What Men Live By

Leo Tolstoy · 1885 CE · Short Story · Russian · Victorian

A cobbler who shares one sheepskin coat with his wife walks home from a failed round of debt-collecting and finds a naked man sitting against the wall of a roadside chapel in the frost. He brings him in against his wife's fury, teaches him the trade, and over six years watches him smile exactly three times without ever saying why. Tolstoy took the frame from a Russian folk legend collected by Afanasyev and set the whole against verses from the First Epistle of John.

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Lineage

• ↓ Cancer Ward
  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1968 CE · Novel — alludes to this

Attributes

Closest analogues

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