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Updated: May 2, 2025
The principal character, about whom circle the police spies and secret agents, is a poor orphan, weak and timid, called Evsey Klimkov, whom his uncle, the forger Piotr, has taken into his house and brought up with his son, the strong and brutal James. Beaten by his schoolmates and by his cousin, the child lives in a perpetual trance.
And in his feverish imagination, daily excited by facts which his terror distorts, Evsey delights in conceiving another existence, all made of love and goodness, an existence that he unceasingly opposes against the hard realities of daily life, with the stubborn fervor of a mystic.
Raïssa, tired of being tormented by Raspopov, who accuses her of poisoning him, strangles the old man in a moment of cold anger, under the very eyes of Evsey. Thanks to Dorimedonte, this crime goes unpunished. Evsey, having become the lodger of the two lovers, now enters the Okhrana, at the advice of his new master.
Having entered the service of the old bookseller Raspopov, the young man does his duty with the faithfulness of a beast of burden. His home no longer pleases him at all; there, things and people are still hostile to him; but his uncle Piotr seems enchanted with his new position. Evsey spends his days in arranging and classifying the books which his master has bought.
Among them, young Evsey leads a miserable and ridiculous existence. Bruised by an invincible power, he sees himself compelled to arrest an old man who has confided his revolutionary ideas to him; then a young girl with whom he is in love; finally, his own cousin, a revolutionary suspect. Gradually his eyes are opened.
A few words addressed by Raspopov to a certain Dorimedonte Loukhine reveal to Evsey the part that is being played by his patron. Raspopov, who is an agent of the secret police, gives Dorimedonte who, by the way, is deceiving him with Raïssa the names of the buyers of the forbidden books in which he trades. And here it is that the tragedy suddenly breaks forth.
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