Dark Time of Day

Kuprin’s stories often feature people endowed with the best moral qualities. And the bearers of these qualities are ordinary-looking people. The same situation is in the story “The Executioner.” In a tense world filled with cruelty and human indifference, a despised and rejected executioner comes to the aid of a stranger traveler. By profession and at the command of someone else’s will, he is forced to take the lives of the condemned, which makes him seem heartless.