The narration is conducted on behalf of one of the most famous poets of St. Petersburg, Peter Nether.

First part

Winter of 1918. In the center of post-revolutionary Moscow, Peter came across a former classmate and poet von Ernen. He now served in the Cheka and invited an old friend to his huge apartment confiscated from someone.

Peter admitted that three days ago in St. Petersburg people from the Cheka wanted to take him for an abstract poem, but he ran away from them, firing back. Von Hernen, who promised to help, decided to arrest him. At the point of the Mauser, Peter went into the hallway, where he unexpectedly threw his coat on the scoundrel and strangled him.

Peter put on a Chekist’s leather jacket, reloaded the gun and wanted to leave. Suddenly, a pair of sailors in jackets burst into the apartment. Having taken Peter as von Ernen, they handed him the order to "draw our line" in a literary cabaret, drank vodka with cocaine with him, and drove there together.

In the darkened room of the cabaret, Peter met his eyes with a strange man with a strong-willed calm face and a mustache curled up.

I suddenly somehow realized that he knew everything about the death of von Ernen - but what was there, he knew much more serious things about me.

Peter went up to the stage, read the verse just written, and after the line “we will answer the white bastard with revolutionary terror!” shot into the chandelier. The sailors accompanying him picked up the shooting. In the hall they shouted and hid behind the columns, and only that mustachioed man sat calmly at his table.

Having stopped shooting, the sailors with Peter got out through the back door and got into the car. On the road, Peter fell asleep.

The second part of

Peter woke up in the mid-1990s in a psychiatric hospital.

Her head physician treated the “split false identity” according to his own method: a group of patients was immersed in the false reality of one of them, and at the end of the session they all returned to their usual mania.

And at this second, the patient himself can feel the relativity of his painful ideas and cease to be identified with them. And from this to the recovery is already very close.

Petra was injected with the drug and introduced into a group hallucinatory session. He came into the reality of a patient who considers himself to be just Maria from the Mexican soap opera.

On the smoky embankment, Maria met her fiancé - Arnold Schwarzenegger. He took her to a wasteland, to a military fighter, where their "alchemical marriage" was to be carried out. Landing Mary on the fuselage, Arnold took off. The plane tipped, Maria rolled along the wing and caught the hood on the rocket. She shouted that she didn’t want to, and she was in pain. Schwarzenegger fired a rocket, and Maria flew with her into the Ostankino television tower. The merger of Russia with the West did not happen.

Emerging from "not the most interesting vision in his life," Peter fell asleep.

The third part

1918 year. Apartment von Hernen. Peter woke up from the music coming from the next room. This mustachioed man, whom he saw in a cabaret, played excellently on the piano.

“My last name is Chapaev,” the stranger introduced himself. He said that he was impressed with the agitation of Peter and found him to call the commissar into his equestrian division. Peter agreed. They went out onto a frosty street, got into a long gray-green armored car and left for the station.

Behind the armored staff carriage, in which Pyotr and Chapaev were located, carriages with a "red soldier" and a regiment of weaving workers were attached.

Something like this train. He is just as doomed to always drag behind him from the past a chain of dark, terrible, unknown from whom inherited wagons.

In the evening, during a light champagne dinner, Chapaev introduced Peter to Anna, a beautiful, short-haired machine gunner.“By the way,” she said, “we completely forgot about the weavers.” Together they marched to the end of the moving train, and at the direction of Chapaev, his assistant unhooked the cars with the weavers. As if nothing had happened, Chapaev and Anna returned to the table.

Peter went into his compartment and fell onto the bed.

Fourth part

He woke up in a hospital tiled room, in an cast-iron bathtub with cool water. In the neighboring baths lay other patients from his ward - Volodin, Serdyuk and the muscular young man Maria.

During a quiet hour, Peter secretly entered the office of the head physician and found a thick folder with a history of his illness. His pathological abnormalities began at the age of fourteen: he moved away from family and friends, school performance declined, and he began to intensively read philosophical literature on emptiness and nonexistence.

Considers himself the sole heir to the great philosophers of the past. He is not burdened with a room in a psychiatric hospital, as he is sure that his "self-development" will go the "right way" regardless of where he lives.

After a quiet hour, a quarrel arose between Serdyuk and Maria. Peter tried to separate them and got on the head a plaster bust of Aristotle.

Fifth part

Peter woke up in the summer in an unfamiliar room. Anna was sitting by his bed. She talked about the battle during which Peter commanded the squadron, was shell-shocked, and spent several months in a coma.

Not listening to objections, Peter got up and decided to walk around the city. Anna brought him to a restaurant, where she said that Peter was very close to Chapaev.

Chapaev is one of the most profound mystics I have ever known. I believe that in your face he found a grateful listener and, possibly, a student.

Upon learning that Chapaev was Anna's uncle, Peter tried to flirt with her. He decided that the girl was not indifferent to him, since she was on duty at his bed. To this, Anna objected that she came to Peter's room to listen to his picturesque nonsense. Peter was offended and quarreled with her.

White officers sitting at a nearby table intervened in a quarrel. The conflict was growing, but then a shaved head with two revolvers suddenly appeared in the restaurant and drove them away. He introduced himself as Kotovsky and took Anna, whom he had known for a long time, in his carriage.

Peter thought that he had nothing that could attract a woman like Anna, and felt disgusted with himself.

Chapaeva Peter found in an old bathhouse on the outskirts of the estate. He was upset when he learned that Peter had really forgotten everything that he managed to understand, and tried to explain to him that all the surrounding reality was in his mind, and he himself was in the void. Chapaev flavored his explanations with generous portions of moonshine, and soon Peter was too drunk to understand anything.

Having reached his room, Peter fell asleep. Kotovsky woke him, who came to talk about Russia and get some cocaine. Peter traded at Kotovsky for horses and a carriage, on which he rode with Anna, half of the can, inherited from the murdered von Ernen.

Sixth part

Peter found himself in the reality of Serdyuk, in Moscow in the 1990s. He rode the subway. Serdyuk noticed a brochure “Japanese militarism” from a neighbor in the shop and thought that the Japanese remember the duty, and therefore they live normally.

Coming out of the subway, Serdyuk got very drunk from longing. On the newspaper in which the snack was wrapped, he saw an ad - the Moscow branch of a Japanese company was recruiting employees. He called.

The next day, along with the head of the branch, Kawabata, following centuries-old Japanese traditions, Serdyuk drank sake, poetically talked about life and had fun with Russian girls dressed as geisha.

So the "alchemical marriage of Russia with the East" took place, where Kawabata personified the East. Kawabata said their firm looked more like a clan, and dedicated Serdyuk to the samurai of that clan.

... and he sadly thought that Russia, in fact, is also a country of the rising sun - if only because it never really ascended to it above it.

Soon, Serdyuk learned that the enemy clan had bought a controlling stake in their company, and now all the clan samurai should make a seppuku for themselves. Serdyuk failed to escape. He remembered the past night and realized that she, unlike the world outside the office door, was real. He did not want to betray all this, took a sword and ripped open his stomach. The union of Russia and the East did not last long.

Serdyuk woke up in a mental hospital. “That's how they found you by the air heater, with a rose in his hand. With whom did you actually drink, remember? ” - asked the head doctor.

Seventh part

Peter woke up in the headquarters room, where he had traded cocaine for horses on the eve of Kotovsky.

Chapaev, wanting to demonstrate to Peter what the mind, death and immortality is, took him to a meeting with the Black Baron, whom many considered the incarnation of the god of war. He brought Peter to his mystical "camp" - a place where all the soldiers fall after death. In dense darkness, countless bonfires burned, each of which had vague silhouettes of people.

Then they heard a scream and went to the fire, in which four were sitting. After removing the ring from the lemon, the Baron threw it into the fire, and everything disappeared - and the fire and four people. It was a “hooligan eating a lot of shaman mushrooms” and got here by mistake, they just had to be “brought to life”.

The baron explained to Peter that both the dream of the mental hospital and the reality with Chapaev were equivalent. He compared the world to a crammed full room in which everyone is trying to win back a chair. Outside the world, each person is waiting for the throne of “infinite freedom and happiness”, which belongs to him by right, but it is impossible to ascend to it, since the throne stands in a place that does not exist. To end up in this void, one must realize that all worlds are equally illusory.

The Baron returned Peter to the steppe, where the dead fellow soldiers sat around an ordinary fire. The Baron taught them to see the void. The one who achieved the goal immediately received a personal elephant and left for Inner Mongolia - the place where the person who ascended the throne falls.

Inner Mongolia is not called that because it is inside Mongolia. She is inside the one who sees the void.

Peter suddenly found himself in the headquarters again, as if they hadn’t gone anywhere with Chapaev and he didn’t introduce him to the Black Baron. Arriving in his room, the stunned Peter lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

Eighth part

This time Peter got into the reality of Volodin, the “new Russian”. He, along with two bandits - his "roof" - arrived in a jeep in the forest. Companions lit a bonfire in the meadow, ate psychogenic mushrooms and waited for the arrival.

Volodin explained to nearby companions that "all the buzz in the world" is inside a person. It is locked, as in a safe, and in order to get the key to this safe, everything must be abandoned. This is what they do in monasteries, where monks "twirl" around the clock from the feeling of world love.

Here - as he puts in, he will never let go. And there will be no need for a woman, she will not break through any hawk. There will be no scraps, no breaking. Only you will pray for pearl and pearl.

One of his friends was inspired by the idea of ​​eternal buzz, but Volodin disappointed him: “if it had been so easy to get it, now half of Moscow would have been full of money.” Inside a person is full of all sorts of hypostases: the defendant, and the prosecutor, and the lawyer. But in order to catch “world buzz”, you have to “wipe this entire queue” and become nobody.

The conversation was interrupted by a pillar of light that went down to the fire and enveloped those sitting around. They saw the void and tasted the eternal buzz. Two "poor in spirit" began to scream and scream. “So, we do the legs. Quickly!" - said Volodin, seeing in the emptiness of the Black Baron, and his friends ran away to where.

Recovering, everyone gathered at the jeep Volodin. On the way, he explained that they had illegally gotten into an eternal high, and for this they could be tied up. At the physical level, they are taken to a madhouse, and where "on the subtle" is a mystery. If his companions had not arranged a racket, everything would have worked out.

Ninth part

This strange dream Peter wrote down and showed the manuscript to Chapaev.He, like the Black Baron, metaphorically advised him to "leave the hospital", meaning this institution as our mortal world.

Going down the street, Peter stumbled upon Anna in a black velvet dress, absurdly tried to confess her feelings and invited him to go out of town in the evening in trotters. "What vulgarity!" She said and walked past.

In the evening, the weavers gave a concert with incredibly obscene numbers. Peter went on stage and read his new proletarian poem, in which he entwined the princess in a black dress and her naked friend. The hall exploded with applause, and Anna, sitting in the far row, stepped out.

Peter returned to his room and lay down. The weavers' concert meanwhile “grew into complete disgrace” - shots, drunken gnaw and the sounds of a “languid fight” were heard from the yard.

Kotovsky went to Peter to say goodbye. He was about to disappear before the drunken weavers burned everything here, and advised Peter to do the same. The fact that Chapaev will restore order, he did not hope.

When Kotovsky was escorted, Peter went to the bathhouse to Chapaev, where he, habitually drinking moonshine, tried to make him understand that man is not a form, but a spirit.

One cannot say about the soul that it is different for everyone, it cannot be said that everyone has one. If you can say something about her, it is that she is not there either.

The rebellious weavers have already set fire to the estate and with shots went to the bathhouse. Chapaev opened the hatch in the floor and, together with Peter, made his way through the underground passage to the armored car hidden in the haystack.

Chapaev started the engine, and Anna took her place in the machine-gun tower. Weavers surrounded the armored car. Chapaev ordered the clay machine gun to be uncovered. Anna silently circled the cannon, and all sounds disappeared.

Chapaev said that once there was a Buddha, so wise that things disappeared when he pointed them with his little finger. Buddha pointed his little finger at himself and disappeared, but the finger remained. Wrapped in clay, he became a terrible weapon. Chapaev found it in a Mongolian monastery, attached a butt and turned it into a machine gun.

Coming out of the armored car, Peter was on a round patch of earth, surrounded by an endless sparkling stream.

This rainbow flow was all that I could think or experience, all that could or could not be.

Chapaev called the stream the Conditional River of Absolute Love, in short - the Urals. People merge with him before taking any form. Anna and Chapaev rushed to the Urals and disappeared. Peter followed suit, saw the beginning of the stream and swam to it. Peter's movement slowed down, the glow of the Urals faded, and he woke up in a hospital. “Complete catharsis,” said the head physician. - Congratulations".

Tenth

Petra was discharged, and he returned to the city. Sitting on the bench, Peter wondered how to continue. Then he remembered the literary cabaret and immediately understood what to do.

In the new reality, the cabaret has become a pub, but little has changed inside. Peter decided to repeat the steps from which it all began: he sat down at the table, ordered a cocktail of vodka and ecstasy, and took out a pen stolen from the orderly before discharge to write a poem. The pen turned out to be a miniature weapon with one bullet. Peter composed a poem, read it and shot into the chandelier. The lights went out in the hall, a shootout started, and Peter left the pub by the back door by touch.

Chapaev in his armored car was waiting for Peter on the street.

Chapaev did not change at all, only his left hand hung on a black linen ribbon. The wrist was bandaged, and in place of the little finger under the layers of gauze, a void was guessed.

The armored car started, and "soon the sands rustled and the waterfalls rustled" of Inner Mongolia.