The novella is divided into 14 chapters. The chapters have no individual titles.

Chapter 1

This terrible affair is a strange, mysterious, and insoluble one. On the one hand, it is very simple, but on the other, it is very complex, resembling a tabloid novel — which is what everyone in our town called it — and at the same time it could serve for the creation of a profound work of art… In general, the defense counsel spoke justly at the trial.

‘In this case,’ he said at the beginning of his speech, ‘there seems to be no room for dispute between me and the representative of the prosecution: after all, the defendant himself has pleaded guilty, and his crime and his personality, as well as the personality of his victim, whose will he supposedly violated, seem to almost everyone present in this courtroom unworthy of special philosophizing due to their alleged utter emptiness and ordinariness. But all this is not so at all; all this is only an appearance: there is something to dispute, there are many reasons for dispute and reflection…’

And further:

‘Let us assume that my goal is to achieve only leniency for the defendant. I could then say little. The legislator did not indicate exactly what the judges should be guided by in cases similar to ours; he left a wide scope for their understanding, conscience, and keenness, which must ultimately select one or another frame of the law that punishes the act. And so I would have tried to influence this understanding, this conscience; I would have tried to put in the first place everything best that is in the defendant, and everything that mitigates his guilt; I would awaken kind feelings in the judges and would do this all the more persistently because, after all, he denies only one thing in his action: conscious evil will. However, even in this case, could I avoid a dispute with the prosecutor, who defined the criminal as no more and no less than a ‘criminal wolf’? In any matter, everything can be perceived differently, everything can be illuminated in one way or another, presented in one’s own way, in this or that fashion. And what do we see in our case? The fact that there is, it seems, not a single feature, not a single detail in it, at which the prosecutor and I would look identically, which we could convey or illuminate in agreement: ‘Everything is so, yet not so!’ I must say to him every minute. But, what is most important, it is that ‘everything is not so’ in the very essence of the matter…’

Terribly did it begin, too, this affair.

It was June 19th of last year. It was early morning, it was the sixth hour, but in the dining room of Captain Likharev of the Life Guards Hussar Regiment, it was already bright, stifling, dry, and hot from the summer city sun. It was, however, still quiet, all the more so because the captain’s apartment was located in one of the blocks of the hussar barracks situated outside the city. And, taking advantage of this silence, as well as his youth, the captain was fast asleep. On the table stood liqueurs and cups with unfinished coffee. In the next room, in the drawing room, another officer was sleeping, Staff Captain Count Koshits, and further still, in the study, Cornet Sevsky. The morning was, in a word, quite ordinary, the picture simple, but, as it always happens when something unusual occurs amidst the ordinary, all the more terrible, surprising, and seemingly improbable was that which suddenly happened in Captain Likharev’s apartment early on the morning of June 19th. Unexpectedly, amidst the complete silence of this morning, the bell jangled in the entrance hall, then it was heard how the orderly ran cautiously and lightly, barefoot, to open the door, and then an intentionally loud voice rang out:

‘Is he in?’

With the same intentional noise the newcomer entered, throwing open the door to the dining room particularly freely, clattering his boots and jingling his spurs particularly boldly. The captain raised an amazed and sleepy face: before him stood his comrade from the regiment, Cornet Elagin, a small and frail man, reddish-haired and freckled, on bowed and unusually thin legs, shod with that elegance which was, as he liked to say, his ‘main’ weakness. He quickly took off his summer overcoat and, throwing it on a chair, said loudly: ‘Here are my epaulettes for you!’ And then he went to the sofa standing by the opposite wall, collapsed onto it on his back, and threw his hands behind his head.

‘Wait, wait,’ muttered the captain, following him with wide eyes, ‘where are you from, what is with you?’

‘I killed Manya,’ Elagin said.

‘Are you drunk? Which Manya?’ asked the captain.

‘The actress Maria Iosifovna Sosnovskaya.’

The captain lowered his legs from the sofa:

‘What are you, joking?’

‘Alas, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, not in the least.’

‘Who is that there? What happened?’ the count shouted from the drawing room.

Elagin stretched and with a light kick to the door flung it open.

‘Don’t yell,’ he said. ‘It’s me, Elagin. I shot Manya.’

‘What?’ said the count and, having been silent for a moment, suddenly burst out laughing. ‘Ah, so that’s it!’ he shouted cheerfully. ‘Well, to hell with you, this time you’re forgiven. It’s good that you woke us up, otherwise we would have certainly overlept; yesterday we were amusing ourselves until three again.’

‘I give you my word that I killed her,’ Elagin repeated insistently.

‘You’re lying, brother, you’re lying!’ the host also shouted, reaching for his socks. ‘And I had already got frightened, thinking if something had really happened… Ephrem, tea!’

Elagin reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out a small key, and, skillfully throwing it onto the table over his shoulder, said:

‘Go and see for yourselves…’

At the trial, the prosecutor spoke a lot about the cynicism and horror of certain scenes that make up Elagin’s drama, and more than once dwelt on this scene. He forgot that on this morning Captain Likharev only in the first minute failed to notice the ‘supernatural,’ as he expressed it, paleness of Elagin and something ‘inhuman’ in his eyes, and then was ‘simply struck by both’…