The story “The Cat's Story” was once awarded the V. Dahl literary prize in Paris. It talks about the spiritual helplessness of a person rinsed in alkaline solutions of materialism. Realizing the existence of other worlds besides the tangible physical, he loses his internal support, falls into the field of action of dark forces and creates an image of the devil in his soul. The rest of the stories and stories in the collection can be considered as a kind of demonology of St. Petersburg, which describes the various games of eminent and unofficial demons, from time immemorial who have chosen the banks of the Neva.