Savely is the creator of his own school of psychotherapy: psychoedaphos. His apostle is S. Freud, who believed that only lust, greed and malice swirl in our depths. His method is grounding. His goal is an immoral revolution. A person is unhappy only because someone has invented ideals for him that he cannot live up to. The more lofty the ideal, the more it rapes nature, the more torment and blood it demands. And the most unearthly, the most unnatural of ideals is, of course, Christianity. But events happen in the life of Savely and his family that make him look at life differently. The father-in-law, Pavel Nikolaevich Vishnevetsky, a famous clergyman and preacher, disappears. Savely is under suspicion. And under the pressure of fate, he begins to look at himself, at the world, at his idea differently.