And the soccer match may be the most ordinary thing that happens in this novel.
First published in 1927, the object of envy for the protogonist Nikolai - a young, disaffected, arrogant and lazy drunk - is Volodya, a handsome, talented soccer player who is like a son to the business man Andrei, a man proud of developing a very large and cheap type of sausage. Andrei has t

This is post-revolutionary Russia where the citizens are not only trying to adapt to a new political reality, but also to the cold culture of modernity where mechanics overrides human emotions. As Ivan rants to Nikolai:
The millennia are like a cesspool. Floundering in the cesspool are machines, pieces of iron, tinplate, screws, springs. . . A dark and gloomy cesspool. And glowing in the cesspool are rotten stumps, phosphorescent mushrooms - fungi. These are our emotions! This is all that's left of our emotions, from the flourishing of our souls. The new man comes up to the cesspool, tests it, climbs in, picks out what he needs - a piece of machinery will come in handy, a nice wrench - and tramples the rotten stump underfoot, crushes it.
The emotions - the most prevalent of these being envy - are expressed in a series of mostly hallucinatory dreamlike episodes and the slightly surreal stories that Ivan relates to Nikolai while drinking. On occasion the fanatasical language also infiltrates and poetically elevates some of the more pedestrian activities:
It was early morning. The street was jointed. I moved from joint to joint like a bad case of rheumatism. Things don't like me. I'm hurting the street.
There's not a lot of plot to this short, often comic novel - it could almost be summed up as one man's search for a decent bed for the night - but I enjoyed reading it as another interesting European perspective to set alongside - for example - German expressionism, in attempting to describe or predict the future effects of technology and machines, so prevalent in many artistic endeavours during the 1920s and 30s, and the inspiration for many of the science fiction novels that followed.