In Leo Tolstoy's “What Men Live By,” (1885) an angel is sent to fetch the soul of a dying woman, who has just given birth to twin girls. The Angel, decides to spare her life so she can care for her babies. God takes her soul anyway and punishes the angel’s disobedience by sending him to live on earth as a human until he learns what distinguishes the life of mortals from that of angels.

Finding himself freezing and naked, the angel witnesses a poor shoemaker first ignore him but then turn back to rescue him. Bringing him home, the shoemaker persuades his reluctant wife, who knows they lack even bread for the next day, to take the wayfarer in. “We will all die”, he says, and suddenly love enters her heart. And this is the angel’s first lesson—“in man dwells love,” and the nature of human love is that it costs something and often goes against our own needs.

The angel becomes the shoemaker’s assistant. When a frightening “man of iron” orders boots to last a year, the angel, who foresees the man’s imminent death, makes funeral slippers instead. He thereby learns his second lesson, that uncertainty governs human life. Unlike angels, people can never be sure of God’s will or even that He exists. And because people cannot know the future, they mistake their own needs.

When the angel encounters the woman who, out of sheer compassion, adopted the orphan girls whose mother the angel tried to save, he learns his final lesson: although people imagine they live by their own efforts, they really live because of human love. Mortal ourselves, we see our mortality in others. When people truly love, the sense of death is never absent. Far from destroying life’s meaning, death creates its distinctive value and the special kind of love that people live by.

What Men Live by is part of a collection of 20 folk stories. Other folk stories include How much land does a man need. A Grain as Big as a Hen’s Egg and the Anti-war story, The Empty Drum.

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