Kharkov, late 1950s. Eddie Stenkov is a young man with a clear, generous gaze, in which the richness of his inner life is expressed. He is a poet and recites his poems in the public square, at the foot of a monumental Stalinist sculpture, built to the glory of the heroes of the people. He is in love with a young girl whose grace and reserved elegance contrast with the frivolity of morals attributed to her, and of which his own mother sets the example. The delicacy of Stenkov's feelings does not sit well with the misery of his environment and his milieu. The buildings in his neighborhood are leprous, the vacant lots compete for space with hostile construction sites. His friends are young delinquents, who break shop windows to get vodka and for whom love is nothing more than a trivial game. His mother is a weak and timid woman withdrawn into her false comfort of a cheap petty bourgeois. The girl he loves refuses him because he is poor: she demands an invitation to a restaurant as a proof of love. Stenkov tries in vain to get the necessary sum from his mother, then attempts petty burglaries to get the two hundred rubles that could bring him romantic happiness. But he does not succeed, and he takes refuge in reading the works of the poet Blok, which a friend, to whom he gave his few rubles, has given him as a gift. Finally he decides to knock on his girlfriend's door. She undresses, determined to give herself to him, but when she opens it, Stenkov has already fled and slit his wrists. Discovered by the police, he is taken to the psychiatric hospital where he is confined in an adult room, because there is no room in the children's section. He then experiences the mental distress suffered by the patients whose fate he shares. Obsessive masturbation of one, stupor of another, cynical clairvoyance of a third who explains to him that the shock treatment administered to patients, "the sulfur injection", condemns them definitively to alienation. Stenkov wants to leave the hospital: he assures the doctor that he is in perfect health, he says that he prefers deportation to Siberia to internment, he tries to get his mother to intervene. But he comes up against the conspiracy of adults who see in psychiatric confinement the answer to the difficulties caused by the young man's rebellion against the order of misery in which his social and moral environment wants to lock him up. A failed escape forces him into a resignation that his mother's visits do not alleviate, any more than those of his friend, close and distant, foreign, she says, to the feeling of love. It is finally his father who, after having him interned out of duty, comes to free him out of love.
