The book was published in 1907 and dramatized in 1909 as a five-act tragedy. The story is set in a provincial Russian town, where the ambitious teacher Peredonov, unable to fight against everyday frustrations, is gradually driven into paranoia and violence and the town's people to a riot in the novel's climax. The libidinious servant-girl Varvara tricks Peredonov into marriage. Several of the characters, Peredonov's colleagues, stupid and vicious friends, town officials, pupils, are descendants of Gogol's civil servants, but also Dostoevsky's psychological insights influenced Sologub's work. Life on earth is created by a malicious demiurge and dominated by cruelty and perverse sensualism but by a creative imagination one can enter a realm of harmony and beauty.
Earth is a prison and the human existence is painful.
The main story lines are set in Russia on the eve of the revolution of 1905 and in a fictious Mediterranean kingdom. It blended fantastic and supernatural occurrences with everyday, played with the conventions of narrative, and had references to contemporary ideas, events, and movements, such as Black Hundreds, and anti-Semitic group. The critics, among them Maxim Gor'kii, were not happy with its sado-masochist thematics. In 1905 Sologub had sided with the revolution but in 1917 he remained politically aloof. They requested a permission from Lenin to travel abroad in 1920.