For what purpose alone was man sent into this life. What is this purpose? Discuss some means of fulfilling this purpose.

Tolstoy spent the last twenty years of his life, after his fame had been fully established, writing for the most part shorter works intended to convey a religious message. Some of the best known of these stories are "What Men Live By," "How much Land does a Man Need?," and "The Three Questions." The last of these deals with a king who seeks guidance from a hermit. Because the king ends up helping the hermit with his work in a field, the king escapes being killed by a man whose brother the king has executed. His good deed in aiding the hermit in his work has saved the king, and the moral of the story is that this is solely what man has been sent into the world for: to do good.
It is interesting that at the close of the 1968 film of War and Peace, the director Sergei Bondarchuk gives this moral to the character Pierre to speak. The story of War and Peace is so multifaceted that it cannot be interpreted as having a single "message." But at the time Tolstoy wrote the novel, he presumably had not yet experienced the religious epiphany that later motivated him to write the stark, simple parables such as "Three Questions." Throughout his whole life, however, Tolstoy seems to have been haunted by his somewhat wild and reckless youth, before he settled down and married. In some sense these late religious writings appear to be an attempt to atone for that past. Yet, as well-intentioned as those parables are, probably, as George Orwell wrote, no one today would be aware of Tolstoy's later writings had he not also been the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.