A story about the young Soviet Union in the early stages of its journey to the total fullfillment of socialist utopia, and about a guy named Nikolai who finds it difficult leaving the "old times" behind for the arrival of the new socialist future, where people work together like a clockwork, machines will produce food and wellfare for everybody. But still there will always be hierarchy, people above people..and envy. The writer has really worked hard to subtly critisize couple of things that might be a problem in this new arrangement, and has succeeded in getting through the sensorship. If you take out the soviet-time context, this book isn't a very entertaining one. The story itself wasn't very fascinating and I had a hard time sometimes understanding the reactions/motivations/feelings of the characters. A character could get extremely offended by something I didn't really get..or decide to do something weird because of some absurd reason. But eccentric characters are quite typical for russian litterature so you just have to go with it :)