About the book: 1911 / It was August. It was a hot sunny day. Warm, fragrant air rushed in gusts through the open windows of the office; the sun sparkled through the thicket of leaves and trembled with light spots on the floor and walls. Pavel Semenovich Verstovsky was a bit of a poet at heart, and on such a day he especially hated his usual activities. The law of the struggle for existence is terrible. But why mention it when talking about crime? They poison, set fire, rape... is this really in the struggle for existence? This is some kind of terrible, ineradicable disease of society, some kind of monstrous deformity, and with the gradual progress of progress it grows and covers larger and larger circles of society, becoming elusive.