Author Description

In Victorian-era St. Petersburg the narrator, who is a cynical, paranoid, and hostile convict, cannot readjust to society following his release from prison. When his flatmate and only friend proposes marriage to his fiancée, the narrator undergoes an existential crisis and begins to question the parameters of what it means to be human, and exist in a society he begins to resent. Exhausting and bewildering himself, he seeks comfort in a past that has abandoned him; estranged friends who have established new lives; and a culture whose minimum requirements for participation he cannot meet. For two days, he roams around St. Petersburg seeking an end to his unyielding existential terror and vindication for a past he fears he has lost forever.