Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

The remark is a sharp critique of a certain kind of historical writing: instead of responding to the real problems people are trying to understand, historians can end up constructing self-contained explanations driven by their own assumptions, categories, or professional debates. The simile of “deaf people” suggests a failure of listening—history becomes a monologue rather than an inquiry grounded in lived questions. Read in a Tolstoyan key, it also aligns with his skepticism toward grand, tidy causal narratives (especially those centered on “great men”) and his insistence that human events are too complex to be reduced to the answers historians prefer to give.