Provincial schoolteacher Login is a sensitive, finely attuned man—he languishes in a suffocating environment of petty bourgeois narrow-mindedness, where vulgarity and spiritual immobility reign. His inner life is filled with dark forebodings, painful visions, and a tormenting desire to break out beyond the boundaries of dull everyday life. In his mind, love and cruelty, dreams and facts of reality are woven together, turning existence into a chain of heavy, unsettling nightmares from which it seems impossible to wake. This is one of the early decadent works of Russian literature, plunging into the dark corridors of the human psyche.