Tolstoy's "What Men Live By" (1881) — Short Story Discussion

God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him. — 1 “Epistle St. John” iv. 16.

"What Men Live By" was Tolstoy’s first piece of published fiction after Anna Karenina, which he had finished four years earlier. In the years in between, Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis which led to him rejecting the Russian Orthodox Church. He ended up producing his own translation of the Gospels which threw out all the miracles and concentrated on Christ’s ethical message. Although there is continuity with everything Tolstoy had written before, “What Men Live By” is his first conscious attempt at expressing his new faith in fictional form. It is prefaced by no fewer than eight epigraphs about love taken from St John in his new translation.

Anna Karenina is a novel written about upper-class society in which peasants are part of the background. But Tolstoy’s conscience was already troubled, and when he finished it he renounced writing fiction for an educated audience. The main characters in “What Men Live By” are peasants. The story is a model of clarity, but with Tolstoy it is always the art which conceals the art.

— "The 5 Best Russian Short Stories", Rosamund Bartlett, Tolstoy biographer and translator for Oxford World's Classics

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Please read the short story "What Men Live By" (25 pages) in advance of our discussion. You can find the story here (new Penguin translation) or here (the classic translation).

The story revolves around a shoemaker named Simon, who, through a series of events, comes to realize the true meaning of life.

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We previously had meetups on Tolstoy's novellas "The Kruetzer Sonata" and "The Death of Ivan Illych", and the essay "What Is Art"