What Men Live By, and Other Tales

A poor shoemaker, Simon, finds a naked stranger shivering by a roadside shrine in winter and brings him home, though his wife is furious. The stranger, Michael, becomes his apprentice and smiles only three times in six years, each time when he learns one of the truths that God sent him to discover: what dwells in man, what is not given to man, and what men live by. The volume gathers other short tales Tolstoy wrote for ordinary readers in his later years.

Leo Tolstoy wrote these simple parables in the 1880s, after his religious conversion, drawing on folk tales and the Gospels, and they are among his most widely read works. They are given here in the translation of Louise and Aylmer Maude. For more in the same vein, read his Master and Man.

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), born at Yasnaya Polyana and a veteran of the Crimean War, wrote two of the summits of the novel, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

In later life he preached simplicity and non-violence in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a book that deeply influenced Gandhi.