The film describes the difficult existence of a creative writer in the Soviet Union of the 1920s in anarchic images of great visual suggestiveness. Supported by solid, often brilliant camerawork, the grotesque, ludicrous ideas in the screenplay are also fascinating evidence of the joie de vivre and will to survive of a group of young, talented artists who use wit and black humour to defend themselves against boredom and inhumanity in a country condemned as humourless.
