Free Summarizer
Daily · Classics

What Men Live By, and Other Tales

Leo Tolstoy · short story collection, 1885·1 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version1 hrs → 50 sec
  • Simon nearly abandons a naked stranger by the roadside shrine. He is halfway past before his conscience turns him around: "Have you grown so rich as to be afraid of robbers? Ah, Simon, shame on you!" He goes back and gives the freezing man his own coat and felt boots.
  • The angel's exile ends with one line about love. Michael reveals he is an angel God sent to earth to learn three truths, and the last one is delivered as plain doctrine: "I have learnt that all men live not by care for themselves but by love." He explains that a rich man ordering boots for a year did not know he would need a coffin by dusk, and that a mother's orphaned twins survived on a stranger's love, not her own dying wish.
  • A hermit answers a king's three questions without speaking. The king digs garden beds for an old hermit, unknowingly saving himself from an assassin waiting in ambush, then nurses that same assassin's wound and turns him into an ally. The hermit's verdict: "there is only one time that is important: Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power."
  • Nine travelers argue about God using competing suns. A blind theologian insists the sun does not exist, his slave answers by holding up an oil-soaked coconut shell: "This is my sun." After a Brahmin, a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian, and others each claim the one true faith, a Confucian scholar closes the debate: no man who sees one ray of the light should condemn the man who sees only that ray.
  • A peasant is offered land priced by distance walked. The Bashkir chief tells Pahom the rate is "one thousand roubles a day," meaning he may keep every acre he circles on foot between sunrise and sunset, so long as he returns to his starting stake before the sun sets.
  • Pahom outruns the sun and dies at the finish line. He reaches the marker just as the chief laughs and calls him a fine fellow for gaining so much land, then falls forward with blood running from his mouth. His servant buries him in a plot six feet by two: "Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed."
Summarized by FreeSummarizer.com

•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is Tolstoy after he renounced novels for peasants, and the closing line of the land story, a grave six feet by two, is the sharpest thing he ever wrote about property.

A shoemaker takes in a naked stranger who turns out to be an exiled angel, in four Tolstoy parables that all end the same way: the thing you were chasing was never the thing you needed.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

Want the 30-second version of your own documents?

Summarize Pro batches your PDFs, papers and reports into this exact format, every key claim cited to its source page.

Get 25 free Pro pages →

More from the archive

Men and Women/daily/men-and-womenSongs of a Sourdough/daily/songs-of-a-sourdoughTales of the Jazz Age/daily/tales-of-the-jazz-ageLove of Life, and Other Stories/daily/love-of-life-and-other-stories