What Men Live By Study Guide

Born into the Russian aristocracy, Lev Tolstoy had already earned widespread literary acclaim within Russia by the time he turned 30. At the time of his death in 1910, he had become the most well-known Russian writer abroad and the world’s first international literary celebrity; his death in 1910 ran on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. After a stint as an officer in the Crimean War, Tolstoy spent most of his adult life living on the country manor in central Russia where he had been born. He fathered 13 children, managed several large estates, set up a school for the peasants who worked on his land, and wrote his two most famous novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878). In the 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a major moral crisis followed by a religious awakening, which he wrote about in A Confession (1882). After this point, many of his works were written in a more explicitly moral and Christian register. Tolstoy always idolized the Russian peasantry, and the moral philosophy of his later life was based on charity, pacifism, vegetarianism, reverence for poverty and simplicity, and a rejection of governmental and religious institutions—the latter of which he believed failed to center the true teachings of Jesus. The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901. Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy also began to express a deep distrust of art and music, which he believed made people act immorally. At the very end of his life, Tolstoy gave away all of his money—including the rights to his novels—and ran away from home in the middle of the night, planning to live out his final days as an anonymous peasant. Only ten days into this experiment, however, he died of pneumonia in a train station in the town of Astopovo, about 220 miles south of his estate.

Tolstoy’s pivot to radical Christianity in the 1870s was motivated by his own personal (and marital) turmoil rather than by any large-scale movement in Russian social or literary culture. However, his choice to set “What Men Live By”—and many of his other moral fables—in a rural Russian village (rather than in Moscow or St. Petersburg) and to cast its central characters as peasants (rather than landowners of his own social class) reflects a fascination with the peasantry that he shared with many of his contemporaries. Although the extremely low literacy rates of the lower class throughout the 19th century meant that almost all Russian writers were, like Tolstoy, born into the aristocratic class, Russia’s rural lower class—who were serfs until 1861 and “peasants” afterwards—became important characters in Russian literature long before they could be creators or consumers of it. Beginning with Nikolai Karamzin’s highly sentimental portrait of a peasant girl in “Poor Liza” (1792), the poor peasant became, for many Russian writers, a glorified symbol of Russian spirituality. In the peasantry, writers like Tolstoy saw a simple, soulful, irrational, and distinctly Russian worldview that Western Europe—in spite of its technological advances—could neither match nor understand. This idealization of peasant spirituality can be found throughout Tolstoy’s oeuvre, most famously in the character of Platon Karataev in War and Peace.

“What Men Live By” is one of 20 so-called “Folk Stories”—or “Stories of the People”—written by Tolstoy in the last 30 years of his life. Other famous stories from this set include “Where God Is, There Love Is,” and “How Much Land does a Man Need.” Many of the stories were loosely inspired by peasant folklore, and many of them carry explicitly Christian messages. Not only is “What Men Live By” a story about peasants, but the manuscript’s revision history—and Tolstoy’s comments about it—suggest that he wanted the story to be read by peasants. He intentionally strove to write it in a simple, pared-down style that could be comprehended by Russian peasants who were learning how to read. Outside of Tolstoy’s own body of work, the story’s most significant literary connection is to the Gospels of the New Testament. Although the story’s four epigraphs are all drawn from the Gospel of John, its moral message is also heavily influenced by portions of the Gospel of Matthew. The Sermon on the Mount—from the Gospel of Matthew—was Tolstoy’s favorite part of the Bible and formed the basis for much of his own religious philosophy. “What Men Live By” is also referenced in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward; having turned to Tolstoy’s corpus in the last days of his life, the patient Yefrem Podduyev is struck by the story’s assertion that what men live by is love; he conducts an informal survey of the other cancer patients in the ward, asking each of them what they believe men live by.