At the center of the novel is the life of Russian émigrés in the 1920s–40s of the last century, their suffering, wanderings, and disarray. The novel is historical. It is about the time of the First Republic, about the wave of emigration westward from the newborn “Sovdepia” and the Bolsheviks. The action takes place in the capital of Estonia—Revel (now Tallinn)—and focuses on the fates, hopes, and wanderings of Russian migrants: the intelligentsia and near-intelligentsia. Here they are, meeting, making grand plans to overthrow the Bolsheviks, sniffing cocaine (or even morphine), visiting brothels, and discussing one another. In short, behaving as if “the sea were only knee-deep.” And at the same time, over all this hangs an inexorable and elusive foreboding of the end, of disaster, which becomes ever harder to ignore.