What Men Live By by Leo Tolstoy
Quick answer: What Men Live By by Tolstoy: full summary with the ending, the angel Michael's three smiles explained, characters, themes of love, and the story's craft.
A poor shoemaker walking home without the sheepskin coat he meant to buy finds a naked stranger slumped against a wayside shrine, and against all sense takes him home. Leo Tolstoy published What Men Live By in 1885, the best known of the moral tales he wrote for ordinary readers after his religious crisis, and he built it openly on verses from the first letter of John about love.
The stranger, we learn, is an angel serving a punishment, and the story is his education as much as ours. Students are usually asked to explain the angel's three smiles and the three truths behind them, which this page sets out plainly. Writers should look harder at the design: a mystery story where the mystery is theological, and every clue is an act of kindness or its absence.
The story in brief, ending included
Simon the shoemaker has spent his money on vodka instead of the coat, and dreads facing his wife Matryona. Near a chapel he finds a naked young man, hesitates, curses himself for hesitating, and clothes him in his own coat. At home Matryona rages at the pair of them until something in the stranger's helplessness moves her, and she gives him supper. At that moment the stranger, who calls himself Michael, smiles for the first time. He stays, learns shoemaking with uncanny speed, and makes the household modestly prosperous. A year on, a rich gentleman storms in demanding boots that will last a year without losing shape, from leather he supplies. Michael smiles a second time, and to Simon's horror sews soft slippers instead of boots. Almost at once the gentleman's servant returns: his master died in the carriage on the way home, and the household needs slippers for the corpse.
Six years pass. A woman comes to order small shoes for twin girls, one lame. She explains they are not hers: their mother died the night they were born, alone, her body rolling onto one baby's leg, and this neighbour, who had lost her own child, nursed and raised them as her own. Michael smiles a third time, and light fills him. He tells Simon and Matryona his story: he was an angel sent to take the twins' mother's soul, pitied her and refused, and was punished. God sent him to earth to learn three truths: what dwells in men, what is not given to men, and what men live by. He learned that love dwells in men when Matryona fed him; that men are not given to know their own needs when the gentleman ordered boots for a body that would need burial slippers by nightfall; and that all people live not by their own care but by love, when he saw the orphans thriving in a stranger's arms. His lesson complete, wings appear, and Michael returns to heaven. The story closes on its teaching: whoever has love has God in him.
The characters
Everyone in the tale is drawn quickly, but each carries one of the three truths.
Themes and meaning: the three truths
For exams, give the truths exactly as the story does. What dwells in men: love, shown when Matryona pities a naked stranger while angry and poor. What is not given to men: knowledge of their own true needs, shown by the gentleman ordering year long boots hours before his death. What men live by: not self care but the love of others, shown by orphans raised to health by a woman with no obligation to them. Standard supporting themes are compassion, the hollowness of wealth, divine purpose behind apparent misfortune, and hospitality to strangers.
The sharper point is where Tolstoy locates each revelation. None of the truths arrives through the pious or the comfortable: they come through an angry wife at the end of her budget, a corpse in a carriage, and a bereaved neighbour. Tolstoy's God teaches exclusively through inconvenient people. Notice also that Michael's original sin was compassion, refusing to take a dying mother's soul, and his redemption is learning that the compassion was not wrong but shortsighted: the mother's death was survivable, by love, in a way he could not see.
The craft: structure by smiles
The story's skeleton is unusually visible and worth tracing. Michael smiles three times, and each smile is a receipt: a truth has just been demonstrated in front of him. Tolstoy sets the mystery early, why does this stranger never smile, then makes each rare smile an event the reader investigates. It is detective structure applied to theology: clues, pattern, final explanation that reorders everything we watched. When Michael finally narrates his own backstory, scenes we took as domestic incidents snap into place as a curriculum.
The technique worth stealing is the marker gesture. Give a character one rare, countable action, a smile, a lie, a phone left unanswered, and spend it exactly three times at your story's load bearing joints. Readers feel the architecture without seeing it. A story whose emotional beats are this legible tends to score well on Structure and Emotional Impact when judged against a rubric like Writory's Short Story Contest scoring, precisely because nothing about its shape is accidental.
Context worth one paragraph in any essay
Tolstoy wrote What Men Live By at the head of a series of tales for the people, deliberately plain in vocabulary, drawing on folk narrative rhythms and framed by scripture, here the epigraphs from 1 John. He was, at the time, the most famous novelist alive choosing to write like a village storyteller, and the simplicity is a style, not a limitation. Comparing its layered reveal with the single line morals of Three Questions or The Three Hermits makes a strong compare and contrast answer.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, anchor your answer on the three smiles and pair each with its truth; that structure maps the whole story.
- Quote or paraphrase the closing teaching that whoever has love has God in him, and tie it to the epigraphs from 1 John.
- Use the gentleman's boots as your irony example: he orders footwear to outlast a year and needs burial slippers by night.
- Writers: give one character a rare, countable gesture and spend it only at structural turning points.
- Withhold your explainer scene until the end so earlier domestic moments retroactively become clues.
- Note how Tolstoy makes poverty specific, one coat, one loaf, one stove, so the charity costs something real.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a stranger taken into a household is quietly keeping score of something the family cannot see. Reveal the scoring system only at the end, and make each scored moment an ordinary act of kindness or failure.
Questions
What are the three truths Michael learns in What Men Live By?
That love is what dwells in people, learned when Matryona fed him despite her anger. That people are not given to know their own needs, learned when the gentleman ordered year long boots on the day of his death. That everyone lives by the love of others, learned from the adopted twins.
Why was the angel Michael punished by God?
He was sent to take the soul of a woman who had just borne twins, pitied her plea that children cannot live without a mother, and refused. God punished his disobedience by sending him to earth as a naked man until he learned the three truths, which the twins themselves finally complete.
What is the irony of the rich gentleman's boots?
He demands boots guaranteed to keep their shape for a year, threatening punishment for any fault, while death is already waiting for him that evening. Michael, who can see the angel of death behind him, sews soft slippers instead, which is exactly what the corpse will need.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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