kind of have those questions of you know patriotism being a defensive stance and nationalism being an offensive stance and i think you're going to see a lot of questions about that with these characters and their bravado right when does when does bravery and belief in your country when does that go on the offensive and when does that offensive become nationalism and not listening to other ideas or thoughts i also believe and i i love the orwell quote and i think that he's right about it at the time that this is taking place but i also see that this is an evolution of patriotism and nationalism as they almost almost they almost seem to be switching roles where you're not patriotic unless you're aggressively defending the belief that you know the russian way is best the french way is best the the german way is best and just being nationally prideful of your nation is more of kind of that laid back of like yeah that's what i am it's cool because we're seeing that kind of reverse in these aristocrats where you're not getting the honor unless you're going out and fighting you're not courageous you aren't a true russian if you're going out and you know participating and battling those evil frenchmen to save the continent we see that flip-flop of evolution of the ideologies of patriotism versus nationalism and that's gonna be that's that's gonna be huge for the next two centuries until almost world war one now at this party we got a lot of self-interest too right you got prince you know vasily who's basically pushing anna pavlovna about a position for his son in vienna we have uh princess drewbets jabetskoye who is grabbing prince vasily's hand and pushing for her son boris basically but you see how you got a lot of people that are married marry me marry me marry me that's what i felt like it was like you get a wife you get a wife you get a wife it's well it's who you know right and it's also who you marry is not just for love it's a way of social advancements it's social mobility it's increasing your land even money status power influence yeah this is definitely not for love although there's a little bit of there's a little romance sprinkle in there for you people that need that well i mean it's certainly not short for uh prince andre who's talking about how you shouldn't get married and women ruin life and slow you down he is completely disenfranchised with this concept of love as is probably tolstoy as he's writing this but he's definitely kind of the more aggressive stance compared to some of these others that it's symbiotic in a sense of getting something in terms of social advancement but prince andre is saying that this is not even worth it almost and he's so disillusioned that's his reason for going to wars not even this the patriotism it's just to escape the social mire that he's in i also feel like it tolstoy is setting the stage for no i don't want to say how terrible these people are but to give us some insight on the humanity or how they believe humanity should be in russian society at this time period yeah now we also have his uh wife you know lisa liza i'm not sure how to pronounce it and pierre they arrive and pierre is kind of the guy that's been educated out in the west so oh there's that west first east thing coming in right and by him him being educated out west and him sympathizing with the friends whoa that doesn't fit with our national uh or patriot uh patriotic agenda here in russia and pierre social social stigma here right we don't like pierre right we need to get rid of him because he's not fitting in with the social agenda he is a social pariah ooh they don't want to touch him with a tenfold poll no no no so the viscount de montemar he comes in and tells the story of duke don yun and this is probably the part when i got for the first time i got super excited while reading this book because i i think you may know that there's a actual that was very popular in the time because well um napoleon pissed a lot of people off with it so going back to our intro we did have the discussion about how uh you know french becoming the first non-monarchy country whoa like all the monarchs are freaking out right and for him to go and you know there was det there was attempts on his life and it was you know guillotine or imprisonment stuff like that but this was like a case where he was taking out the last in the lines of the kunduz and with the death of him he's kind of like taking out the possible return to monarchy symbolically and boy did this set europe on fire when he did this and in conjunction with that remember napoleon is a self-appointed emperor even regarded higher than a king and he he gives himself the crown he won't even let the pope you know anoint him you know the new emperor of france this has all the monarchs shaking their books boots because this is a direct violation of the divine right of kings and that anybody can rise up to power this is changing the norm of european feudalism which has been the standard for nearly five centuries [Music] mind blown you better believe they were shaken scared and they were get they would do anything to get him out of power because he's setting a scary new normal and small note for other history lovers like us it is july so he crowns himself emperor in december he's first consul now i don't remember if he's already first console for life but he's basically rewriting the constitution he's making himself this and he does this through appealing to the people directly and you'll notice we don't really do that in the united states or a lot of countries because that's kind of sidestepping politics it's sidestepping opponents and it makes it look like you're the choice of the people napoleon did a lot of things that were considered machiavellian to put himself into power and he continues that that reign throughout his his career if you will and very much supported by the people because he's giving him what they want he took away and got rid of the monarch he's feeding them he's giving them jobs he's he's increasing that idea of french patriotism and french nationality and he's expanding their empires he's making life better for these people he has the support of the people especially coming out of the reign of terror where they were chopping everybody's heads off he's given them stability something they haven't had for many many years probably two or three decades so when pierre's all like yeah napoleon he seems like a cool guy like prince andre's like yeah we gotta go pierre like this isn't working so where do we go let's go to another party where we're gambling and have bears i really like this part i feel like it again it gives us more of that um gritty human feel that was the first time i know that it gets grittier and grittier we go along but i really like we get a true sense of what these guys are really like you know they're kind of hoity-toity in their party and putting on the fake personas here we get to see their true naked natures of the drinking and the gambling and the socializing and you know the the manly nature because they kind of start you know boasting a little bit here in this part of the story really i feel like starts moving forward a little bit of what's going to take place for these guys in the future well it's kind of the anna karenina world too right where we see how much society can influence us right pierre is very impetuous right and you have like the dolo cough oh gosh i am so bad at pronunciations you have the guy that drank a lot of rum and was bet to st sit on the windowsill and pound this bottle of rum right you have these like college frat house like behaviors that are coming on as an influence as a result off right yeah you start to see how these characters react to these social pressures because that's exactly what russia was it was a gigantic social pressure pushing down on each other until the bigger weight won and then the story kind of pivots to a new shift of bringing in death and count bouzouk dies and the big question is where will this money go i mean it wouldn't be a russian story if we weren't talking about death and inheritance well i think almost the plot pivots but i think the theme stays there right because i'm sorry yes plot you're right you're right because you have still the self-interest of the characters you still have prince vasily like trying to sneak in in the middle of the last rights um i'm sorry extreme unction for christian orthodoxy and he's trying to like sneak in to see this will and uh honestly pierre's kind of a doof until this scene where i start to solve some of the humanity with him right the fact that he cared as an illegitimate son i believe if i'm not mixing things up that he was an illegitimate son and still cared about you know the count as he was passing away he cared about humanity he saw him as a person and expressed that and grieved with him well vassely and you know katie they're sneaking around trying to figure out who's going to earn the money arguably we go back to the whole monarchy thing right in monarchies who you were you were given that it's what you were born as right as opposed to now here comes westernization with you know napoleon who could make himself a self-made man you know prince vassely is the guy that's more worried about what's going to be handed to him and what's his wealth going to be you hit the nail on the head this is the definition of how callous these people are and i think that's what tolstoy's driving forward here because we're gonna see the evolutions of these characters as we move through the novel you know what i think it's time for another party party go to the rust-off dinner party right the after after party and now you know what time it is it is time to head out to the country to the polkanski the postcards parties are open parties are over in a sense but prince nikolai now again there's going to be a difference between prince nikolai belkonski and nikolai rostov right and they'll just call him nikolai if it's just rostov and it'll be prince nikolai if it's uh bokonski so bokonski his children are prince andre and maria right and you see him tending to his estate you know raising his daughter maria and the tutoring and he's stiff with her but he does care about her in a sense and that's when maria gets back to her room with the letter from julie uh kerrigan her closest childhood friend who basically writes and sends her flattering comments and says yo here in moscow they're all super obsessed with this war can you believe that yeah this i think this is really where you start to see the contrast in the characters and the people that are those callous individuals and the ones that really true about and those ones that really truly care about the cost of human life and that these aren't just numbers on a page these aren't just dots on a map that these are people that are eventually going to die i wonder too we've read a lot of tolstoy and you know that he viewed that moscow was more of the old russian way and i think it was culturally too in st petersburg you know hey that's farther off uh to the west that's that's closer over there to all those european people that was more progress that was westernization right and in in moscow they're all worried about gossip right and it's almost like this symbolic letter because i think boris earlier was talking about how all moscow carries about is gossip so it's like the old monarchy symbols of that in terms of the gossip in terms of prince vasily uh worrying about the the income and how that's going to be passed down did you think that uh tolstoy was critiquing that like i don't know if he was so much authority critiquing it but he certainly put it out there as a juxtaposition to the westernization that's happening with napoleon i definitely think that he's kind of taking a little jab here and saying hey you know this is the way we've always done this and we need to look at things better because it was always that standard of for the aristocrats that eh war is just the way of life for us and they didn't really care about the loss of life and he's like well maybe we should care these are people's you know fathers and sons and brothers that are giving up their lives for for what well i mean with prince andre it's really strange the way that he's just so disenfranchised with his life that he's willing to go you know i think it was rather touching with mario wishing him goodbye as touching as it gets um i i was really trying to connect with these characters part one do you think it was genuine though i do i do i think it was the most genuine for me but at the same time i honestly had a hard time connecting with the characters at this point like in book part one um i wasn't the most invested yet but i did like the characters but i wasn't like i was expecting to be super in love with them right and here comes maria who is set up to i don't know she seems like she's going to be the moral compass of this story right like we always have these authors like to pick one character they're like this is the character that always knows what's right right it seems to me like maria is gonna be that moral compass for the story she's giving you know her atheist brother who's going off to war and can't find himself i mean he's young he doesn't know himself but she gives him this cross and gives him a vision of what you're fighting for that he himself doesn't perhaps know yet yeah i don't know i guess i i struggled with this of who was the clear protagonist of the story who who's gonna take us through his adventure uh i mean pierre's barely in it uh we we could pick several of the princes right prince andre uh prince drew baskey i don't know how to say that uh natasha rostov i mean who who is our who's our main character i don't feel like we really have one yeah natasha i mean she was barely in it except for like that weird triangle you're right i didn't have like a clear main protagonist uh i don't know if i have to have one but i feel like there's something that was is not pulling me forward besides the ideas which i do love um or the anticipation that this is going to be the contrast of war and peace and we've seen the peace now we've got to get to the war and that's what's drawing you into this narrative i feel like as they're talking about all this war eventually it has to happen right it does and it's almost kind of like the war is symbolic of the russian soul the russian soul the russian culture at this point is searching for who they're going to be this westernization versus this patriotism of the old russian way you know and along comes napoleon and there's this question of him forcing you know client states and will he push these liberal values and these ideas of you know monarchies are a thing of the past across all of europe i think this is not just a battle for europe i think this is a battle for the russian soul of who are we going to be well you bring up a lot of good points and the last thing i want to talk about before we move on to the next book is that whatever it's going to be it's going to have a lot of french there's a lot of french many you know historical literature historians peoples study this book and they estimate that nearly two percent of the novel is in french and depending on which translation you get you may or may not even have that french and and lose out on a tremendous amount of the story i mean two percent in a thousand page book or whatever your version is is a lot and that's kind of important because many critics of the story say that french is used to represent or be pretentious or deceitful in the story because you'll notice that certain characters like prince nicolai he never uses french and that might be a play on his character as an individual of you know what does that say about him and then you have other characters that you know hate the french but then they only speak french and it's like oh okay this is this is napoleon you know i hate him but i'm gonna use french like what like i love the irony there so we start off in october 1805 oh wait if it is october 1805 i lied earlier because that means he was crowned in december of 1804 he called himself emperor of 1804 and i think i misspoke and said 1805. so i think you've been for almost a year yeah yeah so there's probably already a comment to someone like being like uno was wrong when he was correcting okay i i caught it first i didn't say it though and i'm the historian so we'll forgive him i can't believe you didn't correct me or maybe you actually maybe i was so confident you believe me so the russian troops said 1804 maybe i did okay ignore everything i just said if i said 1804. the russian troops are stationed in austria right we're finally here we're starting to get um you know tostoy was famous for realism and i think there's something to be said about this book with how fiction and reality it's not it's it's almost pejorative to call this like historical fiction it's almost like a lie to say it's part fiction part reality tolstoy really created i feel like something unique with how he blends historical fact with testimonials and how he injects that into a fictional setting in characters you definitely have a sense of a new ambiance of the story in this part of the book where you do have that really ramped up gritty realism while it's kind of hinted at at some of the parties in the funeral and the letter and the drinking uh you know and the the the mansplaining of everything you really start to see it ramp up here in the action of the book so commander in chief the well-dressed katussoff who is actually a real person and is super cool to see how he's realized in this book is stationed in the soldiers pour in and they're kind of like confused they're like uh do we go in stay nice and dressed do we sleep and get ready to march tomorrow like it really starts to show the confusion of war it starts to show where pomp and circumstance still exist even within the army and navy right as opposed to the preparations and strategy of of how often and how fast you have to move because i'll tell you what napoleon changed a lot in this war and really showed europe how you can win battle with your feet instead of your arms i thought it was hilarious i love this part of the story we really get to see that a lot of times these leaders don't know what they're doing and when you hear stories about like the horrific things that happen and then you hear these kind of like dumbfounded like they just walked in and why were they shooting their own people like they didn't know they were there and of course you're like well they didn't have radios and the technology is very different but to know that sometimes the left hand was not talking to the right hand at all they didn't know they're both hands so the characters begin to talk about their social advancements after the war bringing in kind of like that um the war is a means to an end not to save necessarily europe but to advance my own social standing in society i do want to point out real quick as they're addressing each other i did notice that there is a difference here as in part one everybody is introduced with their full titles their full names maybe that's just because of the beginning of the story but again we see that abrupt change here in this part where everybody is usually referred to just by their last names i think that's because we have less characters but i think it is important to point out yeah and i think you know when you think about even american military private and then last name was like a common thing and as you know people you use their first names as a thing too right there's a little bit of a social element here that tolstoy be making that that there's that less formal military atmosphere everybody kind of lets their hair down a little bit that these people are seen more as an equal they're not but they are treating each other a little bit better than they would back at those aristocratic parties there's no princes here out on the battlefield well there's a couple exceptions but those are some of the subplots that we'll get into well isn't it isn't it mostly prince's like i thought um the way the russian military worked is that you kind of had to serve and that it was more upper class per se there wasn't as many like serfs serving in the war i don't know i could be totally off on that one um but you do bring up a good point about class that regardless of whatever i mean you know whether that was true or not yeah the etiquette in in russia or in their etiquette in moscow is very different than the etiquette out here in austria when they're on the battlefield but you still have somewhat of the ladder climbers right because we do have at this point dolokov was promised the epaulettes right and he was the one that was just like drinking the rum at the third story window in chapter one and now he's like trying to kind of like advance himself through the military so even though the setting is totally different you still see some themes about trying to advance yourself in society in a sense you can take the boy out of the city but you can't take the city out of the boy [Laughter] so prince andre is ordered to stay near katussoff if you will and he barges in and informs him of austria's loss at the battle of olm which is so cool um i don't know how much do you know this battle well crypto i actually had to refresh myself on this a little bit because we don't study this one too often in world history we jump right to you know the good stuff of uh 1812 when things kind of start going down for napoleon when the russians finally do start winning so um i just know that it is a napoleonic victory and he uses kind of the same strategy he's done before and for uh he overwhelms the force and he hides his forces and attacks from basically ambush let's look at this map here as you have austria over here on the right hand side and french on the left i'm drawing some of the armies here and you'll see that mack right here the austrian force of 72 000 again these are coming from a couple different sources so the numbers kind of vary and go up and down because number counting wasn't the same back then as it is now but they're waiting on katusaf right so here's where we are we're with katusov and they're heading west to meet up with mack because they're going to team up and they're going to pound the napoleon right and you've got charles and john in the south because they think napoleon's coming through italy right so max like all right cool i'm going to go crush bavar bavaria real quick no big deal uh katusoff meet me over at you know bavaria and um and we'll we'll team up on napoleon right it's like okay cool great plan right and napoleon he's all the way over on the other side of france there's no way he's gonna be here in time you know pass a couple weeks into september and oh i was immediately wrong yeah and i think that it may be you know interesting that people may not understand that these faints weren't commonplace back then there was no such thing as napoleonic tactics he's kind of inventing all this that's why he's seen as such a military genius and strategist is nobody had done this before because we might be like well duh that that that makes complete sense the russians the austrians the british everybody else is flabbergasted by this they've never seen anything done like that before right right and what's really cool about this one too is napoleon he just broke the troops up to smaller corpse he let met them kind of like live off the land as opposed to having supply chains that slowed the army down and also if that supply chain was cut off well the army was screwed so it really allowed him to as we said earlier win the battle with feet and as a result of of him coming to mack and surrounding mack and getting the entire army to surrender literally where mack had you know was down to 23 000 uh soldiers is the estimate and you go to the aftermath and you look at napoleon's losses of 500 losses which any loss is terrible but it's catastrophic when you look at austria with ten thousand lives lost and if you look at abandoned twenty twenty thousand people just left off of austria's side that's how complete and destructive this battle was for france to basically win it instantly like that and yeah i don't want to sound you know obtuse but yeah a few hundred compared to tens of thousands is inconsequential and this sets him up for his next big victory that's gonna happen in december where he does the exact same thing and they don't learn their lesson and he just steamrolls right through into germany well he yeah well he he moves right through like in the story he heads to vienna first right because by taking out mack and katusov still being too so far away he's got a straight shot to vienna and the southern austrian troops kind of have to retreat a little bit like it's like this this totally disrupted their entire plan which is which is why i think it's so interesting so that announcement to katussoff when they come and say oh max surrendered and like you know he got macked like becoming a noun it's it's hysterical right and i think it's actually kind of interesting because now it's like well what are we going to do you know katusa's army was 50 000 compared to napoleon's he needed help he had to back up to wait to meet up with other resources and probably head towards prussia because prussia was still uh i think they were neutral at this point in time and they were kind of hoping that prussia would join and be like hey help us out man we need to kick napoleon back he's taking over our lands uh the retreat wasn't you know a lot of history books talk about it being kind of like they were running away it was a strategic retreat is what i would say to what katusov's doing here they're scared napoleon is coming in fast they've already gotten their butts kicked twice by napoleon but it also is strategic and there is a point to the retreat when the story transitions to austria we have uh rostov and he's you know with the squadron commander uh denisov and he's you know denisov's like you know hey i trust you well you count my money um after all this bad luck i've had you know and losing cards and stuff and here's we get some of the drama taking place out on the battlefield and i kind of love this um denisov realizes that his money is missing and it's like oh no what are we gonna do um and rustav you know grabs his you know weapon and he rushes out and he's like i know who's taking it uh and you know little do we tattle on him what do we do like you know who gets in trouble and what happens here because in the military you know that's gonna be a serious accusation we're gonna have a lot of problems here um but i guess does this subplot pay off eventually because i felt like it kind of left me hanging well i think maybe we have to look at it from maybe even more russianized if possible they say that you'll never understand the russian soul as a westerner right okay got it i get it but we can try right we can try to understand some of these things and i think we've talked about this in the past that in a lot of eastern countries and including like japan or even korea the we or even communism too we matters more than the i and rostov could get some personal glory by finding and vindicating the honor of his uh you know squad or his captain denisov but then that kind of dishonors the whole clan in a sense right and it's a little bit of a do you dishonor your family do you dishonor your whole you know squadron here or do you let it slide and uh here in this culture there rostov is making the decision that there's bigger forces at play here we need to win this war and let's just let this one slide so that we don't dishonor this this you know squadron and potentially put things at risk that could you know harm our future gains i guess is how i interpreted it i guess i just thought about i know that they would flog this guy and maybe he doesn't want you know his you know comrade arms to get flogged but your answer is much smarter well i think it serves as a personal lesson for rostov right like instead of looking even constantly like fossily if we look at you know prince vasily if he was here or boris who's always looking for that social advancement and that cheddar right they would have absolutely turned that guy in and then there would have been problems in terms of the squadron getting in trouble and stuff like that so i think and trust me i guess it would have betrayed their trust and they would have written down upon him right right right right so it's kind of like a a different way of flipping that coin that tolstoy does a really good job of looking at it from a lot of different angles right like why wouldn't you look for personal advancement well hey sometimes there's bigger forces at play here and you need to think those things through so we fast forward a little bit in time and it's october 23rd in ennis inns don't know how to say that exactly i'm sorry um but the russians and the french come to head to head over a bridge and there's confusion among them again i love that there's this confusion that like nobody knows what's going on and they're like do you destroy the bridge do they destroy bridge if they destroy it should we destroy before them and it just it it it adds a little element of for me humor in the story because you could see these guys running around like chickens with their heads cut off like what are they supposed to do with this bridge yeah i was reading in the book that i bought the napoleonic wars there's actually it's not it's not i don't know for a fact but i was reading something that's like huh that sounds awfully familiar and we know that tolstoy read a lot of historic documents and interviews and that he could have potentially grabbed these elements and maybe infuse some fictionality to them but in in history in real life page 202 in this book it talks about how there was a real story where two french generals cross the bridge and basically lied and said oh hey guys you can't blow up this bridge that would violate this uh armistice this treaty uh that we're signing right now so you can't blow that up and they're like oh crap we can't do that so the french cross the dang bridge take control of it before they could blow it up and that's how they basically snuck their way over the bridge like by just basically playing on social engineering and tricking the other side and again it seems so simplistic to us but these were new tactics because there is you know that honor and war of you know you're supposed to meet your enemy head on and you're supposed to fight them a certain way and napoleon's throwing all the rules out and writing a new book and that's why this is such an incredible time in history of when he is making these new norms of this is how warfare will be done we're not doing it that stupid old way anymore yeah and i think rostov is starting to realize that about how war is not what he expected at all so the russian army retreats and they know they cannot defeat napoleon so their best bet is to meet up with the rest of the russian army they get a victory as they retreat finally after two weeks and uh prince andre is injured right and i think this is kind of what we were talking about earlier their treats are typically treated as pejorative i think in a lot of western textbooks but when you look into it they really were strategic in trying to meet up with the rest of the russian army to buy time to get closer to russia a potential future ally if they could convince them to join arms into the coalition so now andre is injured he basically becomes like a messenger boy and he has to go to the minister of war uh not the emperor mind you he won't meet with him uh and we get the introduction of bilibian i don't know that's a tough name i'm not sure if it's russian actually that sounds like a different nationality i don't know regardless i'm gonna butcher it because you know that's what i do uh and this guy i feel like is hilarious he's the he's the true comic relief of the story uh he's a russian diplomat and he is the guy that loves loves the french and they get a little bit of an argument over this again and we kind of see that um you know bravado come back again um between between these characters i think you see a little bit too about how when the austrians were asking them questions they cared about austrian topics did the austrians win any wars and the russians were concerned about russian things did the russians win any battles when you're out on the field this is where the character billovin i think exemplifies the idea that we talked about earlier of patriotism and you know he's austrian himself but he's always referring everything as we we this we that because these are different countries and nationalities and ethnicities that are fighting together against this big bad french cause and he's somebody that's you know trying to work together where as you've pointed out many many times it's always the me me me these guys are looking to move up in high society through their military prowess because that's how things were always done and he's not doing that where you know everybody's thinking hey i can move up you know war is the great socializer and equalizer for everything and he isn't doing that and he's pushing more of that we propaganda that we're going to see for the very first time um i kind of think in in history of of warfare and so now prince andrew he finally answers to to basically the head the higher ups and he has to answer a bunch of superfluous questions that the emperor franz of austria was asking him and he didn't really want to deliver that info however upon returning he finds billabon frantically packing and announcing that the french have crossed a bridge of tabor and they have blown by the allies and and allies and now advancing on their position so prince andre is uh fleeing he he well instead of fleeing he heads into battle i guess i should say and i think there's kind of um he was told to flee though wasn't he and he kind of he goes against the orders right he kind of he kind of had the option to right and i think this is this is part of tolstoy's critique on um motivations right you have these characters you have everything in this novel it's your point about it being so broad earlier you've got these characters that are self-interested the diplomats are all about high society social advancement you have the emperors who are just about looking good and you've got prince andre who's probably the most complex character in in my eyes in this book because he's ready to head back not because he's looking to receive honor from someone else but because internally intrinsically i think he thinks that's what will give him honor because he's so disenfranchised with society and ladder climbing he's looking for a different way to extract value in his life and he's the only character that we really feel the the bloodshed has affected him of for the right reasons that he's he's doing this for the betterment of his country not to just move up well yeah because on his way back remember he helps that woman cross when the military's like we're military and i think it to me it showed kind of how um he still saw people i guess in a sense it's it's very i feel very conflicted with with prince andrew to be honest but doesn't he feel like the the good person i mean you have the military here that are killing each other uh when they're going through they're cat-calling the women uh you you have that macho bravado through all of it there's a lot of negative things that tolstoy's putting on this military style of life and he seems to be embodying a little bit of positivity there a glimmer of light in a sea of darkness it's gritty realism right oh for sure yeah well so we head back we meet prince purgation a real figure again so this is that uh kind of like that that real life entering fiction or being inspired in through fiction i guess in a sense and he basically takes a small group of soldiers and fakes being the larger russian army and this was a real thing that actually happened when you read about it in the history books and the idea was we need to slow down this french advance and honestly this was kind of a big deal because if they didn't do that napoleon would do the same thing that he did with mack would he'd basically take an overwhelming force he'd use his uh fleet movement to basically outmaneuver them and force them to surrender on his terms right and i think when you look at like the numbers there were a lot of losses i think there was thirty thousand losses that uh radion's troops took here but it was again trying to like justify the numbers of war always sounds kind of uh difficult but there's there's like this almost like understanding of utilitarianism when you think when you talk about war like you always have to play it by the numbers almost so from a utilitarian standpoint they lost 30 000 but saved potentially the war and other forces by being able to meet up to potentially put up a resistance against napoleon spoiler totally doesn't happen yeah exactly i think that a lot of times we become distance ourselves and that's what is pretty meta here in the story of how the russian aristocrats felt of you know it it doesn't matter it's not a big deal but when you think about 30 000 people losing their lives or being captured or injured that's almost unfathomable i mean today think about that's half of a football stadium of people that are going to have something tragic happen to them and that that social pageantry of you know callousness that they have back in in moscow and in russia you don't see that out on the battlefield when these soldiers start meeting up with one another uh we see that in the story here you know that they taunt and they laugh and they kind of joke because they know that the killing is coming and that it's gonna get ugly yeah well i think even you pointed out too also like there was like that letter that was going around like they're trying to stall and um napoleon is just ruthless where he's like what are you doing take them out and like when you i was looking at my book there really was letters from napoleon where he's just like no take them out while you have the chance it's about that utilitarian win at any cost the machiavellian mindset of doing whatever is necessary to get your way yeah and there is some historical accuracy to those letters i don't think they're verbatim from the letters that napoleon will end up writing to his commanders but there are huge chunks of that that are word for word and again in my translation it's in french so i'm pretty sure it's pretty accurate uh that that those are real things that were actually happening and again it just immerses you in this story of like oh you know this is it you feel like you're there uh and i just i i i'm giddy over this section of the the story yeah this was this was great this was our section i know there are some people um that don't like the war section that's fine it's not wrong if you not to like it like we loved this section as people who like to understand history and research and get closer to it this was important for us i think from a perspective of trying to understand what motivates countries and nationalism patriotism at this point in time now with that said it ain't all rosy for our characters this is when things start to turn upside down right because uh prince andrew is inspecting the troops and then grapeshot hits the sky and that's when everything just hits the fan you know you had rostov who was on his troops uh i think he was he um was he he was a cavalry man right he was on a horse he got somehow he injured his arm and got thrown off and like kind of like ran and hid in like with some other riflemen like it it wasn't glorious what was happening grapeshots hit the ground and everything that was envisioned in all of these characters minds was nothing to the horrors that war brought into their lives for real and if you don't know what a grape shot is basically imagine like two tennis balls together with a chain between them and so when it's shot it just kind of acts like you know a blunt knife going through it it absolute carnage right and we have this but this is a trick you know that napoleon used you know profusely through the revolution when he was taking over france uh that he used and perfected back when fighting the british when he was a captain uh back in the 1790s so our characters are not heroes right that what they thought it meant to be a hero is not right zerkoff doesn't even follow his orders just just abandons his post in a sense and you've got like tushin who's like yeah it's like like you literally have like the full gamut of reactions in gosh i mean what are we like page 200 like tolstoy really made sure that you had every view of life except maybe the female view not so good at that but everything else pretty pretty represented [Laughter] and i think this is telling of these characters that he's created of why they would respond the way that they do yeah so night falls right the russians escape right in the end of the end of this chapter and prince andrew kind of sticks up for toushing's escape and um the loss of several uh military men and i think this calls back to the rostov thing that we were talking about earlier right when do you stick up and when do you put your personal honor on the line in a sense and uh you know i don't know there's not as much uh historical data that i could find that backed up some of that stuff but i think overall we have what is ultimately for me a very exciting chapter two i think tolstoy's doing a great job of using his historical imagination and maybe filling in some of those fun stories to give us more of that humidity that human perspective [Music] part three who's going to marry my child in the battle of austerlitz [Laughter] sounds like a game show meanwhile in petersburg prince vasily is a man with worldly success right he's like all right helen helena we got to get you married right and uh well there's this guy named pierre and he just so happened to get a lot of money that i didn't get you should totally hook up with them so that i could get that money get that cheddar they are so not subtle about this right it's just like oh it's like it doesn't matter if you're attracted to them it doesn't matter you know who they are i'm marrying you off like this is like the worst arranged marriages you can imagine well and as for how poo poo i was on pierre in part one now i'm starting to get like sympathy for him because he is totally on the struggle bus as he's got all these new responsibilities all these people coming to him for money and uh just being taken advantage of and i kind of feel bad for him in the sense of like he was mocked i guess in part one right like what are you doing sympathizing with the french oh you've got money oh you're the greatest thing since sliced bread why don't you meet my daughter why don't you get married to her it's um it's unfortunate to see humans use other humans as objects as opposed to seeing humanity in them i don't even know if they're seen as objects they're seen as tools of manipulation where i mean you you you have children being married off to children here i mean that's really what it is right i mean not maybe not for the time periods but that's how i kind of viewed it i was reading it and when um i think it was it was a prince vessel who when he was talking he's just like oh they're married even though like they hadn't said it like it's not what they even wanted like they were literally like forcing it on their children i would like i was like did i read that correctly let me go back a page like it was really like abrupt and sudden and they're like yeah this is happening and i'm going to make sure that you marry the person i think you need to marry oh that's it it's cringe-worthy that's how i would describe it but again i think that that's wonderful because i mean tolstoy is invoking that emotion in me and i think he's supposed to because we're seeing again that very very uh decisive contrast between the aristocrats and and the war and that these relationships are taking place even while war is happening because these people are so out of touch a reality yeah now now that one daughter's married off we gotta talk about anatol right so so anatole i'm not sure how to pronounce it exactly uh i think he takes him to the bulkhonsky estate because we're gonna marry maria remember the the sister that gave the cross to prince andrew in part one well we're going to marry her because they're rich right and when nikolai prince nikolai uh bulkonski finds out he becomes grumpy right he's he's the dad that like is sitting on the porch in his underwear cleaning the shotgun like like you gonna take my daughter i totally get that yes that's a perfect envision i probably was thinking that at the same time well and i also felt a little bit from maria here too right because she i think she does care about people right she's worried about fulfilling that role as a wife here again putting people into roles i get it but the point being she cared right she wasn't oh how do i scheme and fix my son up with a rich woman she's like how do i fulfill and be a good partner to someone and i thought that was kind of touching is is when you see those little moments of humanity in the characters do you think that that's because of something that she experienced in her past because i kind of feel like she's had coming of those romantic misadventures and she wants better for you know others not to have to go through that or is there something more there i am vacillating between the idea that she's young and naive is one option like she's she has this romantic vision of what love should be and if we go back to part one she was the religious moral compass of this novel is is she doing this because that's what her religion tells her to do i don't know or is it because she's described by tolstoy again does not write women well she's the plain one and she's settling which is so sad like toast toy bro you could do better you're one of the greatest authors of all time get in touch with your feminine side the plain one oh that's like the biggest insult ever and it doesn't help but that like the suitor anatoly is sitting there running around with these other chicks like oh yeah don't worry about this mario we're we'll get married but i'm gonna have some fun with these other chicks while we're here it just makes you hate uh honestly the the prince vaseline all of them yeah yeah it really does makes you hate all yeah so at the same time we have the rustops receive word that their son nikolai rostov was injured right and i think they are concerned but i think they also you know they're in society still they still use that as a tool of like oh my son the war hero he's off serving russia like he's doing russia so much good and when you look at like what actually happened to him like i mean he kind of like dislocated his arm from falling off the horse i think it was and then hid in the bushes like it wasn't the most like heroic thing yeah i mean yeah kind of i would do the same i'm not looking down upon him i'm not a lover not a fighter i don't fault him at all i mean war well let's say this war makes you do a lot of things that you wouldn't normally do right and in the war right we head back to rostov who's trying to borrow money and there's that situation with boris right and i mean i think it comes down to boris is a ladder climber we see how he's still trying to do that here and i think rostov is trying to figure out where does honor come from for him does it come from this moment right or does that be given to you i think that's what a lot of the misconception that tolstoy is portraying here of the russian people is that it has to be given to you and you don't earn it well either way i think we see a very human element to nikolai here where he's like really exaggerating the injury like he's playing it up until prince andrew comes in is like what are you doing like this this injury this boasting this isn't what gets you honor what gets you honor is serving good on the battlefield and they you have like a lot of opposites in the scene of how honor is viewed and then how social advancement is viewed all three of these characters i think want the same thing but i think each one goes about it in a very different way yeah agreed i mean nikolai is the guy that has his arm in his sling and has the thing around his neck or whatever he's like i i did my best i fought hard well and andrew's that person's like you didn't earn that right take off take off that fake valor you've got to earn your valor basically now i mean everybody needs that friend or that guy that's going to call you out on your bs yeah and prince andre is the guy that's going to do that which will make i think nikolai a better person soldier or whatever at least that's the hope right interesting interesting and you got boris boris in the background that's just like yeah let me know when the boss comes i'm going to take a nap at the back right here let me know when the boss comes around i'll look like i'm doing something productive [Laughter] we've all had that partner in class yes we have we have now the next day emperor alexander arrives rides up to kind of see the army stand before him and i think he's immediately admired right and i don't think this is just because he's the mo i mean yes it is because he's the monarchy symbol let's not be let's not be obtuse here but i think also he's young he's still pushing out these liberal reforms in terms of setting up universities in russia he's still learning what it means to be a leader and i think he's still learning what it means to be on the battlefield because this is the first time an emperor has been on the battlefield since peter the great so this is this is a huge lifting of spirits because these are people who are appointed by god in the view in the viewpoint of of the russians right this this is a a divine seat to them with how the state and church are combined in a sense that this isn't a self-made man this is someone who is going to righteously deliver us victory in war which means i will lay down my life and trust and put faith into him as a result i think it's important to note that he is young uh many historians have research and he's been described as kind of mild-mannered so he wasn't somebody that was too you know intimidating or imposing but he is out there and that says a lot about his character and i think that does help raise the morale of his men who have been getting their butts kicked lately by napoleon and napoleon's out there leading his men and as you said he steps up to the plate and i think that it is kind of inspiring and i think it's kind of cool again i get giddy when these real characters are in this you know this fiction book and i was like oh i'm like oh i know him i know him i teach about him uh you know he's in my my real history book and uh i i think that tolstoy did a great job of writing him you know not too hot not too cold just right right right and you talked earlier about how i think a lot of times at least in our western these in american textbooks we learn about the war of 1812 and about napoleon and how the the i mean a lot of our books focus on how the environment was used to defeat them it's almost like symbolic of russia like the country defeated napoleon but in terms of like pro-napoleon views like what's coming up now this battle of australis is frequently talked about as it has to be one of his most crowning achievements from like a battle perspective it really showed his strategic uh mastery over how to direct troops and how to manipulate forces to move the way that he needed to he he was like he was like a orchestrator of battle if you will yeah this is the one battle that i teach up to uh when we get to 1812 and 1814 in the fall of napoleon eventually uh the battle of auschwitz is is the one that i teach uh because it really is kind of that midpoint it is a defining characteristic uh you could even see it as kind of like the conclusion of what historians would call the uln campaign of that he takes all this and from here on out he marches his way you know almost to to moscow so rostov sees that the emperor alexander the first and has moved to tears as we were talking about and dogorukov is in charge of negotiations and he's like 100 offense 100 of the time like yes russia alexander's here we can defeat anything like it's part of like that divine spirit that russian soul that's coming out for these characters and he's got to get behind this guy though right you love his enthusiasm this is the cheerleader that you want in your corner though when you're down a couple of points well this is uh there's there's also um dramatic irony here where you and i know what's happening we know that napoleon is faking weakness like he's using his spies to spread rumors man he's the best at it he's using his spy network to feign like weakness he's giving up literally he's on the top of the hill which at this time was where you wanted to be because you had oversight you know it's easier to aim downhill etc etc gives up the power play position has less troops so you mentioned earlier that napoleon frequently overwhelmed outmaneuvered he had less troops here in this battle than than the russian army did the combined russian and germanic armies and such um it's it's really the crowning achievement of how he manipulates and wins this war that i think is interesting he gives up the high ground how did he win kenobi would have been so upset with him with that move but he still won dark side is powerful with napoleon yeah it really is all right so way rather again another real historical fact um is one that is kind of representing tolstoy's pride i think he comes into this war room and he's just like all right guys this is what we're gonna do and any objection that you have he's already got planned what the counter is to it he's the guy that's arguing from rhetoric and from like pre-planned moves rather than actually listening to people you've got people like katusov who's just like no he's not weak we shouldn't pursue him and way brother's like no i've already thought about that this is why we're going to go crush nicole and he's almost like his version of honor and valor is leading these troops to victory and he doesn't even know if he can do it like he's totally wrong in this situation through the course of our discussion we've come back to that me versus we thing several times and i feel like way rother is kind of that embodiment of the individual and he thinks he has all the answers but the answers isn't an individual it is that collective nature of all these people working together to be able to take down napoleon and spoiler that's eventually what does happen but i think it's kind of that play that tolstoy is having here of which one of these is gonna win the war and he knows the outcome obviously like we do but i love that these people in this story don't know do we go with the individual that is like napoleon that is confident or is it gonna be that we thing that we come together and ultimately become the victor what if we get to like the war of 1812 and like tolstoy just like randomly it's like yeah russia like what if he writes it totally different than what happened like you say spoiler alert because you know what happens in history we have no idea how tolstoy will write this in the book though no we do i mean the way that he's written this so historically accurate with these correct characters the way he's written the you know the czar nicholas the way he's written napoleon i he knows these characters inside now there's no way that he's going to change the outcome of these battles even the couple of battles we've seen so far he wrote very historically accurately oh he absolutely did right like because way rather when you will continue when you look and when you look it up in the history books way brother extremely incompetent commander like the troops were literally like you can read reports about how like they were the lines were marching into each other they weren't sure what the orders were he was terrible and tolstoy depicts him perfectly of coming in and just being like this is what we need to do and like yeah it's it's actually very accurate i guess as we move forward like what do you think about because two staff falling asleep like is this exhaustion is this uh depression is he giving up um for me i think the way that tolstoy has written these characters everything seems to be um not what it seems and i i think that this is him just kind of be like all right i'm gonna go ahead and go over here and just pretend to take a few z's so that nobody pays attention to me that seems to be the thing is nobody is doing what they feel everybody just seems to be putting on a front or a mask uh besides napoleon i mean he's the only one and again because i guess he's probably considered the villain of the story he's the only one that's self-assured everybody else is is growing through the story because napoleon has already made himself of who he is and we don't see much growth for him i like that take i think i had a much simpler take where i was just kind of viewing maybe it's just because i've been reading some stoicism here lately i kind of took it as katusov was just giving up that he's just like yep i'm not going to be able to win this battle and you know when you know alexander comes to the field he's the new numero uno right like everything alexander says goes and he knows alexander is going to be influenced to try to prove himself and you know when you look at the historical documents there was motivation for austria to push this attack they wanted to regain their land right like while they had russian support and help in the area and they did have the numbers they did have the high ground everything on paper made sense and katusov even though he didn't believe in it knew that he probably wasn't going to be able to change it so he just gave up knowing that he had no influence was the way i looked at it that's a good way too i like that so tolstoy now shows us prince andre and rustop's thoughts and we see andre kind of daydreaming about being a war hero being promoted winning battles and rustop is dreaming of gaining emperor alexander's favor right like he's he's just so smitten with him and then that's when kind of gunfire kind of goes off and he realizes that he's going to be able to to prove himself but this is honestly the french trap being sprung right like if we look at a map up on this hill the russians took the hill thinking they had the power ground here right and down here down below you see that these french are feigning weakness oh we're over extended here this is going to be easy for you to take not realizing that there's some i don't remember was like 12 or 20 000 people that are coming to reinforce just in the nick of time to really spring the trap and then when russia you know also over extends yeah calvary men okay okay and then when russia also overextends chasing you know this chance at victory uh-oh now they're overextended and with the reinforcements now france isn't and that's when they kind of cut off again split the forces to your point earlier a classic napoleon move pushes them towards the lake starts firing cannonballs into the lake oh real historical event everybody knows that part about the battle of australia it's like that's kind of like a romantic view of the world that's what the paintings are of that's what you know in the movie scenes would be yeah yeah it's it's crazy how historically accurate it is and also still how haunting it is to read uh to be pinned between a uh oncoming force and normally it's like okay we give up and you know you know there's there's people taking in and surrendering but napoleon is written ruthless in this is he not yeah for sure i mean were you hoping that it would be changed i mean because you talked about it earlier that you know maybe maybe tolstoy will change with us i was i was hoping for not the realism and grittiness here because it just it kind of depressed me like man this is brutal he is a ruthless sob it's it's very realistic he's so much smarter than everybody else and he knew it he knew it and you see how tolstoy plays up how weak the russians were here like with rostov running around like we're not sure what to do and there's just cannonballs going off and the russians are being pinned um i i don't think while i believe you know obviously tolstoy believes in russia i don't think he believes it in a point to depict i think he puts reality and truth above that and he realizes that there was hubris at play here he realizes that there were forces that had bigger impact and out thought the russian mind and russian bravery russian bravery wasn't enough to win this battle and i think he depicts that i guess one of my questions i'd have for that is is he depicting this as an anti-war novel or a war novel i i don't think either i think the way i thought of is tolstoy is a fantastic historian and writer and he's able to combine those together because he's writing it knowing that knowing the outcome which obviously gives him an advantage to writing the story but he knows that ultimately it really wasn't russia that won the war it was napoleon beat himself he does eventually overextend himself and become too cocky and yes the russians do make some you know big gains and have some big battles but it was the weather it was you know the the the years and years and years of war and i i think that i think it's written fairly by tolstoy of how this is playing out because the russians do make some great strides towards the end of the war when we get closer you know 18 12 18 13 18 14 but here in the beginning they are kind of bumbling and stumbling well okay so now let's move to a more romantic side of mr till stoy right because while we praise him for his realism there is definitely some romanticism at the end of this chapter with andre kind of being knocked down he's looking up at the heavens and napoleon you know finally entering this chapter he's like looking down on him and says you know something about it's a good day to die and there really is a historical quote about not exactly but you're paraphrasing well okay i don't have the exact quote but i guess i do recall like from reading the history books where he talks about there are going to be it's romantic enough right whatever it is it's written that he had said something to the effect of how there's going to be a lot of russian women crying in russia tomorrow after this victory and you have andre who's sitting there looking up at the sky and we're like okay is he gonna die like it's kind of like a cliffhanger at the end but i almost took the sky as him finally looking up um seeing that there's something bigger than him because i think he's we've talked about how he's disenfranchised with society we see how war is not what he depicted at all i wonder are we gonna see him become that that trope of an atheist turning christian uh kind of like how i think mario was hoping for him to turn like she gave him that icon when he left and maybe that he'll kind of turn a more religious life it's kind of a cliffhanger at this point in time i don't know where it's going to go but that's my gut feel oh you think he lives oh yeah oh yeah he ain't going anywhere i think he's sticker i think he's sticking around that last paragraph is is like he's dead like it was very clear-cut that this guy is dying so i mean if he does live then either yes it will definitely be a religious revival or it will be again him finding honor courage strength within and it will be his hero's journey of you know he overcame this obstacle now what's the next obstacle that he has to overcome to you know propel him up to you know hero status well i mean symbolically russia's devastated right now right like the fact that for the first time since peter the great who dominated in war right the first time since him a russian emperor led the battle and lost terribly with the high ground with more numbers and just got demolished by napoleon the russians are very um i think i think reality isn't living up to their expectations of what their bravery could accomplish let's say that and i did find that quote it says that's a fine death that's what napoleon said i was going to ask you what you thought that meant and it sounds to me like you think he actually is going to die yeah yeah well i think that this comes down to at the end it is setting the stage for how horrific battles and war was and that tolstoy is saying the russians weren't prepared for this europe was not prepared for this they had not seen this in hundreds of years not that things have been peaceful but this napoleonic time period is unlike anything that europe has ever seen the loss of life the devastation everything is is a new norm and i know i've said that several times but that the scope and the expanse of this is is something that is breathtaking that i think only something like tolstoy couldn't to encapsulate into a novel oh i just got an idea okay i hadn't thought about this what if there's some foil action going on right here where prince andre has believed in nothing almost in a sense you know trying to find himself i think tolstoy writes these characters um as having room to grow i think all these characters have room to grow right like i don't think so so andre is looking for who is he who's he going to be and he looks up to the heavens i think he's going to live and he sees i think an opportunity in the divine and god there now rostov is the foil where his god was the divinely appointing prince alexander emperor alexander and his gods the one that was fleeing from the battle almost like looking dejected and like his is the opposite where him having faith in that russian pride and soul is now being is now failing him and he's he's like on like the decline as opposed to prince andre is on the incline in tolstoy's view of of of the world i think yeah that could be good i mean because andre too who didn't worship napoleon has just had you know basically got whooped by him and then napoleon looks down on him and i was like yeah you're dirt beneath my boot and so i think that yeah i i mean andre's probably gonna survive but uh it the near-death experience is gonna change him obviously remember that scene in bill and ted's when they go and get napoleon from the past and bring him to waterloo and doesn't he like and he eats the ice cream well he gets pushed down the slide like i kind of picture that like when andre is like about to die like on like he just pushes him like with the like it fades to black like the camera i like that yeah napoleon the water slide taker book four or book two part one with a crazy naming all right but it is 1806 that's what matters and the war of the third coalition's over war the fourth coalition's coming over but we get a little bit of peace first and i love it i love these characters now i i'm converted i am now liking these characters in this part which character is your favorite i'm interested to hear denise off dude totally when when rostov comes home with denise off and he's all like oh why you wash off he talks like elmer fudd well definitely not my favorite uh i'm a fan of pierre i felt like this was kind of his time to unshine or i don't know devolve i guess and i thought it was interesting because i don't know where his character is going to go from here up or down so i'm kind of excited to see what happens when he gets back to the war well i wonder too am i enjoying the switch in the characters right because rostov when we saw him in part one you know they're they're they're not a well-to-do family and you know he's going to war being all patriotic kind of wanting this and he goes to war and gets his butt kicked hides in the bushes right but he comes home the first battle yes yeah yeah but but he comes home and has on this hungarian uniform and he's now like oh sonia we don't need to get together i'm going to go bang some other chicks like he's a different person now basically yeah this is true this is true i wonder too they say war changes you and it's not just for the ptsd i think sometimes i wonder does rostov feel like he deserves more like wha what is his reason for for kind of i mean sonya is looking more attractive than the first time why would he be a man about town now be after becoming this war hero is it the attention is is he drawn to higher mobility perhaps instead of true love is that perhaps the commentary that's kind of being snuck in here i i think it's pride he has gone and done something other people's only talk about in the russian you know social system and he's come back uh not dead and uh he's not a war hero but in his small circle he may be somewhat of a war hero and i think he loves like you said that attention and that's that's changing it's going to his head right that's the easiest way to say it the attention and the notoriety has gone to his head well he's not the only one right papa rostoff you know count he's throwing a party for bagration right for being the big war hero he is lauded for winning victories and even though katusoff we saw was probably better strategically minded in behind the scenes he's kind of booed because he was in charge of those that lost right we we lobbed the heroes that win we boo the heroes that lose even though we can see there's a lot more going on behind these scenes for the war engine right and yeah i think i really enjoyed this section even though it doesn't have the the war stuff that i kind of enjoy the action and uh learning the histories and stuff of that i did like this section because you see that little bit of loss of innocence of what war does to to young people and i think that when they're coming home they they're enjoying they're almost like aggressive about you know hey well this is what happened to me you know they're all trying to get their stories out there uh and a little there's a little bit of grandstanding right and i think that uh we're we're seeing their mentalities of war change a little bit because they have all these ideas the preconceived notions of war they go off to the battles they see how it's awful and terrible and what it's truly like but now they come home and get that positive positive affirmation and they kind of become like single-minded of okay i i can do this because i want more of this i like this it's good to come back as you know a victor now someone who did not come back as a victor as pierre so at this party you know leading up to it there's all these rumors about dolokov hooking up with ln and he's kind of had enough of it and when dolokov starts cheering all the beautiful ladies that's it gloves are off duel is on pierre the eternal fish out of water challenges the battle hardened dolokov who has like no scruples right i don't know about you i don't go around challenging men who have these bare antics at parties do you know anyone that wins duels with people who have bear antics name one i don't think he can i think that he wants to be respected and then you know it and it's not all his fault i think for the duel i mean um dolokov grabs the the piece of paper from him i think rudely and i think this is the last straw you know and and again it's that young man trying to impress the women and i i think he's yes he's at fault but i it takes two to tango and i think that he he he is not solely at fault here and i liked him he's standing up for himself he stand up for himself a little bit i i'm team pierre do you think dolokov wanted to duel him so that he could connect with ellen because ellen for all we know you know she claims that it never happened afterwards after he surprisingly wins the duel kind of return of events sir that's what i mean is because pierre wins um he goes home talks to ellen ellen says no i never cheated on him do we think dolokov wanted to duel because he thought he would win basically it's a win-win for him no matter what if he wins he he you know has more bravado but if he loses he gets the sympathy he's the good guy here no matter what happens i mean as long as he survives i mean duel serious business brother you don't always walk away from those yeah and i was actually really surprised that tolstoy wrote it that you know spoiler alerts pierre wins this duel and dolokov doesn't die he ends up surviving which is crazy and that doesn't happen in these type of novels like you you get shot you're dead so i actually i enjoyed that uh kind of you know a change of pace and reality yeah i was wondering if there's gonna be written kind of like pushkin where he's injured and they do it the one dies a little bit later but you know so there's definitely some foreshadowing here i think that that is important to note that uh this is gonna come back to bite maybe both of them in the butt there's something to be said though about this being a miniature of war um in the sense of of two sides having a disagreement you know you almost have like the third parties the seconds trying to broker peace like oh come on guys you really shouldn't fight and you know at the end you know pierre walks away without i don't think he has the pride he thought he'd have from winning the duel like he's almost kind of destroyed from it and even dolokov while you say that he won i think we see a different side of him i think i think when you see that you know he's the mama's boy when he goes back home and stuff like that that there's there's a lot of uh sadness and he has a lot more to live for than if he had died during the duel so i don't know i don't know i think i think you can kind of view this in the sense of there's not always a clear winner when it comes to duel in the same way that maybe maybe this is my own narrative but i don't think there's always a clear winner when it comes to war either i think there's losses on both sides no yeah no the old saying goes that nobody really wins in war because there's going to be loss of life when you said the word miniature it kind of got me thinking of i one reason i really enjoyed this section i think over the you know socialite drama sections of the the first part of volume of of the book is for me i felt like that it sped up did it feel that way to you because it felt like the narrative got a little bit tighter we honed in on just a few characters the chapters are really short the much shorter this section in its entirety is half as long as the previous one than the previous part of the book so i feel like things are speeding up and i i would like the pace of that like what what's happening like what what is this pressure that i'm feeling for what's gonna happen in the next section of the books i feel like death is looming over me and i did you feel that it felt faster for sure but also i feel like i'm getting a stronger grasp on the themes and maybe some things to kind of like what what might have been some main takeaways at this point in time uh did you get a feeling of you know the love with the rostoffs the love with even dolokov and his mom there's a lot of familial love like those are very warming and and exciting to see but interestingly enough i think there's a lot of problems with the romantic love when you look at every relationship that doesn't work out here like in terms of eventually we'll get to natasha turning down here but we have sonia and rostov not working out we've got pierre and ln not working out and if you remember al bo all of those were almost forms of of social mobility like they weren't true love marriages and i couldn't help but wonder is tolstoy maybe putting some patterns out here of what does it mean to truly connect and truly have a happy life because clearly the people that are doing it for social mobility they ain't happy is it love or is it all just lust and i feel like that it's just this pure young raw sexual innuendos that are there that's that's what it is i don't think this is true love at all uh maybe it's moving towards that something but as we move and progress um and we get some of the negative foreshadowing and we we finally do have a death here uh and then and sonia suffering and having this unhappy life yeah i i don't i don't think it's love so let's move into the last part the bulkhonsky farm right where we think prince andre is dead mario's praying okay again the religious compass of this novel not a novel no surprise there and that's when prince andre arrives right as his wife is having the baby and the look did you notice how the look was written for this scene uh no i i read this a little while ago so i don't remember refresh my memory she it was almost like a look of there's two looks right there's when it first happens it is in the opposite of later on at the funeral but she's almost like a little bit happy and i couldn't help but wonder do you remember when we read the story of an hour and the wife who wanted to be free when she oh yeah release yes yes was was something like that what what actually killed her instead of the childbirth right like was it i don't know it it's a complicated emotion because we're seeing it through prince andre almost i think it's the narration's kind of moving around but it's this omniscient view i think but you mostly get andre's perspective in which case it changes right there's like the joy during childbirth and then there's almost scorn and upset during death later on oh yeah i like that i could see that i i think that i think it's a relief right of that i don't have to deal with this anymore um again it kind of comes back the idea that maybe there isn't a love here that this is out of obligation and not something that they you know wanted to do that she wanted to do moving in back to the raw stuffs here we had kind of like the final scenes where we had the dance where i i thought my boy denise off was gonna win over natasha wastoff uh i was real excited for that because i thought they actually cared about each other i really did and it didn't work out so i was kind of sad about that so i'm like dang it tolstoy where are you going with this one and um and then when we look at rostov and kind of the dissension with um dolo cough over over sonia and you see them kind of gambling you see them putting their bravado on the line again it was uh kind of kind of sad to see how self-destructive some of these men will be for the purpose of of name of honor of of a social norm more so than anything else yeah the gambling thing again is i think it comes back to what you said earlier about the religious element back in this time period from my understanding there was basically three things that a husband did that were usually frowned upon and that is going to be you know sleeping around drinking and gambling like those are the three big sins and like oh he's out drinking out of the bar or oh he's out you know at the brothel or he's down there you know gambling with his buddies and it's just these guys fall into these tropes time and time again and it's like why are you trying to show off for this it doesn't impress the ladies this isn't helping your cause at all and i get so mad at the gambling and then it comes back to the fact that he has to go have daddy pay it off for him and it's like oh you were you were taking three steps back you took one step forward you know becoming a better person and evolving here and then it's just you take all these steps back you've undone all of your growth it's very very frustrating but it's realistic and that's why it's wonderful is because tolstoy is nailing this you know these situations are amazing and you kind of see these parallels of how these characters are are behaving and they're falling into their stereotypes of what you would expect of them so i hope we see some dramatic growth and change in the next couple of parts in the first part we had dueling with the guns now we have the dueling with the wallets right the the men will find whatever they can to fight over the women to fight over their honor it's it's it's not it's like the ongoing struggle in this novel as men will constantly fight over something and they'll find something to fight with isn't that the truth uh and i mean that's kind of the whole theme of the whole book right we we literally have that war piece so they're warring at home they're warring with napoleon they're warring within themselves because they they don't know what they want they don't know what they want to do uh you know especially poor pierre my boy uh he just he's making mistakes left and right you know and dolokov isn't any better off i don't think either and the war of the fourth correlation is coming up right the next chapter is literally titled 1806-1807 we got the piece back to war right yep back to war [Music] part five now pierre is leaving for petersburg and stumbles across a man that changes his life a man that introduces him to the free masons community if you will i like that that's good this bars deeve inducts him and i guess people write online how i guess tolstoy did a lot of research and that they actually are kind of accurate some of these ceremonies but he goes on this holy path of joining the freemasons even though his life is in shambles as the silly's just like oh you left l.a and i'm going to make sure you're ruined tight up a deal it makes for a good story i mean it's entertaining 1806 new year new party at the shearers new war starts right and uh boris still macking on the ladies and ellen kind of i am i am that piece of booty that uh not much has changed honestly yeah he's kind of trying to get that piece yeah yeah so prince nikolai is one of russia's now eight militia commander in chiefs sometimes kissing a little butt pays off and maria's watching her nephew little prince nikolai as andrew has been given an estate and is tending to that and avoiding all talks of the war even though his father sends him pictures about the victory i'm going to put that in air quotes here at lao great so you won without me there makes me feel great thanks pops but kind of ignores his baby sadly so now that pierre is all freemasonified he heads to kiev to free all of his serfs right he's going to go through his liberal forms and when he checks back in the spring of 1807 the stewards put on this show right like oh yeah we built this church for you and like oh look you know the the peasants are working and earning great even though all the money's coming out of their rent and it's just all it's all hoax basically big hoax so pierre heads to talk to prince andrew and he's like yo look how liberal i am and look how awesome i'm doing and they kind of have their debate about god and whether andrew should truly believe in the purpose of life if you will he continues to be dismissive if you didn't catch that and then there's this whole rostoff plot right where he returns to the army he feels he can be a good person while they're worse outside he what ratchets up this huge gambling debt for his family so he's kind of embarrassed about that his family's not even rich to begin with right and um that's when he sees denisov kind of making some moralistic questionable decisions like stealing food trucks from other army resource surpluses and uh yeah it's it's uh it's shenanigans in the army if you will so nothing's changed there either has it no not really it's kind of i guess expected for some of these characters we don't see a lot of growth they seem to be just falling back into their traditional ways it makes me question the title war and peace right where's the war we're skipping that part everybody's trying to get their piece i already told you that yeah they're going to the party to get their pieces right so so we miss the battle trafalgar uh i get it no sea battles right okay that makes sense right that's not really a russian story and that's what is representing here but to kind of just gloss over the battle of elau was kind of sad because you know if you look at like what what tostoi is doing with this novel he's showing how the influence of little men rides up right war it's very easy to say it's a big machine and we can't change things but he shows how these little men have influences in the bigger picture of things and that's such an interesting story too because if you didn't know the russians were going to get absolutely rolled in the batter of illinois he was going to be a slaughter and what happens was like this little dispatch boy that had this uncoded message about what napoleon's plans were got intercepted he got captured by a cossack patrol and he ended up not being able to destroy the letter in times and so the russians are like oh the gods are shining on us so this is totally gonna change the course of battle yeah let's pull out guys napoleon's about to surround us we gotta go but it fits that idea of how little men like small choices can impact bigger things i guess for me i i was i was a little bit disappointed of course there wasn't more of war because we enjoyed those pieces looking at them historically but for the better the battle of alau i guess this one it's glossed over a little bit because in the grand scheme of things it was kind of a stalemate both sides suffer heavy heavy losses uh it stalls napoleon a little bit but doesn't really stop him at all but for me i kept thinking of that the battle is kind of seen through the letter and we don't get a lot of it because i think that's apropos kind of what is going on with these men is they aren't on the front lines they're only living through these you know proxies that are happening and i think that is kind of the the standard for the the russian elite and nobles of how this war is going for them is it kind of doesn't matter and for the grand scheme of things historically the battle of the lao doesn't really matter too much and i think it fits uh the whole andrew story too like if he were there his heart is no longer in war right like when you have the men no longer caring or bumbling it's these small events that might have been skipped over like the russian army could have been slaughtered had they not been paying attention like andrew might have so i think it fits that model but also i mean andr prince andrew he's going through big changes right he just had his life flashed through his eyes his wife passed away he's got birth of his baby coming in but he's still going through this existential crisis now we see definitely the spiritual philosophical kind of soul of the novel so far really come out in this part and i feel like that there's definitely this connection between the material war part of it and the spiritual you know struggles that he's having of what do i do how can i benefit my family during you know such tragedy during this this war time period when we saw prince andrew in the first few chapters he was living for that glory right like he wanted to go to war to find purpose in his life and now when he kind of looks at life you'll see there's even maybe a little bit of class argument where he's talking with pierre here about how like well they're meant to lead right it's they're the proletariat it's the peasants who have to die the peasants who have to do the work and i think you see this this almost like approach to life where he's he's shifting his values i think trying to find them and one of the things that he's going through with pierre is what is the correct way in which we should conduct ourselves in this world yeah i think that we see kind of that parallel between the two and not that they're making different choices or even the same choices but i feel like i feel like they're both trying to cut themselves off so they can have that internal uh aha moment you know that epiphany of hey this war is bad it but i need to find meaning in life for me and the war is not it how am i going to do that uh a lot of emotional developed during this time period and and i felt i felt for both of these men you'll also notice that this freemason thing was actually came out of left field for me like whenever people talk about this book no one ever tells me about this great you know epistemological or theological discussion that happens and i thought it was i thought it was amazing so far um pierre is the fish out of water right he can't fit in in society even when he's rich he doesn't fit in there's all the old people all the young people in the room he doesn't fit with him with either of them he sees these freemasons like a stand-in for religion is kind of how i took it and any religion that is and he sees oh this is a place i could finally belong and they even talk about the four different types of freemasons the four type of religious followers the ones that truly believe the ones that are just there for community uh the ones that are looking there for social advancement and such and pierre i wonder you know as the guy that never fits in anywhere is he using religion as a place to finally fit in oh yeah i think we're all looking for acceptance and when you don't know yourself and you're trying to find acceptance like pierre the first time somebody accepts you you're like this is where i fit this is these are my people and and i think pierre has found himself where prince andrew has not right he's still searching for his personality who am i gonna be because i think you have to understand yourself before you can understand which group you're going to fit in otherwise you still won't fit in i think pierre thinks he's found himself at this point okay yeah i agree with that he um he even had that line remember where he said he couldn't really express himself in russian right like there was that line uh what was it unaccustomed to speak of abstract matters in russian what does that mean right like we talk about how french is the commentary of the bourgeois the commentary of the language of of enlightenment is he questioning i mean even his name pierre ain't no russian name right yeah he is like this mixture of nationality that he's kind of exploring i would say i think pierre is is lost i think that he he thinks he's supposed to be better than everybody because everybody else acts the same way and he's trying to fit in with them so he's trying to have that air of meritocracy but he doesn't do it well because he's not genuine with it because i don't think he really believes it but then is he supposed to be french that is the true you know kind of snobbiness of the novel in my opinion i think that's kind of how tolstoy wrote it with how much french is in the novel and who speaks french and who does not but i think that pierre is is so lost uh that he's grasping for straws and he he he's bouncing back and forth he has no real commitment does he did i miss this he mentioned that his biggest weakness is women is that his biggest weak i mean i believe that for boris like yeah but for pierre what yeah okay so it's not just me okay all right i read that and i was like does pierre know pierre like what's going on and that's the thing is i don't think pierre knows pierre um or we're not supposed to know him yet maybe he does know himself and that will come out later in the story i hope that it does but yeah i i i was it was a little bit off it was a little bit jarring compared to i'm like come on you are not a player you're not that guy pierre the other people in the story they're that guy okay so we agree prince andrew not sure who he is had a recent brush of of closeness of death with family isn't finding his purpose in life isn't finding his purpose in war pierre is pushing himself into religion but doesn't know himself and he's being told to look internal questionable what's gonna happen next [Music] part six treaty time russia is now bffs with france i'll bet some of you didn't know that was coming i bet you you did though mr crypto come on i need this gotta be wartime we gotta talk about the treaty of till set because i've got some artwork that i need to share with you here was that the hybrid version war and peace and treaties and parties strange opening and then prince andre is able to just suddenly do all the reforms that pierre couldn't right like hey we're going super liberal i didn't need religion to do all this right but uh it's 1809 and prince andre is traveling uh towards the rostovs and basically they pass this huge oak tree it's all twisted evil looking ominous much much like prince andrew's life right and they arrive and count rostov uh is you know he's there regarding his son's inheritance right and uh they're all they see natasha and she's all live laugh love running around the farm smiling being a girl i guess i don't really like the way toast i wrote natasha i'm starting to get irritated by natasha to be honestly she's just very one-dimensional to me very dimensional it's very sad because there could have been a lot of character involved there but we know that tolstoy's going to focus on the two main characters what i believe the two main characters of andre and and and pierre but that's okay so when andrew leaves magically this twisted oak tree is full of life and clearly you're never too old to bloom according to that oak tree right i mean that's kind of the the the point of this the all of this chapter is here's how you live a good life and if you don't then bad things can happen to you and that i feel like that was the whole crux of this chapter yeah he sees his wife's photo his wife's no longer reproaching him i think a little hint of pushkin if you remember the queen of spades if you will now later prince uh andrew heads to petersburg where he meets the father of russian liberalism mikhail sparensky we know him a real historical figure and he gets a job and they bff out as well and they become all enamored with these ideas of liberalism and how to you know reform society and they all get super duper excited now everything yeah everything's gonna be hunky-dory now well what's weird is now the chat it kind of goes back in time at least that's how i interpreted this i think um pierre is is head of the freemasons and he goes on this trip pondering the point of freemasons and he tells them hey guys i got this plan we just got to kind of take over start this gum you know universal government everybody reports to us we we purify them like this it's going to be great right you guys down for that and everyone's just kind of like um yeah who's going to tell pierre like and they're like this this is not how we roll we're about self-purification we're not really about governing others and i think maybe to our earlier chapter talk that goes to that slave mentality versus leadership mentality right like religion isn't there to be leaders per se religion is there to be um people who discover themselves and how if you are a leader how do you pull that out right like it's a very different flavor than what pierre is putting out to the chapter at this point in time i would say agreed so back in time also the rostov's have become poorer the count moves them to petersburg to get a job which i think is the job that um andrew goes to see them at right when they're all behind the game of keeping up with the joneses in petersburg because in petersburg you know you might be down here but in moscow you were up here right yeah where you are matters i guess physically and i don't know emotionally yeah well it's kind of all over in this chapter right like when berg proposes to to vera in this chapter uh count rostov has to even give him like an iou for the towery like yeah i don't really have all the money right now because you know social status yeah i thought you were gonna i knew the treaty stuff was funny because we've been talking about like where's the war but i really thought you were going to be like all right marriage time everybody's getting hitched soon there's a grand ball and the emperor is there in attendance and everybody's so excited and natasha and prince andrew reconnect and dance and then tolstoy noodles around for way too many pages with characters and their attentions but eventually if andrew proposes to natasha they have to postpone it a year because grumpy daddy told them they had to and maria prays that the outcomes are good as part of god's will and um suffering is a way to deal with the death of a loved one kind of i don't know we need to talk about that all right where are we starting because you said it's all over the place it is this is a chapter that's all over the place and i think let's start with the treaty because uh you know the treaty of tiltset was kind of a big deal like i don't know if you know this have you seen these paintings of uh napoleon and alexander embracing each other yeah uh some crazy guy has been texting me these pictures all day and there's even one of the big old smooch we got a smoochie in the tenty at tillset and i think this is the original 19th century bff bromance right oh yeah they were total bromance yeah i love it i love it they would definitely have a video or podcast or something i think that the way tolstoy writes this the way that you know he shows how the french and the russians are suddenly getting along going to each other's tents hanging out and and they're a little bit some of the characters are aghast but for the most part everyone's kind of accepting it i think it's interesting the way that he did kind of show that people can come together even even through war like you could see how they're like well we both hate england so we're best friends now do you think this is maybe foreshadowing some of the demise that's to probably come this is the the calm before the storm oh yeah oh yeah because i mean napoleon actually believed that he was totally like brown out right like he wrote to josephine that like man if alexander was a chick he would be my mistress his wife's probably like oh thank thanks for the letter napoleon like super awkward right but alexander just totally betrays him like right like historically like at least that's what happens yeah the book does like a good job of that and that's just that's so historically accurate right the these guys just all these leaders always betraying throughout all of time it just seems to happen over and over they never learn their lesson they never really did and i think it comes down to all of this effort all this fighting in the grand schemes it makes little difference which is so sad in the grand scheme of things now in people's individual lives of course it makes a difference and it goes back to what you said you know in our previous talk about like the little man making a difference well i think you know when we talked we started a discussion about slave mentality versus master mentality in the last part and i think there's something to be said about these people who are so powerful and in charge they get to decide what's right and wrong right like making out with the enemy leader totally cool now people everybody cheers and and let's do this right but when they're like hating each other it's just like well you know i wouldn't go 10 feet near an opponent like that they're deciding what's right and wrong and you have pierre who is going through these reforms trying to propose to the freemasons what we ought to do and the freemasons are like oh no we don't we don't want to lead like that it's about looking internal and the self and compassion and pity and being a good person and i think that kind of smashes his dreams of how to move forward right like he can't lead the way that he thought he could and he doesn't belong in the society that he originally i think joined to belong he was the guy that joined to be a part of something i don't know if i would say it was right or wrong but i would definitely say that it is what is socially acceptable like you said or what can be the norm for people or how people are supposed to behave but i don't know if they're setting that the tone of of more moralistically what is right or wrong maybe i don't i felt it was just more that these are what the leaders can do so now we can emulate them and then let's talk about in between though right i think there's a lot here to this and i think maybe it might be more nuanced maybe than what i've presented so far um so so prince andrew and sporansky right like sparanski the father of russian liberalism huge reforms in russia um they're the ones that are kind of defining that right because russia i mean to an extent still is but was particularly known for a lot of bribery right like oh you want to you want to raise yourself up in the table of ranks from peter the great well here's you know some money that i paid to this guy out in like the caucuses and now i've got a caucus uh you know a title is what they used to call it because you could just buy your way into nobility if you will well now they're they're sending these reforms where it's going to force you to do exams force you to pass tests force you to be qualified for the position that you have and that's kind of a big deal for what is ultimately a society that deals a lot with nepotism and with bribery oh yeah the having the the qualification exams is something that is catching up in in russia at this time because it they'd had that in asia for thousands of years and they'd have that in you know the middle eastern part where you had to take exams to become doctors and whatnot and i think they're just finally you know alexander saying hey we've got to catch up to the rest of the world here and our government can't just be based on who is your uncle or your cousin or your brother's sister's dad like we need qualified people and the government starts hiring people based on you know more qualifications in their merits than just you know what their last name is and i think that speaks a lot to society's whole as we said will change the the social structure of how people are going to be assigned in life and treat one another and uh you know of course eventually spoiler alert to history russia is going to abandon all of this again and start over uh you know amidst world war one but it is interesting for a time period of nearly like a hundred years in my opinion it seems like russia is kind of on the right track to have a more fair society so here's the problem i have with this book so far i i'm getting frustrated with prince andrew like i thought he was my guy right like when he it wasn't because he wanted to go to war but he's like okay i'm going to be i'm disenfranchised no no i'm talking about andrew right he's the one that wanted to should have picked pierre oh he should have picked you sorry sorry so i was teasing you okay i got you i got you guys so he wanted to define himself because society wasn't doing it for him so he'd go to war and i get that right like a lot of young people go through that sort of thing and then he comes back and he he has this chance at a family has it a chance at starting over and raising the next generation kind of just straight-up abandons them right gives it gives this child to his sister to raise and then he's all like just whisked away by this reform like okay i can define society so that we should give me value right and then he meets miss live laugh love natasha who's so one-dimensional just plays the clavichord we're so excited like she can entertain and now he's goo gaga head over heels for her isn't that funny how like th that hasn't changed in 200 years that the guy goes for the the he upgraded right he got him his new 20 year old it it's like come on even tolstoy wrote this way like we can't come up with anything new it's so funny i was hoping that he would be reinjuvenated because of his enthusiasm for life and i thought that his kind of changing character would have helped him and stuff uh you know and a little bit of the religious element sprinkled in there bob tolstoy i was so hoping for for for andrew to have more character and growth development because it seemed to be heading that way right from the last last chapter in part and and it just kind of it fizzles out very disappointed and i agree i was frustrated with this part in the book oh my gosh you know what you just made me realize bear with me i'm gonna throw an idea out here live okay let's do it so why did prince andrew succeed where pierre fell failed with liberal reforms [Music] is it i i don't know if there's a pure answer but is it because he was directly involved using his hands living his his goals as opposed to kind of like outsourcing it like the the traditional aristocratic way was you know crap rolls downhill you tell your uh you know certain people who passed you know the work down to others versus andrew's the one that's going to get his hands dirty much like tolsoi did the way that tolstoy worked the land with his peasants right and tolstoy was also one about reforms and how you know he was very against this is written early in his career so i'm gonna anachronistically jump forward in time in tolstoy's life but he did move forward with pushing what he thought was wrong with you know russian orthodoxy and that that came to be a problem with the church but luckily tolstoy kind of one of the most important russians that ever lived uh you know survived it didn't probably receive the ramifications that others may have tolstoy tolstoy also married very young like he married younger girls and was attracted to younger women is prince andrew marrying a little bit of an author definitely a possibility i think that because this is before i think kind of his crisis of faith that i i think a lot of the religious stuff is coming through for for pierre and andrew here of our we pre predestination or fate destiny whatever whatever you want to call it i think that uh as much as we want to do according to tolstoy in this time of his writing there's little we can do to influence our lives um and that you may fight against your nature you may fight against human limitations moralities but there is nothing you can do in the end i see i think we see that happening because pierre is making the choices and and he is squashing his his love for the younger women where andrew is not and we we see that kind of play out between these two characters poor poor pierre i do feel i actually felt more for pierre in this chapter because now he doesn't he doesn't fit in with his you know religious buddies anymore which you know i i thought was sad right we talked you know in the last chapter about how he doesn't fit into and he's basically not fit into any other society but at this ball the way that like he almost is just invisible there's that quote it's not from robin williams the person but he said it in a movie you know a script written by someone else but it says i used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone it's not the worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone and i think that's the saddest part about pierre to me is we literally have to see him just watch other people find happiness he watches at the ball he watches at his estate he literally is just not engaged in anything working with his hands like tolstoy would want and he literally punished yeah and isn't that sad that he has to then thus watch everyone else achieve what he can't it is sad yeah it breaks your heart but it's real because i think that's what happened and i think that's what happens a lot i mean you know good people no no good deed goes unpunished and i think that's kind of what happened to to poor pierre here i think we need to talk more about petersburg versus moscow we saw him kind of use this technique with um anna karenina with the idea of petersburg being the more european liberal area and moscow being traditional russian slavophile type thoughts let's let's keep our pulse on that maybe let's talk about that more when it makes more sense as we keep moving forward part seven starting out with our boy nikolai rostov being a slacker in the army but still being very important dad was a slacker you're a slacker you'd always be a slacker was it back to the future with the guy that's always like you're a slacker mcfly yeah that's what i was doing okay nicholas dad's a slacker right they're they're financial trouble all over the place well he gets a letter to return home to help out with the family so he kind of goes on a leaf from the army where he uh promptly starts yelling at their head steward matanka and basically yells at them for finances only to find out that it's probably not matanka's fault and rostov probably not so good with finances yeah i mean he's not slack or he's a jerk [Laughter] well let's redeem ourselves with some hunting right that's clearly a compassionate uh play here where he's starting to kind of come in to be the leader for the rothsthose right his dad's kind of getting old passing the baton a little bit and we start having some issues with the next door neighbor well first of all we have issues with our own family right like oh my gosh my younger brother and sister want to go hunting too so they come along dare they and then we go hunting and we kind of run into the iagens if you will the neighbors that keep hunting on our lands the nerfs i mean that was a big deal back then right i mean if you had to protect your land and no how dare they you know trespass on here and try to take our our animals i'd like to get what you think of it here in a second but ultimately they end up at the uncle's house when they kind of get too far away from home where they sing and dance traditional russian music and such and everybody's really impressed that natasha can ride saddle side and can sing old peasant songs even though she's been raised french kind of raised the aristocratic way that she probably shouldn't know this russian dna type customs and behaviors that was important for her when you talk about that for sure for sure now uh the raw stuff parents they need that cash though right i noticed when i'm editing at this i said that they're poor i think we need to fine-tune that because it's not that they're poor it's just they're bad with their finances what i should say they're they're not the the aristocrat rich but they're they're not poor i think i think we phrased that a little bit wrong when i look back on it and they're trying to marry nikolai often to julie kerrigan who is super rich now apparently yeah just out of the blue right did you ever get i didn't get that feel throughout i guess most the story and suddenly now they're like oh yeah we're gonna we're gonna marry you off to this rich family it felt a little out of left field but um maybe i just i think it was real brief but i think they mentioned like what didn't they mention like her brother passed away so she inherited the money oh yes yeah that was like back in what like 400 pages ago sorry i didn't remember it's okay no no worries no worries so um rather than actually follow through with what parents want nikolai runs off with sonia essentially right he starts seeing her qualities i love that the romantic in me was like yes good for you nikolai well it was a cute scene like we we go off into this christmas world we have the mummers i've never heard of mummers before that's why i love reading you learn a little bit more about these cultures like what is that you kind of learn that it's kind of like russian caroling where they dress up like it's like our halloween and then go out singing it's it's interesting to learn about that right why mumming though like mummy like you're wrapped up because it's cold outside i doubt it has the english translation like that because i doubt that word means the same thing as it does in russian right right that i mean that's probably what the translation exactly is no no idea i thought it was just kind of cute the way that they dressed up and started to kind of like eyeball each other and grow closer you know so much of this book have had characters just whiplash back and forth but rostov kind of returns to sonia right like it's it doesn't feel unnatural to me the way that these two are attracted and finally they're pushed together through the uh i guess you're gonna do the opposite of what your parents say right so since they told me i have to marry some rich chick named julie yeah i'm gonna go marry sonia instead yeah for sure i feel like we see the the rostov kind of blossom here a little bit this is probably the most informative we have about them as young adults and we start to see a fulfillment for nikolai right he's finally becoming his own man and not just doing what his parents want he's not just going for money he's having this evolution of what's important to him and i think that a lot of us can relate to that as we go through our lives of breaking out our own and deciding what's going to make me happy for my job you know i'm not going to you know work for money i'm going to work for love or family or passion and i think that the complications of society have been weighing on nikolai for a long time and he's finally pushing those aside and doing what he wants and i love how he's evolved into his own man he's always liked sonia like kind of like that that hasn't really changed he's resisted liking her if anything you know the whole matanka scene was a little bit weird because nothing changed even when he tried to fix her finances and even in the army he likes just kind of chilling being important but not necessarily having to do work um i watched this show recently that brought up like this quantum thing that i was like oh what's that and they talked about like this quantum zeno effect where basically like if you continually look at something um it can kind of reset the state that if you constantly look at something it actually forces the thing not to change it's the adage uh a watched pot doesn't boil and i started to kind of get that feeling a little bit with these characters right particularly like as we talked about in the last two chapters not much has changed a lot of times with these characters well when you think about nikolai we finally see some of that change and it's gradual so it feels very very natural in the story and i think with nikolai he's finally realizing that there is more than just beauty that that all it seems like all the other characters in the story are just going for the pretty ones and he's he's looking beyond that because he kind of knows hey we're all gonna get old and wrinkly one day and i want to marry for love not just for attraction and not just for money and that that's a good nice feeling i think it's all gonna go awry soon and i'm very very nervous for him uh so we shall see well he also kind of is like stepping into the role of patriarch right like this is kind of i don't want to say this is his coming of age but this is his coming of manhood in a sense where he's trying to take over the role of hunting and where would you say nikolai is getting his happiness from you you don't think it's from sonia well i mean he enjoyed his time at war like he enjoyed his time away he and certainly enjoyed yelling at matanka he certainly enjoys yelling at his dad and and hunting real good like and even you'll notice the way it was written he was like excited to argue with ilyagen was the sense that i got that um i think her boy likes conflict like i think he likes struggle oh yeah i could definitely see that i relate to that i i'm one that uh i i enjoy sometimes a little good banter and stuff but it doesn't seem that it's anything um too grand or drastic right i mean these are pretty kind of simplistic things i mean i know the war i shouldn't oversimplify the war but he was never in like really grave danger i mean he kind of has plot armor but he he likes things that he i think he knows he can win and that's why he likes the the conflict within them you know what i was really pushing for i i don't think i can make the argument but like you know 1812 is coming right and tolstoy's doing his research i were you hoping that this whole argument with the ill yogans and like how they resolve it were you hoping that this would be kind of a commentary on the continental system being like one of the main reasons that led to 1812 could this you know this argument over money and when taxes are due and whose rights are they like i thought that would be a really slick way to have introduced the continental system but i don't think it works necessarily yeah i don't think there's maybe quite enough details there i think that you can make a good inference for it obviously you know tolstoy is is writing of the past so he could have given us a few more hints about it um but i think that it's an underlying issue because it's not his main focal point of the novel and it probably would have detracted from that and it's about the emotional journey of the of these characters for me anyway well i think it's about conflict though right like i mean the way they they take the wolf and then drag it and they almost don't even see it as like a creature right like they're just trying to punish it almost kind of like how you view the opposite side in war and it's not until later when you see you know like at the treaty of tilset that they started to see people for who they really were you get to see a little miniature of that of when you want something to be a certain way you can almost mentally imagine and will it that way like he wanted to hate ilyagen until he met him and he's like oh actually this guy's actually pretty nice isn't that how sometimes in life is you have these preconceived notions of somebody you meet him like wow i was totally wrong about that and takes a big person to admit that but kind of circling back to what you said with the wolf and everything of that that hunting that hunting party the hunting adventure is very standard in a lot of these time periods as the growth of a young man of showing manliness and i think that a lot of times tolstoy is playing with the masculinity of all these characters of both the men and the women some of the characters he gives like for a lack of better words obviously he wrote it much better than me that i can convey it but almost like that sex appeal where nikolai and sonia feel very like bland compared to some of somebody like pierre or natasha who seem to like just sizzle in in my mind a little bit um so i i think that for these characters um he he's prioritizing what what is important to them and so for me like i said i think i think nikolai is uh enjoying the conflict but he's trying to find his own person and he's slowly doing that and he's growing on me he's becoming a better person at least i hope yeah i would agree he's growing on me too i think he's had the least amount of conflict even though that's he may be the one that craves it the most i would say you'll notice there there's the you've heard the term the social contract the idea that alone in the woods we'd actually probably be really good people but it's when you start putting us in cities and crowded areas the scarcity problem comes about and we start to turn into jerks we start to be very self-interested and maybe even greedy at times at what we own and what is ours when we're pressured by society right like we give up certain freedoms in order to enter into the social contract and into some social stability if you will oh yeah so this is huge you know good old thomas hobbs here told us about the social contract so yeah i think that this philosophical idea of a social contract is is broken on a daily basis and these characters are very very uh poor at upholding the social contract to each other in a positive manner well where i was gonna go with that was that you'll notice that this chapter kind of gives these characters the first time to escape it a little bit when they go to the uncle's house like they're out in an oasis it's the the whole robinsons crusoe you know castaway plot where they're by themselves uh the uncle dresses in peasant clothes and they're totally cool with it like we don't need to dress nice and they play the traditional russian music and all of a sudden they're they're getting connected to their roots and know their how to dance and sing the traditional russian way it's it's the very tolste tolstoy way of bringing about slavophilism or the traditional russian soul and embracing that when you'll notice when they've been in society there's all these pressures about who they have to marry and and um speaking french to appear cultured this is the first time that we see characters i think kind of escaping that social contract and being able to connect back to their roots for better or worse that's how i took this oasis scene there are societal norms right and these things are the expectations of them and when somebody isn't watching you you will be your true self and they're finally getting to be their true selves i guess that's why i think this is a very very important part of the book and maybe kind of the turning point where a lot of people are going to start liking these characters more and relating to them uh however again i i worry of is this just a a respite that is going to be you know we're going to see a 180 once they get back to the war and society of that they're never going to be their true selves again like they were out here you know at the uncle's house [Music] moving into part eight with natasha and prince andre getting engaged finally and pierre starts his existential crisis yeah hello captain obvious we knew that was coming so he moves back to moscow to find himself he drinks parties flirts with girls almost in a platonic way it kind of strange but uh he definitely lives a looser life in moscow than he did with his wife he's almost becoming what he hates like he's turning into these other characters that he loads the first you know three quarters of the novel oh come on buddy you can do better than that so that winner prince nikolai bolkansky and princess maria come to moscow because plot and mario seems to fall deeper under prince bulkhonsky's rule he becomes a little bit more abusive a little bit more mean and a little bit more old for sure right and uh senile to the point where he's blaming this french doctor the metevier to uh get out of his house because he thinks he's a french spy i love it now at dinner he turns to a defensive posture thinking that well russia we just need to defend our borders let let napoleon take over all of europe essentially right and at dinner pierre tells maria how boris is now looking for a rich wife including her friend julie kerrigan soon count rostov natasha and sonia arrive in moscow because plot has to happen and natasha has a difficult job of trying to win over prince bokonski and maria for the wedding right they're they're going to look down on them rostops they think they're better than them maybe because they're more wealthy so they go to visit well and also prince andrew is kind of the most eligible bachelor in town if you will oh yeah so they go to visit only to find principal konsky still in his night night close awkward [Laughter] he turns back then it's awkward nowadays it'd just be like oh you're home because yeah that's for scrubs that's every day covet a tire over here these days so soon they go to the opera right where everyone observes natasha and she kind of enjoys the attention in a sense and is invited by ellen to join her box because everybody's allowed in a lens box am i right including her including her brother who just so happens to start to lay down his um smoochy face and googly eyes at natasha and he got the boot because he's been blowing some money daddy's a little mad at him and he's secretly married too right so no shortage of scandals for this guy but alain invites you know them over later for a little soiree at the house and um rostov tries to count rostov tries to keep uh anatole away from natasha right he's doing the guard duty for his daughter trying to make sure that she's not getting hinged i mean she's engaged like come on guys i i love the the intrigue between these characters of this so just it's so perfect of how you know they just they had no tack well anna told i i'd say anital tactfully gets her alone and lays a smooch on her only to have his sister walk in like it's clear those two were playing cahoots together to me at least oh okay i can see that yeah well it turns out the next day things are just in shambles as mario dimitrovna her godmother uh got into a shouting match and is just like yeah we we better not go back there but natasha receives a letter from anatol who says hey you know elope with me right i'll make everything okay and sonia decides that yeah i think i am going to elope with him i don't love prince andrew anymore because we didn't already have whiplash from the back and forth with these characters and so he knew it was coming oh yeah oh yeah now sonia notices and tries to stop it and uh interestingly enough they lock her up in the room so that when anatol uh well it comes to pick her up right to elope with her there's just the large foot man gabriel no hidden meaning there from the bible at least in terms of wrath stops him and he's okay yeah he's got to take off in a sense so um it turns out that mario dimitrov not really good like actually host right like stops the sloping kind of prevents huge disaster already gonna be a scandal that she was considering it but uh plays a much stronger role in stopping an allotment than any other character that we've seen who's tried to elope like and there's not really a shortage of that in this novel and i was a little bit surprised that i was taken aback that like i liked that character because she came off as very abrasive oh yeah oh yeah well um and then the last little part of this plot is no surprise your boy pierre comes along is all sympathetic with her and you know he he honestly is enjoying his time just actively loving and you know thinks that he would get saddled with her i think your boy's gonna get stuck with natasha by the end of this book though oh yeah yeah it's okay you can learn to love someone right well you know what i i really enjoyed the this chapter with count bulkonski's fall like his his fall into sea novelty senility sinality um as he gets older it's kind of funny watching him just totally forget that his future daughter-in-law is coming over to visit he just comes out in his night night to close it was hysterical to me watching him kind of just become all grumpy i could do without the daughter beating right like that's not so good yeah i guess i'm in retrospect if i look back yeah it can be amusing i i guess we just uh man that mean old men they just i'm like why why you gotta be so mean why why do you gotta be that way life's good you're almost at the end you won well let's talk about your boy pierre because he's a good person right and um i noticed that they called him piotr so apparently not pierre so i think we were wrong about him having a foreign name i've just never seen peter translated to pierre before hey first for me but he um kind of has a heart of gold here i think he's one of the first characters that we've seen isn't looking out just for himself right like like the way he's looking at natasha isn't for his own interest or his own gain he likes her for her and i think he actively by caring about others it's a it's a form of showing active love yeah i think we finally see those kind of morals come about um that he's been wanting to express we see him finally become his own person uh he's being a little bit more sensible realistic uh i think that the the marriage and the money and stuff isn't playing a big role uh he's got past his you know existential crisis or maybe he's in the heart of it and that's what's driving him forward did you think the comet at the end of this section was his gnarled oak the way that that andrew saw this oak and realized that life he can find love he hasn't found it yet obviously he just dropped her like a pile of rocks when he found out that she was being unfaithful but uh andrew or pierre sees the comet at the end of this chapter and i think that's kind of his coming of age moment where he sees it and he sees the beauty he sees time being frozen like this comet just stuck in midair almost going back to like that idea of you know the the quantum zeno effect from last chapter he sees how something can be in motion but frozen at the same time and i think he's starting to realize how his life can be impactful for others oh i like that yeah the the the frozen i like that yeah i think that yeah i mean it's the most famous scene in the book uh the the comet because the comet was real and we've talked about a lot of other real battles and you know napoleon's real and the tsar is real and there is a lot of you know historical fact in this fiction novel but that is something that is very well documented and there's a lot of different views on you know celestial bodies in the comets and stuff and i think for most of russian history and most of history of humanity these are always used as like negative omens and for here i think that for pierre it's that he is going to do his first selfless act uh and and he's going to love somebody for them and not for himself and so i think that the comment is a a changing of his character what did you think about boris in this chapter because when i wonder if i messed up the names earlier because i don't remember saying baris my chapter summary but he's the one that was supposed to marry um julie kerrigan and rather than just straight mary for money because he is a ladder climber right like let's let's not let's not mince words here but you'll notice that he was always thinking like oh tomorrow is when i'll marry her but he kept putting it off because i think he actually is interested in love but going to our social contract discussion as soon as his parents pressured him he knew he was he was pursuing it right and but he knew he wanted something different tolstoy wrote him to still have personal individual desires but it's when she played that jealousy card of like flirting with another man he the social contract is one right like is there commentary here how at least in the the time that this was written maybe even still today that sometimes the social contract is stronger than our own individual desires it feels very contradictory right because you you you think that he's gonna do one thing opposed to another and i think that for me i felt like tolstoy was given this idea of you can sometimes make good decisions for the wrong reason where you can make bad decisions for the right reason and that nothing is simple and no matter what you're going to choose or do they're going to be they're going to be repercussions uh whether you have male intent or you know uh good intentions well and everything you just said could be equally applied to natasha as well the way that she didn't want to play the game right when she needs she's like i mean it could be applied to almost any of the characters here yeah that's why that's what i was thinking as you were saying that is and it's it's almost coming down to this was the opera scene right operas are people putting on masks pretending performing a narrative put that connection together that's so good performing a narrative written by someone else aka fulfilling your social contract what society expects you to fill these characters are stepping into the roles that society is writing for them in a language that you don't understand and these guys don't know how to communicate with each other either oh tolstoy put in the opera just blew my mind to a whole new level i didn't think about that that is so good i would almost want a shirt that says society made me do it but dostoyevsky would be so mad at accepting that as a legitimate response well he's dead so you know i think there's more to i'm so i'm i'm constantly wrong about this novel i feel like because when we saw some of the earlier australis scenes and we saw how small people's decisions can make big impacts i i thought this novel was an argument for free will and now we see how leaders have a big choice in life and we think they sway things but man this is going back to that quantum zeno effect not much changes right like like the the argument almost seems like i'm coming to realize the social contract like the bigger wheel we step into it willingly as a free will choice and then everything else is just what society demands of us almost i i agree with you though i think that you're right that it is a lot about heaven's will versus free will the the choice of the individual versus the choice of society uh or or you know religion or you know the aristocrats or whatever i think that there's a lot of delicate balance and moments in this story uh it has uh surprised me a few times here there knowing the history of kind of what happens and uh tolstoy does a great job of writing some of these characters not all of them obviously it's not a perfect novel but it is very enjoyable and very surprising i look forward to seeing how that sounds weird i look forward to seeing suffering i look forward to seeing how each character reacts to the ramifications of joining the social engine right because we see how in this chapter prince balkhonsky he's suffering and what does he do he takes it out on others takes it out on his daughter maybe in a sense nikolai rostov is like even a more mild version the way he took it out on matanka in the last chapter and uh the way he thought he would take it out on this wolf and the enemy in a sense and then you've got characters like mario who's the religious martyr her suffering is is funneled internal because she thinks if she's suffering then that explains death that explains the afterlife it explains all the horrors of this world and each character is having to learn how to deal with the horrors of this world in a different way i'm interested in how he'll deal with the horrors of war how is this going to come incorporate back into the story because we've been away from the war for a long time now hundreds of pages i feel like how are we going to bring that back together and that's where i think a lot of the suffering is going to play out maybe not directly indirectly maybe we're not actually back in the war but they're going to be hearing you know the the horror stories and that's how it's going to affect them some and maybe alter their judgments and their choices and their beliefs and how they're going to treat one another uh we'll we'll see i'm excited to see well now you know why i'm so upset that we just skipped right over the war of the fourth coalition because there wasn't gonna be enough like action unless you brought in the continental system stuff um until 1812 right so now you'll notice the book very quickly accelerated to eight we're on the cusp of 1812 right yeah the the big the big push and then you know we'll get to waterloo and it'll all be over so here's the question what are the top three battles you're looking for from 1812 out of curiosity well we got half this book left that we're seeing war i mean we better see battle of bordino right okay i'm thinking um leipzig as well would be a really good one and uh yeah yeah i think i think those are my two picks what are you looking forward to uh any [Laughter] i i i enjoy the historical writing of these battles knowing how they really played out and i love the human element that's added to that because sometimes let's admit it history books can be a little bit dry and sometimes boring how dare you so i like the little spice so and anything i i i would like any of them because i think that he writes well enough to where you know it can be the most boring nothing battle happens but we'll still see some uh character growth and intrigue [Music] all right part nine isn't it a little funny how toaster is just like hey i noticed that you saw how i was whiplashing you back and forth here's what i'm doing with this novel and just totally kind of info dumps like the spirit of the novel like his thesis of history just gets dumped on you for the beginning of part nine here and it's kind of strange how it comes out of nowhere right almost like the the ghost of tolstoy descends into the narrative of the story and just sits down and says hey gov let's have a cup of tea and i'm going to tell you what i think really what history is and what it means to us as a people it's a little jarring definitely yeah well it's it's definitely the most intrusive one he's done yet i would say and to be fair if i had like a a really strong it feels to me that he has a bone to pick with the historians of the time and i obviously don't know the first hand sources that he was reading we have hundreds of years of uncovered and debated over what history has been but i guess it comes to the question is what is history right because i think a lot of people have unfortunately a dry look at history even you've made the classic joke about history books could be boring right and you know what is history is it just great people on how they became great is it just a bunch of facts oh i i hate history books for the most part so many of them are just so condensed where if you don't look at primary sources and i think that's probably what tolstoy is looking at and why he has such maybe a an eagle-eyed view of what is going on that he he's seeing firsthand through these primary sources just you know a few decades after the war has taken place and he's reading napoleon's journals and he's reading the czar's journals and he's reading newspapers and maybe even doing interviews there definitely could be people alive at this time period and i think that he's getting a better account of how people felt and you know coming to that realization what was the point of all of this what was the point of france and and and the prussian war it just it doesn't feel like there was a a positive outcome for anybody yeah he definitely lays on the fatalism feeling a lot in terms of you know the choices that we have our kind of illusions and all the interconnectedness impacts things and i agree a lot with what he says too you know there's a very old saying that a man can't step into a river twice because he's not the same man and the river's not the same right like things change and i think that's true for history i don't think that statement is true for everything but i think for history we have different lenses as time goes on right like if we look at even just how the civil war and how we've treated racism over time in america the way we look at it now ain't the way we looked at it 50 years ago right and i think tolstoy's kind of experiencing that same thing and i think challenging some of the things now with that said he napoleon beginning of european nationalism i would say at least the big movement between now through the second world war in my opinion and and tolstoy is still in this big push towards nationalism towards patriotism and i think he still falls victim to some of the thought processes during this movement in terms of you know russia's the best and if we just have the russian soul and emotionalism that's going to override this war science and strategy and you can definitely get a feel for um things that were victims of the time i would say from from a historical perspective i think that one thing that tolstoy is doing here for us as a reader of the novel is he's presenting it from uh almost a biased unbiased i know that doesn't make sense kind of view of what is russian nationality how important is it to the russian identity how important is it as russia moves forward together as a people or not together as a people and i think that this this book this novel is questioning that of how important was this war to creating who we are and do we want that to even be something that we're remembered by or that is going to be a defining factor of this and we see it in these kind of characters as we move through here of this part nine of that these small men versus these great men as you mentioned before and what differences are they gonna make what crypto not makes a difference at all but president tsar crypto can make a big big difference and i i love how he is taking the the history of it and embedding that uh you know historical fiction into it to give us you know a kind of a different perspective he definitely goes deep right because multiple causality is an admitted thing in history and i think i don't know if i don't know what reason you know what sources he was reading maybe like you said when he's reading a primary source it's making an argument for this is the primary cause and multiple causality is definitely a thing and i would even say there's an even a little bit of an argument there of are the great men really all that great because they talk there's those tolstoy interludes where he's just like yeah um you know they're kind of forced to do a lot of things you're not totally free as a leader your schedules are determined the meetings and the discussions that you have like he does bring up some fair points about multiple causality and interconnectiveness that might kind of get lost in a thesis when a historian's i think making an argument for a particular interpretation of historical facts and we can take and look at you know czar alexander there right polstoy seems to be um a little bit you know biased and positive towards the czar but he doesn't ever come out and say that you know worshiping the czar is a good thing he doesn't ever come out and say that these guys following the tsar's lead you know without questioning anything is a good thing he does point out a couple of times like basically these guys were morons for following this r because the czar didn't know what he was doing you know he was making bumbling mistakes all the time because he wasn't a military man and he was going up against one of if not the greatest military genius you know in in modern history uh so it is interesting how he plays back and forth with these great men of were they truly great or not or has has history rewritten their egos to fit what we think they might have been because none of us were alive none of us have perspective of truly you know what zara alexander was like or napoleon this is the best talk we've had yet so far a good way i've contextualized this i've been thinking about this to your point about the great man and how great are they and how much choice they have is i would almost compare this a little bit to the story of abraham lincoln did he choose to free the slaves or is it the sentiment of america right historians are now arguing a lot of different ways of interpreting of how much did the black slave narrative push the upper hand of the leaders how much did um you know the politics of the time like there's a lot of different ways that you can break things down historically and i think to be fair tolstoy is probably challenging some historians on look sarah alexander had a lot of other outside influences that you're probably not recognizing and the interconnectedness makes it impossible for one man's will to truly have controlled or affected so many things such as with napoleon getting a cold in the next section at the the battle of bourdino right yeah i mean it's those little things of the secret message being found if that's found or not found that's what makes the difference not whether maybe napoleon told his troops to go east or go west or retreat or advance it's those other little things that are the the big add-ons you know it's that you know one rice one piece of rice one piece of rice and then something that finally breaks the camel's back it's it's not that big huge sledgehammer it's the tiny little chips away that make the big difference in the grand scheme of things and i think we see that in napoleon's characters here of them you know as you said the beginning kind of whiplashing us back and forth that are driving this narrative and i feel like we'll continue to talk about this i guarantee this is not the last time tolstoy's going to interject into his own story here but napoleon enters russia in part nine here right and russia is just busy partying and i feel like tolstoy kind of i don't know did you get the in feeling that he was kind of playing up that russia was kind of caught off guard like the narrative like we didn't know napoleon was going to invade like it felt very sudden it felt like they weren't impacted but at the same time when you look at history books like i mean russia and europe are constantly at war during this time but since like 1910 there were information being fed to zara alexander about napoleon they'd been making uniforms the new musket was being developed they even talked in this section about how it accidentally fired off uh kind of like bringing his ears like these are all references that that things were happening behind the scenes it wasn't just like a a total shock i should say well we're in the heart of the beginning of the first industrial revolution and things are starting to move faster and i think that napoleon for me the way i couldn't interpret it is he's setting up russia kind of to be for a lack of better terms because i don't know how to articulate myself kind of the bumbling idiot so that there's the good strong redemption because we know how the story ends we know napoleon eventually loses and turns back from you know uh russia and you know kind of tail between his legs and has to slink home with you know 90 of his forces decimated we know that eventually he's gonna lose the battle battle of waterloo and then he's gonna be exiled we know all this and so does tolstoy and for me i feel like he's trying to to purposely downplay russia's inept ineptness right because now they can come back even stronger when they do quote win or lose however well and two that's actually a really good point because that also plays into the nationalism they won because russia wanted it more they won because the russian spirit fought harder like it all plays into that point and that's true tolstoy did know the output of the war yeah and he he's i mean writing this book for you know what what's his point what what is his purpose is he doing this to make money is he doing this to you know to inspire more russian nationalism as we have you know and this is being written 1860s lots going on in the world in the united states and in europe a lot's going on you know with fatalism and communism and all these things are happening he has a point that he's trying to get across from this novel is i don't think what he's trying to say is i to the russian people don't forget your history we are a proud people and we can move forward being those proud people even with the mistakes that we've made in the past so we have balashov right who alexander gives him his message like hey back off of my soil you know get get get back and he goes to deliver this message to the french army he kind of goes through a couple layers until he gets to napoleon and napoleon i love the way i love the characterization in the scene where napoleon just like does not care what what his message is and he even fails to deliver the actual true alexander message to napoleon but i mean it kind of comes back to the does the boot listen to the ant that it's about to squash right like like you said earlier napoleon is the king of europe right like he is the got the baddest army they're they're thinking they've got the numbers they've whooped them five wars in a row essentially just undefeated uh napoleon's mentality and nationality of how i'm gonna make one europe all under my system and then i'll just retire and it's cool hey i'll go back to peace uh his mind is probably bigger than his own army is at this point in time yeah his ego is probably beyond him but nobody's challenged him to this point and still nobody does and i i feel like there's a few references uh in the beginning of this part to achilles right and i feel like he he's purposely telling us that this is going to be a greek tragedy that's not going to end the way that we we want it to yeah and then up next we have prince andrew who's dropping natasha like a like a bag of rocks through a kleenex and we see kind of like a different side where we see he's kind of starting to hunt down anatole showing that he's not really as hard on the outside maybe as that he is on the inside because why would he do that if he truly just didn't care about her and at the bulkhonsky house we have the count and maria kind of arguing the abuse continues to grow she continues to grow more scared i don't know about the translation i'm trying i'm trying to like rethink about abuse here and am i interpreting this wrong to think it's physical when it's just verbal either way she's scared right like if i'm reading between the lines this is not a healthy relationship between a daughter and a father feels like there's a lot of junk to position in this section right where we go from the verbal kind of abuse to the violent abuse of the war that there's a lot of foreshadowing going on here by tolstoy where he's taking this one piece of you know yelling and screaming and arguing and the meanness of it and then you see that executed in the war and how that it it the way you are at home is how you're going to be on the battlefield and i i love how this is executed through this part of the novel this this is truly one of the highlights if if the last section was the greatest of the the character development this is the highlight of the war element for me for the book so far no absolutely i completely agree with that and you even see how mario interestingly at home makes the argument that they're just soldiers of god they don't make god's rules right god gives the rules and they execute them and then you see prince andrew doing the same thing with the army he's like it's better that we rank and finals don't make the rules we do better when we just execute when we just believe and have the passion like they're both making the arguments almost of execution and falling into like a bigger force a bigger movement and downplaying how much free will impacts that it's funny you say that about what they believe because this is kind of to me the part that tolstoy is kind of snubbing his nose a little bit at history where he doesn't consider what the russians doing are wrong but he does ride in a way like i think a russian of the time might feel a little bit insulted at least i would of like wait a minute we're the reason that we're losing is because we're partying and you know they're spreading all these rumors and everything and the the misinformation is one of the big reasons that russia is struggling in the war because they truly don't know what's going on in in prussia at the time they don't realize that they're losing and they're just partying it up back home like that's that's probably one of the real enemies is the enemy of the state right well i wonder if we can interpret some of the the enemies being themselves where they don't agree right like they're constantly bickering they don't agree and like when i've read that um history book the russia against napoleon they do talk about how there was an argument between an offensive and a defensive strategy and you can see how like a unified russia is causing a problem here yeah exactly and we see that you know take place between the tsar and his generals as well and we i we see that you know come to fruition more in the next section when uh somebody gets fired so meanwhile our boy rostov he's back in the army he longs for sonia but he's the big man now right ilya and other 16 year olds are looking up to him and uh now he can trust oh his instincts right like we just go by passion too as they kind of uh surprise ambush this other french guard and when they capture this guy and the the frenchman kind of surrenders like you see rostov get a little bit broken when he sees like how scared he is or how how similar maybe he is to himself like he's he's not the enemy that i think he's picturing in his head and i think something that's worth kind of tracing to is like that great man argument i've noticed that our characters are getting promoted they're having more connections they're becoming more important i wonder are our characters getting less choice too like their free will matters last be because rostov has to take care of illion because he has to take care of the army he can't do what he wants his free will of sonya right our own characters as they become more great are they going to start to lose their agency in this book i never thought of it that way for me i finally thought that they've evolved past just as you said a second ago living by their passions as a young man would and becoming wise in their choices but seeing that the restrictiveness of military just like the czar has his day planned out a general probably does and a lieutenant a major they don't get a lot of choices because there's always somebody above them that's telling them what to do and all these guys seem to be guessing themselves as well so i i like that interpretation well i mean it kind of happens to a lot of the characters right natasha this is the scene where she starts to get more religious because of the neighbor and you see she starts to give up some of her choice this is what her religion says that she's supposed to do and then even the religion they give up some of their choice to what the state kind of tells them to do there's i shall i'll say this there's a heavier interplay between russian state politics and the church and what its power was i know the novels talked a couple times about this recent break you know catherine the great did do a lot of changes in terms of reform but there still is a lot of you know control from the state and the religion thing the point being i guess i kind of found a tangent there is that everyone is starting to lose control to this bigger force throughout this whole novel every character every every army every regiment is giving up power in a sense to these bigger forces pushing it along oh i mean there's the the interplay of all of these cosmic events kind of happening we literally have a cosmic event with the the comet and we have the greatest you know czar to them at the time i mean alexander is very very well loved and respected and liked by his people you have napoleon who you know is loved and feared by his own people and the rest of the world the time there's just there's so much going on here um and and all on the eve of you see the foreshadowing of the destruction the fall of moscow coming yeah yeah now the last character that we haven't touched upon is pierre who goes to kind of like that i don't i don't know the right word to use maybe it's like rally but where the tsar comes up and talks and gives his war speech and everybody feels a passion that russian soul to want to get involved and uh pet yeah almost gets kind of run over as as they're all trying to volunteer and pierre volunteers too many men because i don't know it's it's the tolstoyan mythology that passion overrides all and there is the old david hume quote about how the intellect is subservient to emotions but it's definitely played up a lot i've noticed with starting with this section or maybe just because tolstoy finally told me what he's really doing i finally understand what he's writing but it's definitely played up a lot i i feel like in this chapter yeah and i guess i kind of glossed over it quickly i just felt like it had been the same old song and dance of you know alexander napoleon's gonna come in and they're gonna give their you know their speech and it's gonna rally the troops and they're gonna finally win one and wait till the next part because we will find out because you already know what's going to happen so i just i don't know it it feels like um the dramatic irony of the story is wearing out on me because i already know what's going to happen and like the the their their rally speeches don't do any good these guys are still you know going around kind of like bumbling it's like i said before well let's find out what these russians do at the battle of borudino one of the bloodiest battles in all the war that you and i have been looking forward to [Music] all right so part 10 again i i guess mr tolstoy is just going to introduce his chapter as he kind of tells us about the causes of events and how there's kind of like a chain reaction and your connectiveness into interconnectivities whatever that word to this world is is tolstoy participating in the battle of boradino is he he's there no well apparently he's participating napoleon who was there he clearly didn't participate he didn't raise a single weapon or sword he was sitting there with a cold and it didn't impact a single thing highly disagree with a few of the statements in this chapter but let's let's go through i still like it i just i don't see it the same way that tolstoy does so august 1812 right we have the invasion coming to smolensk which we gotta talk about first right because that was pretty bloody but finally we stopped to fight for a little bit but uh prince bokonski starts sending like messages home to to mario like hey guys um you gotta go occupation's coming you need to split and i think we see people interpret this different ways right you've got the people who don't acknowledge it like you know like prince bulhansky knows it's coming and he's just like yeah whatever you've got like the the peasant who's sent to town el patriach i'm not sure how to pronounce that and he has uh got cannonballs and gunfire going off and still doing his shopping as if there's not occupation coming to the to the land uh you got a different different views on what does occupation mean to my life yeah and i like how tolstoy is kind of setting up this to be the center piece of the novel because obviously we know that this is the battle that is going to be the turning point for napoleon feeling like he could he he has won and he's going to just push his way to moscow so prince andrew comes to bald hills and he sees i think it's ball hills where he sees everything's kind of like in disrepair like yeah he's in ball deals so so things are kind of like overgrowing and such and uh he sees a lot of man flesh right yeah everything's in a disarray and he's like whoa what is going on here people the peasants have risen up yeah yeah and there's a little bit of a home bickering there that i didn't find um super exciting it kind of like you said it it's still the bickering of internal russia fighting whether it's politics of offensive defensive war or even just within the family of what's best for our family you kind of get a mirror of home life and war life i think throughout this and we have a very important scene of the novel right that is also turning towards back towards the the east of moscow is the count finally dies um and asks for mariana's forgiveness and we we see the shift here of the novel moving from napoleon and the west to the east and i think there is a kind of a a feeling that changes as we move through this part 10 of um dowerness right everything seems to be a little bit more soured now at this point in time it's kind of like mario is wishing for freedom a little bit from her father right like they said it's abusive to me i took that as physical i don't know but it's an escape that she's looking for and then when she's trying to lead the serfs away from napoleon's oncoming advance she's like look i'll give you the grain reserves that are usually you know for the masters of the land and such and i'll give you shelter it was a very conflicting scene because this just came after this freedom thought from mario from her father her slave like our master slave mentality almost and here she is trying to get the peasants the serfs to follow her to escape napoleon and they're like no we're going to stay here and i kind of when i was reading these sentences i don't know maybe it's my translation i was having a hard time interpreting why because they talked about how they'll wait for destruction their weight for freedom like were they at this time russia still had serfdom france had abolished feudalism i believe if i haven't completely mixed up my history here were they looking for freedom from napoleon or did they view him as the devil and his destruction or did they view him as both and it was just a very hard scene for me to understand um how they interpreted freedom the way that mario was i this is one of the few times that in this novel in particular we see that tolstoy is taking a clear stance on class divides and i think that he is hinting at that for some russian lower class peasants that napoleon was a liberator he was coming in and they had heard rumors that you know the the first estate had been abolished basically in france and that the third estate the the lower class people were given more freedoms under napoleon and they were treated better in napoleon they paid less taxes under napoleon you had the ability to move up in the military and great rank and notoriety and you weren't stuck like you were in russia i think that this is a little bit of napoleon um complex coming out in in tolstoy's writing of saying hey you know napoleon wasn't seen as a bad guy by everybody in russia and then there's still some that just maybe like drone even who just felt loyalty just to his other friends like what are you guys doing that's what i'm gonna do like it's a very humanitarian pathos that we explore here i would say yeah agreed okay so back to our story rostov and his army arrive where the peasants are kind of like not letting mario go they're keeping the horses and uh again the tostoyan mythology apparently one man who is rich and leader of the army but he comes in and just like puts the peasants down like slaps one i think does he he slaps drone tells him to be arrested it's like go back to your houses and i guess to me it was a little bit too on the nose that like we're still pushing this emotional charge is what wins the day and it just it felt very strange but i also felt very strange because it's just like he just had this scene with sonia and now he's dropping her like a pile of rocks through a kleenex for the for um maria here which don't get me wrong i can see them together i think in terms of characters but it's just like the whiplash on these characters is rough uh yeah for sure it's just uh it feels like college right everybody's going this way and that way um one thing that i found striking this is the the extreme violence that seems to be um really coming about in this we we've talked about violence throughout the story i mean literally half of the novel's name is is war which you you know indicative with violence but the extreme violence on the lower class people and now that that everybody is like accepting to use violence as a means to an end uh it was not lost on me um that that you know they they were doing this because they thought that they were in the right and i think it it screams to the desperation that has now entered into the mindsets of they realize we're in trouble here we we have been you know placating and playing this off for so long so we thought that we you know we were the best and we were gonna beat napoleon at his own game and now he's knock knock knocking on the doorstep and uh they don't they don't know what to do they're at a loss you'd think there'd be more unity or just um i don't know if i i don't know if the term self-preservation is correct because you had like bergration here was writing the letter um you had the russians right fighting under bagration you had katusoff but then you also had like this foreign i don't know how to pronounce the name but it was kind of like the i think there was more german individuals under his lead i think it was more of a foreign part of the army but there's even a divide between themselves and the grations writing to the emperor knowing the emperor will read it saying hey um you should you should ask this guy you should you know put you know control under one person going back to that conflict that we constantly see in this novel and uh you know something that's not apparent that i don't think they mentioned in this novel is that you know one of alexander's main philosophies of rulership and it's not unique to just him but he was very informative of this is that he shouldn't have just the power of or any one advisor's control and the army split up right between these and here you see where they kind of do away with that finally and do agree that finally that war time you do need to kind of have one leader one martial law type of approach and you see him kind of shift the power to one individual i think that's where we see here that this is definitely more of a story and less historical because i think in history and again i don't know what tolstoy's you know primary sources were but i believe that historically these these men of power they aren't gonna allow anybody to question them uh everybody is a yes person uh you then then you're you're going to be you know beaten jailed killed if you question the leaders because remember these people are anointed by god and i think that we have a very complex world at this time where you know you have people that are still believing in the divine rights of kings uh napoleon you know was basically self-crowned with by the pope uh and i i think that you know that's where we see that this is very much historical fiction that it that is coming about in in this section in particular um as we see this complex narrative happen and unfold in these battles now one thing i'm i don't know the timelines exactly either but i do know that russia had a lot of younger people promoted in the army well that's due to attrition but it did bring in new blood in a sense too and i think there is he hasn't called it out directly about the young leadership that's brought in and again i don't know if that's until later on in the war but you do see him clearly playing up the scenality of certain characters both in terms of count bazooka who passed away but was or not bazook bulkhonsky who was getting a little crazy right with with mario and it was funny at times and kind of terrifying at others but here you have even the generals talking about you know katusoff as he gets older this he's been around for a while he's been serving in the army and still kicking for some time that there's definitely commentary on age here we i don't feel like we've gotten enough about the youth side but it's all been reflected in this emotional instinctual decision making that the army's doing to win the day yeah i don't think it's just a youth though i mean right you have uh julia and maria that are supposed to be friends and julie's you know talking behind her back and they're having all these parties and it seems like again tolstoy doesn't write you know women very well and we've said that before but it isn't just a youthful thing and i think it comes back again to that it's a russian thing that this just is embedded in their national identity in their culture that this is how they're just expected to treat one another and uh tolstoy's calling it out on that and i'm i'm it's very brave for him to do because i'm sure a lot of elites read this and go how dare you sir how dare you we are better than that well tolstoy master of triggering people never afraid to ruffle a few feathers right so moving into ruffled feathers finally the battle of borodino right we get there and i actually think this was probably the highlight of action for me just because i don't know was i projecting much but in terms of vervetsky's redoubt uh you know like the idea of fortifying this area and it changing hands and putting this bumbling idiot pierre who's always a fish out of water continues to be a fish out of water even more right like he walks up on this cliff and he's just like oh my gosh it's so beautiful and i love this red dot oh my gosh cannonball's hit for fire and like everything hits the fan like it was actually quite entertaining if anything for me i mean you could picture this right the poor guy gets up out of his tent and he's got his coffee and he's yawning and he's getting this you know stuff out of his eyes and next he knows sensory overload with you know fire and loud noises and the smoke and uh it just you realize this guy has no clue what he's doing and that that russia was promoting these youths because they had nobody else if you read the um war journals of people who live through that like if you read some of these history books they talk about how you couldn't hear anything they thought the cannonballs were going off every second the entire day was nothing but chaos and we see that in terms of how um pierre sees things right like he sees literally like this guy's brains blown out in front of him legs being blown off people don't even know what army he's in sometimes as he's stumbling about and um you can see a little bit of the argument from prince andre maybe a little unfair earlier i don't know if we were being unfair but you do see how the absolute chaos napoleon wasn't directing every single battalion successfully he had his cold by the time you know troops ran back to execute the orders they were literally either impossible or stupid to do it is impossible to control everything so why do we pretend how much our free will can really impact all the interconnectedness particularly when it comes to war i think actually played out pretty well for what i think is kind of his thesis for this book yeah and kind of have we said before he does attribute a lot of this you know chaos on both sides to napoleon and uh i think that again he's trying to portray that the russians in some positive light this is a russian novel and you know he's not french obviously but i think that the disorganization the battle and the chaos and the things that are going on here in the battle of bordino is is a little unfair by tolstoy of of napoleon being you know inept in in in being a general here um he's kicking the russians butts all over the place and yeah he makes a few mistakes here or there but i mean his big mistakes don't come for a couple of years he is a little stretched thin you know his supply lines are a little bit far and as you said maybe he's not directing every single you know regiment garrison group of individuals perfectly in the right way but for the most part the guy knows what's going on and it just shows how ill-prepared the russians were for uh napoleon's invasion i kind of look forward to i don't even know if it's in this novel but i kind of look forward to seeing if scorched earth is better described just because this is by far not the first time it's used in warfare right but it was used so strategically in advance particularly for napoleon's troops to your point about being very strategic they won the horse battle for most of the wars they won the wars through legs not through arms and guns that this is the first time that i mean it's kind of like when you know the move before the opponent does russia knew what napoleon was going to do and the way they held out at certain redoubts to allow they sacrificed some men to allow others to retreat the way they scorched earth the way they um out manufactured we use the quote manufactured them on the um horses front for for what was an army that was better staffed i think it says says a lot to the strategy but i think that the chaos in this scene alone it backed up tolstoy's mythology if you will because you even had prince andre before going into this battle he was talking about how it doesn't really matter what the the leaders do as long as the rank and file do their best and i think that's represented well but i think to your point you gotta represent so many different angles and and leadership does matter right like i'm sorry napoleon kicking everyone's butt across europe for the past 14 years 14 years yeah yeah i mean that wasn't an accident right like there was superior uh decision making happening so it goes both ways and that's just the complexity is i feel like tolstoy's too far over on one side of the chaos and lack of free will mattering that i think it i think it under represents some of the great men to an extent but i think it does expose that you do need to give more credit to to the rank and file an emotion in a sense too so i don't know he's right in some ways and in other ways i think he's under representing a view that doesn't fit his thesis yeah i agree with that i think that he's trying to say that especially in the battle here at the end is that the russians you know lost the battle but won the morale victory and that napoleon is devastated that it cost him so many men that to him it feels like a loss because he had such decisive victories time and time again for over a decade that in a certain point of view this could be seen as a loss to him even though most historians counted as kind of a wash uh that neither side won neither side lost uh because the loss is so great on each side but the russians delay him from getting to moscow so they're going to see that as a moral victory and i i think tolstoy does a good job on portraying that even though i think that he's a little bit harsh on napoleon himself you know what would have been like a really cool experiment because i i do think tulsa has really good points um imagine in an alternate universe everything in the entire world played out the exact same up to this moment and you know how i think it was borodino where he held back his imperial guard aka like the strongest warriors like they were the best fighters i think the most well clipped um yeah the elites yeah they were held back right and they're like should we go in and crush the army and he made a decision not to send them in if he had sent them in would the war have been over at that point in time right and two tolstoy's great i think a really good point is imagine an alternate universe where he did send them in because he didn't imagine if he had sent them in and they crushed the army and then how much different perhaps the narrative could have been about how his you know superior skills and then and thought everything through really shined as opposed to it being kind of like a both sides claiming victory even though like this was just like the bloodiest battle in that europe's almost ever seen at this point i want to say yeah this is definitely i think one of the biggest battles up to this point in time uh based on just sheer numbers alone but i think that one thing that in our hypothetical here is would would napoleon have done that in our hypothetical again we're doing what ifs now so we're kind of off track here is if if barclay were still in charge uh he's been recently replaced historically and in the novel um i think that he would have i think that uh he he didn't respect uh barclay and i thought that he would have ran right over him but i think he's growing a little hesitant because he realized that the czar is smartening up and putting better people in charge they're gonna make you know better decisions i mean so a it's a good uh you know alternate history idea well it plays to tolstoy's great mythology here of once we know the result would we have backwards rationalize why that happened because of these decisions and he's kind of saying nope guys come on remember it's all chaos stop trying to justify your opinions and i i think that's actually quite intelligent and we know that the russians do retreat anyway a lot slower than what the czar wanted uh as they're trying to get back to moscow to fortify for that last final push by napoleon so i don't know uh it'll all come down to the winter anyway [Laughter] let's find out what happens and see if we get my scorched earth [Music] book 11 volume 3 part 3 i was really excited about this because he opens up with how mathematicians kind of like break down things to measure it and he talks about historians doing that as well and then he goes into one of zeno's paradoxes crypto do you remember us talking about zeno not more than a couple of books ago yeah name sounds really familiar uh isn't that like you can partition things off right yeah that's when we were talking about how things uh if you take too many measurements it seems like they don't change right like with the comment that we were talking about that well here he talks about the achilles paradox where every time you know a slow moving person moves x feet the faster moving person moves y feet and it just seems like every measurement the person should never be able to catch up because of how many measurements are taken to your point and it just feels kind of reassuring when the author kind of like reaffirms what he's going for in the text when you're reading good points sir and that in itself i think is worth a like and a subscribe if you have not already but more i think to tolstoy's point is if you take a man out of context it changes a lot about history doesn't it in the actual story we have katussoff and bennington who discuss their situation and they go back and forth before ultimately deciding we gotta leave moscow yeah exactly i love how this kind of shows the that you you retreat one day and attack another and this idea of sometimes it isn't always great men like we've pointed out so many times before um and that they they believe that they have a chance to win this fight if they only have their opportunity which they're kind of saving up for we see it come about later and it shows that discrete events like trying to break down to just this specific decision and i think that even you can even apply that in our real life right like when we first started this book we said this is the war part this is the peace part and to that point of trying to break things down from a discrete event standpoint you start to see how he's blurring the lines and saying how that's not even possible with even i mean it's a large book i mean mine's 1400 pages but i even feel like sometimes you just can't divide and start at a point and have it necessarily always make sense to the perfect structure that you're trying to create in your mind and told story got us right because we read this and we were so guilty of it as war or peace and the literal title is war and peace and i think that if you kind of reverse of what's going on of how we read it and i feel like i want to read this again and think when the fighting's going on that's kind of the peaceful stuff happening in the book and then back in russia when it's all the soirees that's actually the war these people are in the warring class of one another and i kind of like that idea of maybe going back and re relearning how to read this book as truly warm peace and where is the war really taking place and where is the peace really taking place you know when we look at the rustops in this part of the story they're trying to escape moscow right and they think they have like a couple cartfuls fork heart full something like that of their stuff material items worldly items and that's when they also start opening up their home to the wounded soldiers and that's when they start to realize we don't need this stuff or at least there's kind of a contention over you know how much stuff should we bring but eventually they kind of have their mind changed to do the quote unquote humanitarian thing the right thing which is dump our stuff and help people human beings get out of the city as the most important thing i think i think there's a lot of character growth here from a rostov family perspective oh the biggest growth of the whole story i think is we finally see that tolstoy's saying is that you can change and you can be better people and put in the the eye of adversity good people will do the right thing and then it's coupled also with us discovering that like kind of like that whiplash of prince andrew's uh just kidding he's here amongst the wounded and it's interesting how sonia sees prince andrew but she's like okay we gotta protect natasha let's let's not tell her right away that prince andrew is here with us and he's wounded doesn't all that kind of feel like a red herring though because the focus really is on napoleon's finally going to arrive and pierre has like got to make this kind of crucial decision of the story of does he try to assassinate napoleon and is that where true good intentions can lie to do the best for the russian people and that's a big conundrum that happens the internal struggle for pierre of what can i do to help my people i think it's true for the whole town right because because okay so the raw softs forego stuff for people i think that's a good thing you have here's what's interesting they're trying to get people to leave there's traffic congestion on the bridge some hymn hauling and they threaten to fire cannons into the crowd if they don't hurry up and cross the bridge like that started to make me scratch my head a little bit like i get we're trying to evacuate people but to turn the cannons and like threaten to fire upon them seemed a little drastic like i guess i guess they're like trying to save more people by threatening them but uh seemed rather dramatic to me yeah maybe a little bit dramatic but i think that sometimes as the saying goes to war brings out the worst in some people and they're looking to save the greater good over the one did you know that you were going to get a phd in how beehives work for this chapter no i did not but i can see you know the collectiveness of it and it's a good it's a good analogy i kind of like it it was super cringe at first but he eventually won me over with it and i'm like wow this i'm learning a lot about bees right here and it was kind of interesting to think about it but also when you compare that to some of our earlier points about the leaders being elected right in bees you got a queen right you got a monarchy even in the beehive and when the monarchy is not in charge how do people make decisions and i think you know he's obviously lining up some of the dominoes to talk about whether people can act independently whether we need a monarchy here it's it really sets up the story pretty well and i thought i was going to hate it and trash it but i'm like it was like you in the end i'm like okay all right tolstoy i follow i really love the ramping off of this section and it felt kind of i know we've said there's been so many highlights but this book is so huge it's hard to say that this is the highlight or not a highlight but when pierre finally saves someone and saving a life by tackling uh makar he's made a choice that life is more important than assassination and i think that's when it finally clicked for me like oh he's going to give up his this notion of assassinating napoleon and knows that saving a life will do more good than taking a life when he tackles makar before he shoots rumball the french soldier and even the french soldier who ought to be his enemy see that in the humanity too like oh you saved us you must be french your name's pierre they also i think saw humanity in the oh well he saved a life but they interpreted it not as a life is more important than death they took it as like well you're saving french french lies are important well i guess yeah it does it does come apart that these lives are more important than others and that's been you know something that's been prevalent throughout the entire novel is the ranking of human life of who is more important based on where they were born yeah and i think this is a theme for this like you said for the book but particularly this this book 11 here because in the distance moscow burns and now we have the burning building with the child inside and rather than save yourself we have a character that puts himself at risk to save the child and ultimately gets arrested as a result so so he's actually i think this is a good humanitarian argument that he's putting life before death here as well putting others even before himself and not just pierre's but the french soldier and him kind of come together to save the child and that you almost see that glimmer of hope like oh so russia and france can work together when it truly matters and i i think that tolstoy's making an argument that no matter how small or how little you think you are you can be a hero to somebody well i wonder too you have you know hegelian logic that says freedom comes from society it's a societal construct which i think that tolstoy has kind of been attacking through this whole book and i think this is kind of that switch to almost kind of like more of a kierkegaardian kierkegor where freedom comes from within when you are no longer bound to the social engine and you make your own rules of what you want to do or what you think is important i think there's an argument here that that's true freedom and if you believe that then i guess the question is is pierre discovering his own humanity now finally making a choice at once he what he wants to do is he no longer spending money the way that others tell him to spend money because ever since he's come across this money he's been told what to do ever since he's had uh aristocracy and his blood suddenly thrust upon him everybody wants something from him and now i think we kind of see pierre making his own choices and you know even with the freemasons they were kind of telling him what importance was in life i think he's finally realizing that the subjective truth that what he decides and comes from within is what allows him to be a human being or to be free even and it kind of like all ebbs and flows right and that this war has been thrust upon everybody and now it is you know thrust finally into the heart of the aristocrats of russia and they are having to make some hard choices that was only in the distant those choices being made by other people earlier in the story so uh i think that everybody's involved whether they know it or not is the is the argument that i think tolstoy's making whether you're up on the front lines or back at home you are being effective at some way or another i wonder how much of that is comparable that argument right there is comparable to napoleon where he's making his own rules but we view napoleon he's a ruthless dictator i think most people think negatively upon him but i think some you know they know he was a great military genius but the difference is he chooses it for destruction conquest and ultimately drives his nation to rags right they're exhausted from a decade straight of war but pierre chooses to give life to save life they're both great men but which one do we actually view as great is it is it the one that has the morals first is it the one that has the nationalism or the culture first uh i know tolstoy is going to go more into detail on this but i think these are some good questions of what's the difference between these two great men who have found their own freedom i'm excited to see what comes because we know that he's going to start attacking history a little bit here and in particular historians but i think that we're so historically removed from this by hundreds of years that it's all about perspective and whose perspective you read if you look at certain documents and primary sources you're gonna see napoleon as a tyrant if you look at other things he becomes a little bit more of a humanitarian and that he did a lot of great good and that he was this military genius and it all just comes down to perspective of what tolstoy is saying throughout this novel of the russian perspective versus the french perspective [Music] all right book 12 or volume 4 part 1 the final volume opening up with oh shocker another soiree who saw that coming right how long have you been waiting to say that because i know you love the soirees and this one in particular right because it's a little bit juicy well ln is suffering from a disease i i don't even know if i'm pronouncing it corrects but is it angina pectoric i feel embarrassed saying that word i had to look it up full honesty i looked it up and it says that it's basically a heart condition like kind of like a heart attack and i'm like oh you're doing the literary thing where the person's disease is representative of what's wrong with them right her heart is broken it's torn between all these different men and it's maybe not even there or a black heart if you will yeah it's it's a little bit too spot-on you're like okay tolstoy we see what you did there and people will talk about how there's uh probably a cover-up of medicine to cover up uh uh possible early pregnancy there but i don't know it wasn't super interesting for me other than it was the trifles of society that i think i think he's shaming her a little bit which again presenterism but i just didn't find it that interesting but um we do have a letter that arise about katusa's victory at the party from borudino yay yeah only to find out later that katusa abandoned moscow but hey it was either lose moscow or lose moscow and the army so we can fight another day yay yeah like we talked about before it's if you save the people those are just buildings they can be rebuilt i mean it is kind of sad though that that moscow has been a hub of culture and art and music and writing for so long and it seems to just be thrown away at least how i feel that tolstoy is saying that we're so focused on all these other things happening in the story that this is the death of moscow but not the death of russian people i think it also shows us how war isn't necessarily all consuming to life i think it becomes a big part but you can see how these people still have gossip talking about how ellen is going through this crisis in her life and you've got the war which should be a crisis in everyone's life it's interesting how he co-mingles the two and even um nikolai kind of co-mingles his life here where he's working for the war right like he's sent to go get uh to buy some uh ones horses from varenza and then he's like well i'll go to a ball while i'm here while at war uh it seems a little bit weird how we're even kind of co-mingling both sides of the war and uh parties if you will that's what i love about this fictionalized history is it feels so ridiculous at times but it's so good because you know this was probably happening the only time we really start talking about like total war is when we get up into the 20th century with the world wars when everything about everybody's life revolved around this war and for these people it really didn't until it comes knocking on their door and tolstoy is telling us this history of these people that it didn't matter until it matters and then they truly start having to make some tough decisions right this book does bring up some good questions about total war because there are some people that make the argument that this could be the first total war there are some people that make the argument about partisan warfare that we saw obviously to your point bigger and much more defined in the later world wars and such but he is regardless at this time doing a very important thing which is winning the war with feet which is the cavalry which the russians used to destroy the french at this point is by out maneuvering them right and that's why the part of part of why the french army just falls apart and at the same time you have nikolai kind of give them the googly eyes to maria here and he wants her but she's kind of grieving which is a bigger deal in russia there actually was like a predefined period that you're supposed to grieve for him to be hitting on her but i think you still get it even from the western eyes but you still see how he prioritizes love and and his his attraction to her and ultimately do you think he gives in um he wants her but he wants to say no because that means he's he's getting money he's getting help right he's marrying up in terms of class which he wants to reject so bad do you think he's giving in to the social engine because ultimately he kind of gets talked into allowing that was the aunt to kind of hook the two up together essentially during this questionable period i think he does i i think that war doesn't negate societal norms it may change them in after the fact but while it's happening society and people are slow to change uh i i think that uh the ugliness of what they're trying to do comes out but no i think that passion is squashed sometimes by war and society and it just so happens he gets a double hoping of squashness [Laughter] do you think uh the sonya story backs that up because first you get that letter where you're like she's setting him free and i'm like oh okay so if you love someone you set them free type of thing and then you get the back story that she was pressed into writing that letter so the societal pressure that sonia you need to tell nikolai he can do what he needs to i think kind of to me that backs that up don't you think oh for sure yeah i think that it's the the the same thing of what we see come later of who to blame and they start you know pointing fingers the blame game because that makes it for easier for them to get away with things later in life so let's jump back to pierre who's arrested here he doesn't get along with his fellow prisoners he doesn't really get along with the french soldiers at first and there's this weird trying scene that uh it's probably worth a talk on its own but it wasn't terribly interesting in effect but to me at the end of the day uh here's another more interesting thing for me is the the firing squad he's put up against it almost as if this was written by dostoyevsky who again everybody at this point in time in the 60s they've read you know crime and punishment 1860s uh they've read crime and punishment which came out in 66 everybody knows about the dostoyevsky biographical take about him seeing life more clearly after the firing squad i felt like pierre kind of went through a similar thing where pierre has pre-firing squad pierre and then there's post-firing squad pierre and i guess post-firing squad pierre finally meets his yoda his his platoon all right so like it's pierre before is uh killing people is bad but here afterwards like getting killed is bad it's like his his realization of killing is is bad regardless of who it is um and he finds r uh he finds peace with this realization right i think so because he kind of starts to prioritize life over death right the saving the baby over killing napoleon even though there's that strange um remember the numbers game like the 666 to kill the number of the beasts napoleon and you'll notice that he was even prisoner number six at this point in time i don't know if he was doing that on purpose but there's clearly a shift in his priorities at this point in time i think there's a little bit of god element there and he has faith in god and um he accepted his own death and thinks that you know he's probably gonna go to heaven so uh i i think that there is hey if if i risk it all it's okay i'm gonna be fine all right well now we gotta bring it down a notch uh mario don't do it don't do it to you've been teased multiple times uh but ultimately i think you know you see these two come closer together the two women come closer together over death and we see prince andrew getting ready to pass away and there's some interesting dynamics here with his son right because he receives his last rights wait is it last rights no it's final unction right was he yeah yeah he was christian orthodox right so if he receives his uh uh final unction and um that last scene where he chooses who to kiss what do you think about that i think it again it goes back to that hierarchy of ranking um who do i love who do i love now does it say that he loves somebody more than someone else i don't know well it is does he have to say it though because is that kiss him coming to grips with the son that he never loved and he's now realizing how important love is seeing all this around him like you know he spent so much time in his life chasing politics chasing the army chasing various different things he ignored his son his entire life didn't really give love the priority the spotlight that it needed quickly threw his his lover away once he found out that there were some questionable things happened i think he is doing the stereotypical thing where he's looking back on his life and realized that he should have cared and loved more than what he actually did yeah so it's just i guess it's the in extreme circumstances everybody finally realizes that you should put family first over work or anything else and yeah he's getting that on his deathbed and but does it make up for it a life of longing a life of loss a life of unfulfillment i i don't think so i don't i don't think you get away that easy sorry sorry there guy sorry there i don't think i don't think it's his redemption no no i don't think it's his redemption because he kisses his son and then his son he chooses to hug his mother which i think is symbolic of the death and rebirth cycle he's saying don't make the same mistakes i did son and his mother and he's going on to hug his mother as a sign of showing that he does have the the good will to love and put others first potentially is is one way to interpret that well i like that yeah so he's going and saying all right dad i'm lis i listen to you and it's it still gives the dad a win which i guess is fine uh but i don't know it it just it feels like a cop out like all right you sucked your whole life and now at the end you get a pass so i guess it's not necessarily a pass but i understand what you're saying well do you think do you think he was mourned right like there's characters that still loved him they mourned him and if you lay that over in this chapter we also had ellen's death who is almost like chastised right what does this say about the lives that they chose to live because there's obviously some things prince andrew did correct he obviously meant more to some individuals than ellen did who constantly just thought about herself and pushed herself forward sure prince andrew did that well sure he was pushing for societal needs but he still made connections on a level that ellen was never able to who you know the kerogens they're just totally self-absorbed i think we have to take that as part of the picture too that maybe he's not perfect but he did some things better than ln let's let's admit that no no i totally agree with that yeah that's a no-brainer um i guess it's just everybody has their own different reasons for doing things and i guess his passing is is very relevant because they are reacting to their loss because they're the ones losing here right he he's not losing he's dying so it's it's more of i guess that the mourning of of his son and and the wife and everybody else uh they're they're the ones that are left to pick up the pieces after his death and not that he did anything wrong i mean i guess he did uh but we're not none of us are perfect maybe that's what tolstoy is trying to say is that even at the end you can have redeeming qualities uh and that we all maybe die too soon than we should and so take to take every day as it's your last i could yeah i see that we see a lot of the three questions with mr tolstoy we'll get more into that as we move forward so book 13 or volume 4 part 2. i need to have a conversation with mr tolstoy in real life because there's so many things where i wish i understood better you know what i mean like things are phrased in a way where he's up on a podium in a book you're on a podium you're shooting out information and we don't necessarily get the chance to say well hang on what do you mean this by that or this by that and that's part of the problem with reading these books is some of these some of these things i'm like mr tolstoy can we talk about this a little bit and also being 170 years later there's some things that are just have changed a little bit right yeah well i struggle with this uh volume 4 part 2 in particular because it yanks you out of we just had all these deaths we just had uh the burning of moscow we have a lot of highlights and then we suddenly like leave all our main characters and we're going off on a side quest here and uh that was very very jarring for me so um i guess it's good because now we get to see you know focus on these other things that have been going on and that adds realism to the story but i still definitely struggle with it well he he goes into more of his philosophical things which is fine and he's really bent on showing us the small discrete events and now he we talked earlier about what's the difference between um napoleon and pierre and what makes one great in the other just an average man and here tolstoy is attacking a little bit of that with the idea of well even if they are great men people still go towards the resource area that would have logically made sense they don't need a leader to tell them to do the most obvious thing and i would love to have a conversation because it's just like what company functions without a ceo without decisions rolling up like the the decision makers aren't necessarily there to agree that it's the best decision if there is such a clear answer but sometimes it's to get everybody on the same page and the engine working together that some of these arguments i'm like do i understand what he's attacking because some of it felt either sidelined or straw man like it it wasn't clear to me the discrete events and looking at it within history if that really articulated the the defense of a great man of them does that make sense it does i for me i guess it was kind of the same thing but i was looking at more for that historical philosophy of things are always going to repeat themselves and i feel like he's critiquing russia a little bit as well as the french obviously uh but kind of that idea that uh the the russians are so disorganized and they don't take this serious and that it hadn't been for more like the french failures russia itself would have failed uh but yeah i guess he just he's he's critiquing uh what he already knows happens so i guess it's a little unfair but i'd like to have a conversation with him too and and ask him why he chose uh at this particular point in the story because i feel like things were ramping up and i feel like it's a hard break of of the story to come back to those things when he could have tacked it on in in the epilogue more which he we know he already does and we'll talk about later you know he shows from it from a pure historical standpoint we do have a lot of new officers promoted we do have a lot of new energy coming into the ranks and to kind of make the argument that they're making separate decisions that katusov was trying to hold them back i get that but sometimes for me it felt like it was just like well the russians wanted it more or because they were russian and they had more energy that's why the decision was right like it felt too often that it was just like nationalism was the answer i thought sometimes and that you know you you and i living 170 years later know that we don't look at nationalism the same way as we do back then right like we've changed our ways about the belief of of where does that sit in a global economy and you know at that point in time that that's not what we had this was like at the forefront right i mean we aren't too far removed from the upcoming you know turn of the 20th century when we start hitting some major changes when tolstoy's writing i remember 69 even though he's writing in the 1812 war that that we start to see some industrialization we start to see globalization and we start to see uh nationalism put to almost very destructive ends in the future and it's not just nationalism either it's this patriotism for nationalism and i think that those kind of go hand in hand and he he has this idea a lot through the novel and it's coming to heavy fruition here in volume four part two is that the french soldiers are the heartless cruelest most terrible people that are pushing upon their nationalistic agenda on the russians and that it's the poor russians that are having to march home to to protect their homeland from these invaders uh and i think he does a good job of that but he's just he's pushing home that ideology heavy heavy heavy and because it has changed so much over time because time has passed and it's not the same way it is i i don't think it's fair to critiquing too heavily on that because he is writing from what he just knows at that time period right right well he he does some great things let's talk about some of the things that are really good i thought it was really interesting when he talks about um okay so napoleon he for the past decade takes hope you know you win battles you win wars right napoleon comes in he pushes european ideals mentalities upon the people changes the organization of who's in charge bada-boom bada-bing people love me we got a new city right well we don't see that with russia we see russia rejecting that and we also see with borodino a change in where when we win a battle that doesn't mean we win the war for some reason napoleon won in terms of like strategic positioning boradino but lost the war as a role a pyrrhic victory if you will and i think napoleon is napoleon tolstoy is absolutely correct in calling out that hey this doesn't fit the traditional model of history doesn't mean history is wrong i mean historians are wrong it means things are changing right and he starts to go into some of the partisan warfare and stuff like that which became huge right with world war ii with vietnam war like like depending if you classify as that but it became a bigger thing moving forward the rules changed that doesn't mean that historians are wrong which is what i think the conclusion he comes to and that kind of felt strange to me the argument he was making i guess well i think he's making the argument that napoleon changed those rules and that great men do matter maybe they just don't matter as much as they think they do in their own heads well they certainly all agree we're in the we hate the english club right it's just well the russians want to trade with them so i don't have cheers [Laughter] so let's go to the characters in the story mr tolstoy right we we we have pierre as a prisoner he's been a prisoner for four weeks as their captive he's finally starting to defend a little bit with the french being able to kind of like mediate between the prisoners and the french officers if you will um and we continue to kind of meet with uh platinum who becomes kind of like our spiritual guide if you will and we have um i think the three questions argument here which if you remember if you've read tolstoy's later story that he writes this is this is big for his philosophy you got to read that story because i think it's core to what tolstoy believes which is the three main questions that you have to answer in life is what is the most important thing to do who is the most important thing to do it to and when is the most important time to do it and platinov platon the key keeps kind of showing that he's the one that keeps showing the answer to that do you agree with that oh for sure i think that he really teaches those the answer to those three questions to pierre of you need to live now you need to avoid toxic people and you you need to to relish in the fact that you can be a good person and i think that this is arguably the most character development that we get for pierre throughout the entire novel and that he truly understands human empathy at this point in time but he just had to have his eyes open for it which is kind of interesting that it happens in like the depravity of society right he's like in prison learning how to be a better person yeah well it's it's his three questions were answers were the most important thing to do to is to help the most important person to do it to is the person next to you your neighbor and the most important time to do it is now right and even like with like the scraps that the french were taking away that ultimately like okay well you can do it and platon's like oh see the french aren't all bad like i think we see this is like we said this is post-firing squad pierre and he's starting to see freedom and happiness from this he's starting to finally get enjoyment out of life from this freedom and from finally understanding his three questions and finally kind of getting the answer from platon uh of how to live life so all this goodness is happening right and then we get the marching order to come in for the prisoners and then we see kind of all of it start crumbling down on them i think it does for most except maybe not for pierre right like the french soldiers aren't free right they're still restricted to the social engine military orders of what they need to do but pierre he there's something about the sky in this book the way he looks up he sees the higher power right and he feels free like this is for this is one of the first few times post-firing squad pierre just continues to not feel constrained the same way everyone else does even though he's lost freedom of choice i guess in a sense with having to do this march yeah i think that he's he's looking up and looking towards the future for the first time for himself and not just the betterment of russia it's more than just him he's finally realizing that there is greaterness out there and katusa finally kind of celebrates as the french start to all collect towards smolensk uh yeah things aren't going to go out good there big bottle boom coming book 14 volume 4 part 3. tolstoy is now our narrator officially he he's going to tell us that you win wars through the spirit of your country i don't know not feeling that one but i feel like there's a lot to what was happening in the war at this time and tolstoy knows that but he chose i i think he chose not to represent you know the decade-long war that led up to this event a lot of europeans focus on the climate of russian winters at this point in time uh the the lack of preparation napoleon had because up to this point countries you win wars you take over capitals they give up well that didn't happen with russia right so napoleon himself was unprepared for kind of trying to hang out in moscow i think he represents a decent amount on that side but there's a few things that i think that aren't represented for why napoleon lost and it wasn't just because russia didn't give up and it wasn't just the russian spirit that made them win is what i would say i know that tolstoy is our narrator and i don't think that he was confused because i think he was a genius far smarter than i but it almost feels like he's intentionally being confused himself like he he wrote himself the narrator being confused and oversimplifying the war because he's looking back and studying history and thinking wow this is how you win wars and napoleon's rewriting the guide to winning wars and even the new guide doesn't win wars and he's saying that this oversimplification isn't going to work anymore and i think that he's poor he through the whole story he's trying to portray the napoleon and and the french as the bad guys he's depicted on that even we've talked about before that you know the language itself is is supposed to be the language the french language and i think that here he he's trying to say that no matter what this is all kind of like tragic um and that we don't know how history will play out with great men or not great men or or any of these things okay okay i can see that and i i do see that because if we look at the partisan warfare discussion here uh you and i living 170 years later can apply that how right was tolstoy here absolutely right right like the partisan warfare particularly with like the uh the german vermont when they were kind of going in through eastern europe uh it was a big deal and and played a big role in slowing down armies and we saw lots of times recently here with how important it is for countries to never give up fighting right it's like that old winston churchill quote the nations that go down fighting rise again but those who surrender tamely are finished and i don't think it's i don't think it's honestly just a comment on patriotism i think it is a comment on how warfare warfare is changing and how much individuals can all contribute to the spirit of what countries can accomplish if you will it's not just the great men that direct them and you're right tolstoy does direct us with specifically kind of putting up ideas and then ripping them down later like that's kind of like his goal of this whole novel it seems to me is to put ideas out there knowing he's going to attack them later on and this is really the culmination of all those ideas right because to take churchill's saying yes it is a rallying cry it is to boost morale that we're not going to go down fighting and this idea that you know we're not gonna surrender but there's so many things changing and napoleon has changed so many things and i think that that the tolstoy is saying hey if we keep fighting we may lose today but we'll get the fight tomorrow uh we just we can't give up hope and i think that's really what churchill saying is is going for here and i think what tolstoy is saying is that uh we may lose our city but if we don't lose our hope if we don't lose who we are then we can continue fighting and we won't be oppressed by the french and we can rebuild and we can be better people because of it they're not they're not going to bring us down where does pecha play into that narrative right because he starts real wide here with like this philosophy of war and how people are part of it right and then he jumps into an individual pecha who's come to denisov's army he's supposed to go back but when he hears that they're going to run these raids and run for intel he's like oh i got to stay i got to be a part of that because he believes he's got this view of heroism that he wants to accomplish right so he's like okay i'm going to stick around i'm going to participate in that and that's how i will be a hero and he goes in and well even that night remember going to the sky thing he he looks up and reaches up to the sky and feels free like uh his thing above like the sky like you remember prince andrew looked for it pierre looked for it in the last chapter uh the andrew references from australis if you recall after he almost nearly died pierre when he got his moment of grace uh of post-firing squad and here's pecha the night before he goes into this raid looks up and sees the sky and sees how beautiful it is and i think he's surrendering to that bigger power the question is what is that bigger power can we define that or is there one bigger power for everyone that's pretty deep right there i don't know what to say to that but i'll go back to one comment you made just a moment ago of i feel like toy story is making an argument that historians glorify war i know that when we look at a history book a lot of times the chapters are divided up by wars or time periods are divided by wars when i did my own curriculum it was 1865 to 1914. why it's bookend by wars everything is about war here and i think that he's trying to make a point that there's more to life than that he's trying to illustrate that it's about people and not these grand events um and it it's easy for us just to fall into the norm of you know there's the war of 1812 and then there's this war and then there's this war and that life is a lot muddier than that it's not so clear is just jumping from war to war do you think so we talked earlier about in the then two chapters ago with prince andrew's death and him um kind of the death rebirth cycle with with his son getting a second chance well here's a young generation pecha who goes in and it's like it's almost shocking how fast he just gets popped dead it just it happened so quick for a character that i thought was going to have more for him do you think um tolstoy to your earlier point is ripping down one of his previous arguments that it's not just that pecha wanted it that there's there's more to life and there's a bigger element to it and do you think this makes us re-question what it takes to accomplish things in life i want to say that it's just a plot hole but yeah i he seems to be breaking his own narrative and i think that tolstoy is saying that you don't always get what you want and that uh it it's hard sometimes to appreciate uh the depths of suffering and that you can want something so bad and it can be ripped right out from underneath you well or is it the death of wrong ideals right that putting your faith into something that that isn't really true or honest like the great man the belief the russian spirit i i don't know what you want to call it but it's almost like it's the death of that to give birth because if you remember who do they free they free pierre who's putting life first who is putting his his new way of looking at life into action by finally being freed so again you have the end of one thing and the beginning of another thing with how they free the soldiers at this point in time yeah that's some good insight and we do finally see pierre i think appreciate the depths of suffering and that that the death has finally allowed him to be free because i think he's internalizing it a lot through the the few previous volumes that we talked about but i think finally now uh it being forced upon him uh we we see a spiritual awakening for him and it's it's kind of strange how tolstoy puts a flashback here back to platon again we've read the uh god sees the truth but wait's short story that's kind of interjected here uh it felt a little bit like rehash of you know okay so we got it pierre's choosing love he's choosing life we got his kind of got repeated here to me only to come back to napoleon not being great at the end here as the french army kind of starts to fall apart uh i don't know i didn't have too much new insight it felt like a little bit of stuff that we've kind of covered just kind of confirming that no this is true the french army is really falling apart and yes i think tolstoy is making an argument for uh putting life before death even like the senselessness of war which doesn't sound like new information to me yeah it's a little bit of rehash it feels like it's just a backhanded almost complement of the success of the russians when it's really the failures of the french like we've said well and then katusov to your point about or to our point about life is he didn't just crush napoleon like his point was preserving life as opposed to destroying it and this is way before a lot of his arguments that he grows into i just don't know how much of it was in this text but eventually he starts putting out papers about how christian armies or christian nations should disarm right there's no point to kill other people um bold statement mr tolstoy uh but i i wonder if this is kind of like the not fully formed vision of that but i wonder if this is the seed you know what i mean like him seeing i think he really respected katusov i think he wrote this book because of katusov and seeing how he prioritized life and putting that even even to pierre-empire we said was even maybe a little bit of a analog for mr tolstoy himself on some levels that uh you see that he's really starting to grow that seed of what is most important in life and how to nurture it agreed all right book 15 volume four part four last of the numbered books per se uh let's flip back to the bulkhonsky family if you remember them like we haven't seen them since prince andrew's death but we had to have some time to mourn where maria and natasha have grown together right what are your thoughts on that well i'll ask you a question let me throw you a question okay you think do you think that these deaths are bringing out the best qualities of people i think when a death happens that in real life and literature it changes people and allows people to almost like you want to reflect on them but i notice sometimes i mean i don't mean to be rude but it people become more self-reflective looking at themselves and it's not bad like we say the good is celebrating that person in their life but i think a lot of times what it really does is allow you to focus internally of am i still doing the right thing what did this person do that was best and what should i take and adjust my life to which i don't think is bad but i think some people may take it that way and i think it continues that death and rebirth argument that we've kind of talked about in a couple different books because with prince andrew's death anew is the relationship with with these these female characters natasha and mario and i think also with pecha's death like one of the i don't know i thought he was kind of like a medium-ish to big character to me he's part of a big character's family at least we'll say that that it's the also the last that we see of warfare right it's the end of death and opportunity for growth moving forward so i guess to answer your question now that i've wandered off enough is i think this is a chance at new beginnings for a lot of these characters all right to answer your question then i i think that for natasha anyway uh she has matured because of these deaths and i think that that happens to a lot of people in in in fiction nonfiction life in general but sometimes for me i feel like tolstoy writes women very poorly and i think that if we look at the best iteration of one of his female characters it's natasha at this point in the story that she's finally kind of embodied uh what is to tolstoy the ideal woman in the 19th century russian setting um that she is not simplistic anymore um she's a little bit still complacent but uh she's grown uh beyond the expectations of the societal norms that have been placed upon her and that's the betterment of all society as we move forward as people let's talk about um katusov actually let's wrap that story line up because it is kind of sad that the ending of these numbered sections is where we finally see the death of our favorite general if you will um the man that prioritized life over death and i still argue is probably the reason why tolstoy wanted to write this story is is i think tolstoy saw something in that character and we see how everybody was pushing him you know onto crossnoie and we kind of just really skipped over smolensk like i thought i thought smolensk might be the final battle because that's where like what was it like 80 90 of the city was just absolutely raised like the entire town was destroyed and i thought that would be the continuing of the whole destruction into rebirth type of mentality that we see in a lot of this book but it wasn't we just kind of gloss over it but i guess that's kind of what this book's doing we started out in a soiree focused in on people focusing on the assassination of of one person the discussion between two families it was very small and then we start to step back into bigger philosophical ideas and we're no longer in a person's head such as with uh australis and like a very detailed battle which was probably the most detailed battle i thought you know smolensk would be like this too as like a grand finale but it's the opposite tolstoy keeps backing up and going up to the big ideas and to me i think his backup from katussoff is how katusov was representing that russian mentality that ideal mother russia right like it's it's the idea of of giving birth to a new land and a new beginning and honestly even for europe right like like russia has always been connected with europe to defeat napoleon is to change europe it's not just a russian victory this is a change to all of europe and i think this is like tolstoy's backing up of what katusov's role was in changing to changing a continent's history and in future even i think it really it comes down to him trying to squeeze in at the end here how we all different experience war and that these few crucial deaths like chris andrew is really gonna push thinking about our own death uh you figure that he had plot armor right he was gonna make it to the end and tolstoy kind of subverted my expectations of the novel killing him i kind of you know it was hinted at obviously um throughout the novel that so many times he was about ready to die and that you know he was longing for that escape um from life that death was the next chapter for him and now he finally has it um but as i said i think it kind of finally we see the best in some of the worst characters because of of the death here at the end pulling everything together i think i think he did a good job with it too right because he even zoomed in on like you thought like rumball was a throwaway character the one that uh you know that pierre saved but you see how here when like they come like the french soldiers that are discombobulated and come in they clothe them they feed them they look up at the same sky there's that sky thing again together like the bigger that we're under something bigger than just us i think he does a good job of tying together this that uh this novel is so broad it's amazing how many different connections that that you can make and that we've missed right like there's people out there that are probably wondering why didn't we talk about this and neither we didn't have time or whether we just didn't pick up on it possibly right like tolstoy did a good job of showing how connected uh the novel can be compared to how connected life can be how we've seen these characters before how they can be under something bigger and how small characters actions can lead to very different outcomes in life yeah i agree i think that the deaths you know all kind of parallel one another and zooming out and in and out in so many times throughout the novel it is kind of hard to keep up with everything uh you know we're we're pushing hours and hours of the discussion here uh i think on a broader scale as we kind of zoom out here uh the french retreat at the end um these terrible situations it's a very dramatic time period in russian history uh but it it it's a brief sequence of seeing you know what people have become uh of these different families that we've been following for decade now um you know back and forth back and forth um that that we all have a lot in common and that it's gonna pave the way for a better future for the russian and french peoples well and then i wonder too how much of it is a lot of people write about how a lot of the 13 to 14 18 13 age 14 campaign are you know german-led or foreign-led that it's not necessarily just a russian story at that point in time you know we didn't get battle trafalgar and stuff like that like like tolstoy is keeping it to the russian story too so i guess i didn't realize that when i was getting into this novel either but uh pierre where do we start with pierre because his friends are dead his wife is dead that was cheating on him um he sees young boys being killed he sees his country being ravaged he has every opportunity to become depressed and into himself but that's not where pierre goes right he's grown as a person he he has seen the worst and doesn't want to be a part of that it hasn't tarnished him which is incredible and you you you root for the guy now like wow so stained of all these terrible things and you're still going to be the optimist that is incredible and i think that's where tolstoy's saying is is be a pierre [Laughter] well and you know now that he's got this new perspective he's a lot better at how he manages money and how he uses it you see when he comes back to russia a lot of people you know just flee back into russia the pole of russia you know if faulkner is this writer of the pole of blood uh tolstoy is the writer of the pull of the russian spirit and we see that that pierre is not alone other people believe in getting back to life too as as moscow springs back into the energy that it once had i guess my final thought on that is when money was so important it was kind of elusive and now that he's found a greater call of life things start to get better for him and that's so tolstoy right we've talked about that so many times in this story and in his other stories that when you aren't looking for those materialistic things better things will come for you and finally now pierre has uh the right insight to life and he's going to have a better life and hopefully make russia better as a whole yeah i wish i wish tulsa went into more detail because some of it i wanted to know more about what pierre found like okay so he saw his wife right i'm not wife at this point he saw he saw natasha and he didn't recognize her at first right because she looked old and withered like like she didn't take the stride yet right you started talking earlier about how she became her own i don't think i don't think that happened yet i think she saw a new rebirth with maria but you see how worn she is here and it's only once that these two kind of finally reconnect does he i think i think influence her to kind of maybe natasha's always been about herself and what can be right for her i think that i think it's only in the next section that you see her rebirth but uh i think she's kind of like that one that is saved by others in a sense maybe i don't know i i could see that i think that um i think there's some truth in the simplicity of uh the lies that we tell ourselves of how we're going to be um she has matured i think that the the what what sustains your happiness and i think that natasha in particular has seen that she doesn't need others to sustain her happiness and i guess that was kind of my point earlier is that she's matured in what she needs and now that she knows that she can finally have that yeah it's a slow process and and i don't mean to say that like i hope that didn't come across as me saying that you were wrong i'm just saying i didn't see it yet until the next chapter because it's in epilogue one notes here let's just go ahead and move into epilogue transition that this is when i finally saw her care about others and maybe that says something about me maybe that says something about me that my definition of living is when we look into others before we look into ourselves as that's kind of like i think a a higher plane of existence a higher plane of living i follow a lot of kirka gore's philosophy and theory for that uh which may say more about me and my standards but it's in this chapter when they have the children we zoom ahead uh was it seven years after the war of 1812 i think is where epilogue one kind of kicks off and we see her looking after her children looking after her family she's no longer the self-interested natasha for for me this is when i click to say oh okay so this is the new natasha it only took until after the book was over we had to go to the epilogue to finally get her growth for me at least well we see finally that a relationship built on friendship and that when you are living your life and your relationship for your other you know your self-sacrificing for your family that you're gonna have all these good things i think is what tolstoy is trying to say um and and we get a glimpse into pierre and natasha's uh marriage and you know we it's not happily ever after but it's better after um and then can you have on the other side uh there's a lot of tragedies that have led to this especially uh nikolai and and mara um and uh there there's there's a lot of baggage for everybody uh it just doesn't feel like that it has the nice little neat bow that i wanted uh and i didn't expect this you know epilogues usually you get uh all that closure and we really just get more of the story it's not a traditional epilogue so i do want people to know that that um maybe you've already read the novel or you're going to read the novel uh this is not an epilogue like you would see in a modern novel this is very very different um you know being written you know 170 years ago so be wary of that in from nikolai's perspective he also gets married right to to mario and what do we think about his growth as a character because he still struggles with family she still is the one that sacrifices and it's kind of sad the way sonia sacrifices it's like it's like even though you sacrifice you don't always get what you want the difference between mario and sonia but nikolai i think is trying to be a good person how did you take his growth here at the end so i looked at it more from a broad point as the novel is closing here and we're zooming out that natasha and pierre are when you make the free will choice and i know that we're not completely into the religiousness of tolstoy but i still think that there's a hint of it here as you've mentioned several times before and i think that that that these two nikolai and maria are the idea of like predestination if if one is free will one is what will happen in these two different relationships um and that sometimes you don't get a choice in the matter yeah i can definitely see maria being that idea where she prays to the higher power right we talk about what is that higher power hers has always been defined as god and she finally gets that happiness and you know nikolai was rejecting the social behavior for the longest time eventually married up because i think he really did care about her uh but we meet at the bulkhonsky's house we have the youngest nikolai at that point in time there's something to be said about young nikolai nikolay i'm not sure how to pronounce it but but prince andrew's son right yeah and he has that that dream right like we need to talk about this dream here because because what does that mean right like how did you interpret how he viewed his father and how he viewed pierre at the end here i think he cares uh and i think that he realized that caring is difficult and that his father had a lot of hard choices to make and whether right or wrong um i think that he realizes that life is made up of a lot of tough choices and all these different combinations get us to where we are and that uh i think i think that he forgives i think there's a little bit of forgiveness there um but i think that he realizes that um it's difficult to be a father because he didn't he didn't i mean nicole prince andrew's son he didn't have a father right his father passed away and even when he was alive wasn't there for him and he has that dream about pierre and pierre interestingly enough is kind of uh i don't know when we talk about the ideas of liberalism and conservatism within russia we see them kind of at ends here and i don't know if i was supposed to take it this way but you know pierre is throwing off you know there's references to a whole bunch of things here in terms of the decemberists the the freemasons like pierre's throwing off the shackles there and it's almost heartbreaking at least the way i interpreted nicolet's dreams to see that is he having visions of being the great man of wanting to be a great man and where does that play into the picture of tolstoy's whole argument here because it would be heartbreaking to think that he's going to change the world and become like the next napoleon or is he going to throw off societies and become the next pierre and to me it wasn't clear how to interpret that and what that dream meant i guess i don't know i'd love to hear people watching you know what your interpretations were of that one but uh i think this was goes back to our earlier point about uh this being a public discourse right tolstoy writes it down and it's up for us to figure out how to interpret it and to me this was part of that whole argument of death and rebirth of the next generation has the ability to make that choice and we see the choices put between them and and we can see how even like when they talk about historians they change their logic whether you believed in it because of cultural reasons or whether you believe because of free will or whether you believe that nature you know history happens because of great men we all have different ways of interpreting how we got there and here we see the youngest generation kind of being the choice between conservatism and liberalism is there for them and i think that comes down to maybe this is an argument of choice and free will and uh it seems like he attacks free will but he also supports it at the same time too at certain points in the novel there's two things there i think that yes i think tolstoy is struggling with predestination and free will and the other thing is i think he's struggling with why do we give so much attention to these great men and i think that throughout the novel we've made this argument several times it kind of wraps it up here at the end that while napoleon was a wrecking ball i think a lot of this would have happened without napoleon that it's all these little tiny things it's it's the people it's the boots on the ground it's the normal people that are the driving force behind history not great men yeah he absolutely attacks the great man relentlessly through this book but i wonder how much of that was more relevant at the time right we're looking at this 170 years later i don't think many people totally believe in that great men mentality anymore um you know we talked earlier about you know alexander and napoleon some people may have viewed them as being appointed by god but their decisions are still human decisions right they may be guided in some regards but they're still people and they're being attacked not only in this novel but in 1966 dostoyevsky came out with crime and punishment a great discussion on the great man and then the will to power if you will and i wonder how much of that was in the social consciousness at that time that just it maybe i'm not totally in tuned with exactly what that consciousness was but it felt very strange to me from a modern presented presentism perspective so it's hard to critique because i know that it's a little unfair because i don't totally understand the social norms at the time if that makes sense all this philosophical stuff almost feels like background because there's character stuff still going on in the epilogue um we have you know the count rostov die um the family starting to split up with the they're in financial rune uh you know we we have all these things that are still progressing in the epilogue which is so crazy to me to be like i just read like nearly a thousand pages like when is it going to end well in and this is the last time we see the characters right because epilogue 2 we ain't getting no characters right so this is the last time we have for growth and you know you question some things with how uh nikolai still kind of showed his anger here and there's still room for growth i guess in a sense but um you know the death again just another example of of the end of one thing means the beginning of the next generation i don't know it to me the ending of this book felt a little unfair to the reader because i felt like a little bit was rehashed a little bit was like well we kind of have already talked about this maybe there's a little bit more nuance there than i'm giving it credit for but i i can't be the only person that felt that i was just like okay tolstoy let's wrap this up i feel like you've talked about this i think you need a fresher angle for discussing it for me personally and he didn't have that fresh angle because we've seen it in so many things of all right nikolai uh goes back to the farm gets his hands in the dirt and things get better and he becomes out of financial rune right you work with your hands and life's gonna be good i'm like all right i've seen this song and dance before uh i felt like it was almost rushed for a thousand even in this novel even if you have seen it yeah it it it it feels rehashed and rushed at the same time i don't know if that makes sense but i guess i was expecting more out of an epilogue knowing that there were two of them yeah yeah well let's let's move into epilogue two the grand finale which um you know i was expecting more plot but but nothing happens it's all philosophy and i'm just to put it on the table right now that i think tolstoy i think he did some really brilliant things with here some things didn't stand the test of time but that's not his fault i mean that's just kind of time and older novels but there's some parts that i just didn't totally agree with i think some of this stuff should have been worked into the novel earlier i thought he had some really cool philosophical ideas and appreciate what he had there but there's just enough that's just like this is a little off like i'm like i just don't understand exactly the hang up that tolstoy had with this sometimes felt like a lot of it came down to he has so many things crammed in here i don't think that there was ever going to be a perfect ending i don't think that us readers now or readers back then we're ever going to be content with that i mean how could you follow up arguably one of the greatest novels of all time with a happy ending or an unhappy ending that makes some people happy i don't think that was possible but you have all of these power struggles of great men and not great men you have all these conflicts you have character growth you have loss of life and death and how that you know changes us as a people you have high society low society french society russian society uh i i don't think that there's anything that a historical fiction novel could do to satisfy all of the readers um and i don't know if we deserve that as a reader i i don't think that that tolstoy has to give that to us i think that he leaves us wanting and yearning more and i think that's the true nature of why this is arguably the greatest novel ever okay do you um do you think that there's any resentment from tolstoy's side of maybe how he wrote napoleon like like it felt very tongue-in-cheek the way that like he'd be like you know he's described as ground has grown chance chance like like he's almost like attempting to be a little snide with a description of how napoleon's just a man right like you guys got to stop building him up which maybe at that time in history he was built up more and the great man argument was a bigger ideal back then but it felt like um so some of it was was really good but it also felt like the fact that it was tinged that that there was a shade of resentment to the glory napoleon received that it felt like i wasn't getting a purely open discussion sometimes with how much he wanted to attack napoleon at this point in time yeah i think that's fair i think the tolstoy in my interpretation of it is great at writing fictional characters and didn't struggle writing nonfiction characters but napoleon feels like he lacked a soul um or emotion he was like a robot or just a uh he was a plot device even though in the story in the novel he's arguing that he's not a plot device like that's how detached i think tolstoy wants to be from napoleon in this story i like some of the arguments right because you had the uh the devil and the steam train example that i thought was really cool with okay you know when we're looking at history and we're trying to understand how did this happen i really like the devil in the stream team because it's like okay well do we try to explain how locomotion works right like how that works or do you try to disprove that the devil exists right and i just i would love to have seen that actually woven into the narrative with the characters obviously not the trained part because they didn't exist yet in 1812 but but the idea right like like like does do you have to have knowledge of something or do you have to like like knowledge of a system or do you have to have experience of it it's kind of the a priori posteriori discussion here is kind of what i thought and i'd love to have seen that pushed further into the knowledge like i don't understand why it was tacked on as philosophy at the end because i don't think i think he's an author i don't think he's a philosopher for the most part but i do think he does have great philosophical ideas and and i thought maybe i'm attacking the negative parts too much but i don't know why that is because i thought there were really good ideas but maybe it's because sometimes you hear nothing but praise for a novel but i think it's okay for us to criticize you can love every word of this book and still talk about how some ideas weren't either clear or didn't make sense i guess in regards with napoleon when i think about that of he's making this argument that great men sometimes don't matter as much as they think they do and that history cannot be altered that much by one individual but then tolstoy goes on to argue that in his other stories and again we're critiquing him as an author and i don't think we're critiquing him just as a novel and that's the difference is he's saying well in my faith if if you know god comes to earth as you know christ he is that single person that's powerful enough to change the world uh and why wouldn't we want to have the free will to have the ability to change the world and the betterment so people can't change no single person can change the world in a negative way but if they change it in a positive way that's okay and that's one of the kind of big things that i got from the novel and i don't think that's fair if if one person can change the world and they have free will they can change it for the better or for the negative and that being of a different society doesn't make a difference and he's saying a little bit of that it does he is putting that you know spin of you know national pride patriotism in there that we've talked about before and i think it's okay to critique uh you know the novel and love it as as well when we talk about free will the the do you have the ability to change the future right the definition of one basis of free will uh some people talk about free will about being able to choose what you want but we're talking about actions right he has this like empiricist type view like he'd get along really well with like lock and hume i think because how do you know what's good or bad until afterwards you have him taking a very like scientific approach to it i think almost like kind of like wittgenstein or bertrand russell would the way that he looks at this and i really appreciated that side of the way he broke down you know history this this had all the markings to be like one of our favorite novels because of the historian philosophy combining here but it's almost like um remember the the story the bet by chekhov that we read oh yeah that's a great one locked me away if you remember one of the main words that's really important there is a priori can you know something before it happens or do you have to experience it the empirical empiricist view it's kind of like that here where he talks about like from a historical standpoint are they acting and do we talk about them acting upon behalf of morality not even understanding what is the good of morality here and then when we separate it because you know remember tolstoy is writing this in mid 1860s looking back on something that happened in 1812 you know 1814 years decades ago and does that remove us a little bit about how we view orders how we view free will at that point in time and what someone chose there's that strange analogy about the log about which way to move the log and the one that when the log went the way one of the eight people said it was going to go this way that that's the person that gave the orders felt like a very strange conversation to me that i wasn't really sure i understood exactly but to me it came down to this idea of how do we know empirically mathematically figure out what's the right moral law or free will way of choosing things and historians can't do that and look back like it's almost like historians can't discover first cause they can only describe events as well and i completely agree with some of the things that he said in that section i one thing that the novel feels like it leaves out is that a lot of times morality comes from a place of faith uh and it oversimplifies things where this novel is trying to make morality out of the choices of people and very difficult situations they're in a war and there's life and death and suffering but there can still be good also yeah there's so much in this novel going so many different directions i feel like that tolstoy is just trying to say in the end uh you have to try to make yourself happy uh whether that is based on your own faith or your own morality um or whether you're being selfish or not that may or may not happen that because the free will of one person is going to interact with the free will of another it's very the the truth is subjective type of argument i feel like sometimes which needs to go further in order for it to be truly valuable because otherwise that's just very cracker jack philosophy if you ask me that you need to go further into why is truth is subjective here but um i think i think when we look at this we need to also talk about translation because i don't we don't bring that up every time we talk about a translated work because i mean it's it's just a redundant statement it's not like we don't know it's not translated but when he's talking about the word power when we talk about elected individuals and delegated authority and free will he uses power multiple in multiple different situations and for me i'm like i constantly wonder like is this translate the same in russian because when he says okay power means this here and power means the opposite here so it means we don't understand the word power and to me i'm like well i just i wonder how much of that is translation and how much of that is just like well the word power in this context doesn't mean the same is in that context i think to me at least in the english translation it seems like he was bewitching himself with the definitions of words as opposed to what words represent behind the scene and and when you're comparing words it's not the same thing as comparing what they represent in different contexts i think the final thing to say is that i i love the novel uh i think that there's always going to be something lost in translation uh i don't think it's perfect um i definitely think it has a good argument to be the greatest novel of all time uh then that's saying something i mean the top three top five but i think it's what you're looking for uh what you're looking to get out of this novel is something as well if you read a different translation that is going to get you to i think a different destination and tolstoy wouldn't have written it that way i don't think that he would have known it was going to be translated to you know english and you know dutch or you know mandarin or japanese because there is gonna be something lost there but i still think that you can get something important out of the novel that we can grow as people and that uh we all can make a difference uh this was not one of the greatest novels to me but that doesn't mean that i don't see that it's one of the greatest novels to others and i don't disrespect there there's some things that i honestly think objectively should be would be updated if tolstoy were to rewrite it today you know what i mean like like looking at certain elements of what we consider socially acceptable is not how it'd be presented today but tolstoy future proofed that right because he even in the book talks about that about how we change throughout time and the further distance away we are from things there's the argument and the fallacy of presentism president is that i can't say the word right now but i i think that's rather brilliant so i think tolstoy pulled off something very remarkable um my dissatisfaction yeah maybe part of it is is the flaw of presentativism and maybe part of it is just i just didn't really enjoy some of the writing i felt very becky forthy i didn't feel like it progressed and maybe rehashed things more than i would have liked but that's just a personal thing i'm not saying they're objectively wrong per se so i don't know good good and very glad i read it and i think it definitely has a place in world literature for what it accomplished um i guess i guess maybe it just would didn't hit on all cylinders but maybe i need to read it again i don't know this was just a first pass for me right definitely should be on a list of to read right it doesn't just because we rank something whatever our opinion is it doesn't mean that you shouldn't read this novel because you might get something out of it or you might hate it and that's okay too because you get something out of it yeah well if you sat through a five-hour discussion and didn't read it i'd love to hear who you are and i like you for subscribing i'd love to hear your thoughts on for those that did read it which i'm assuming is most of you at this point what your what your thoughts were on the novel um that was a great novel tell me what you loved about it because that would help me maybe see some things that maybe are i didn't interpret correctly or maybe i just didn't see correctly love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below make sure you hit that subscribe if you spent this much time with us there's probably other novels that we can discuss together to probably help each other out get the most out of our readings my name has been una i appreciate the time that you guys have spent here today and appreciate you guys for uh you know just sharing your thoughts and such so peace out peace