Surrealistic and grotesque, these characters are practicing to hear God, patient to meet God, startled by the solidity of material things - whatever exists is an obstruction. Born to doomed and violently unhappy parents of working-class origin who rose in class by chance during their lifetimes, Arkady finds himself tsar at seventeen. He does not want to rule; he is aimless like his mother and seeks intoxication and loving-and-hateful violence and absurdist ritual to negate his guilt at shirking responsibility and to destroy any possibility of meaning or even of intelligibility - sensations should not grow to words in a living death. Then he begins to believe he is the Russian Christ.