What Men Live By
Complete textSimon, a poor shoemaker, hopes to buy a winter coat but instead encounters a vulnerable stranger. Taking him home places generosity in tension with the family’s limited resources. The stranger, Michael, learns the trade with unusual speed while his unexplained circumstances give ordinary household events another significance.
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The tale makes ethical questions practical through bread, clothing, tools, and the price of labor. Kindness asks for something the household can genuinely feel it lacks. Follow the contrast between predicting future needs and responding to a person directly before one’s eyes, and notice how the stranger’s attention gives small encounters the structure of a lesson gradually becoming clear.
Reading focus
Consider generosity through the concrete needs of a poor household as Michael’s presence changes the meaning of ordinary acts of care.
This reading edition contains 8,002 words in 13 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.
Author: Leo Tolstoy. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.
Opening excerpt
A shoemaker named Simon, who had neither house nor land of his own, lived with his wife and children in a peasant’s hut, and earned his living by his work. Work was cheap, but bread was dear, and what he earned he spent for food. The man and his wife had but one sheepskin coat between them for winter wear, and even that was torn to tatters, and this was the second year he had been wanting to buy sheep-skins for a new coat. Before winter Simon saved up a little money: a three-rouble note lay hidden in his wife’s box, and five roubles and twenty kopeks were owed him by customers in the village.
Contents
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Is this the complete What Men Live By?
This edition contains the complete English literary text, with 13 sections and 8,002 words. This reading edition preserves the checked English text and its section order. No study notes have been added.
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