Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in What Men Live By, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mystery
Rationality vs. Generosity
Selfless Love
Summary
Analysis
Semyon asks Mikhail what has made him smile this way. Mikhail stands up, bows, and says that God has forgiven him. He asks if Semyon and Matryona will forgive him, too. Suddenly Matryona and Semyon notice that Mikhail is glowing, and they realize that he is not a normal human being but an angel. Then Semyon asks Mikhail several questions: first he wants to know why Mikhail was so unhappy when he found him at the church. He also why Mikhail smiled those three times: first when Matryona gave him dinner, next when the wealthy gentleman ordered the leather boots, and finally when Marya and the twins came. Finally, he asks why Mikhail is suddenly glowing.
Semyon’s question about Mikhail’s smile is the first question either he or Matryona has asked of their guest since the first days after he arrived. This time, Mikhail seems open to answering—perhaps affirming the idea that before, he “could not” answer their questions and now he “can” (that is, he has divine permission to). The mystery surrounding Mikhail is suddenly explained by his identity as an angel. This one major explanation leads Matryona and Semyon to voice their suppressed questions about his strange behavior.
Themes
Mikhail explains that he is glowing because God has forgiven him; up until this moment, God had been punishing him. He says that each time he smiled, it was because he had learned one of the three truths that God sent him to earth to learn. Semyon asks Mikhail what he had done to deserve God’s punishment, and what the three truths were that he learned.
Mikhail’s explanation that God has forgiven him connects to his earlier remark (when Semyon first found him by the church) that God had punished him. His identity as an angel also sheds light on certain other strange comments, such as when he told Semyon that because men work for their livings, he would work also. (This construction implied subtly that he was not a man but a divine being.)
Themes
Mikhail says that God punished him for disobeying him. When Mikhail was an angel, God asked him to take a woman’s soul up to heaven. However, Mikhail saw that the woman had just given birth to twins, and she begged him to let her live and take care of her children, saying that she had no living family and suggesting that her children would die if she did. Mikhail pitied the woman and her children, and so he disobeyed God and did not take her soul.
Mikhail’s decision to let the woman live—which was motivated by pity for her and her children, as well as by the compelling argument she made—could be seen as selflessness and generosity. Notably, though, it is not what God intended, suggesting that Mikhail made his decision based on the woman’s rational arguments rather than divine will.
Themes
However, when Mikhail returned to heaven and told God about what had happened, God told him that he must return and take the woman’s soul. Then, God told him, he would live as a mortal until he learned the answers to three questions: “what dwells in man, what is not given to men, and what men live by.” Only after Mikhail had learned these lessons could he return to heaven. Mikhail took the woman’s soul, and as she died, he watched as she rolled over the leg of one of her babies. The next thing Mikhail knew, he awoke beside a church in the body of a naked mortal man.
Mikhail has often seemed mysterious and puzzling to the other characters in the story. It has seemed that he was in possession of divine knowledge that the story’s mortal humans could not access. Now, however, it’s revealed that Mikhail himself faced mystery and uncertainty on Earth: he was trying to understand God’s three lessons for him.
Themes
Get the entire What Men Live By LitChart as a printable PDF.
