The Adventures of Skuf

The life-affirming, witty, and provocative prose of Mikhail Dmitriev is full of caricatured characters. Often, like Gogol's mayor, one feels like exclaiming: "I see some pig faces instead of human ones!" They drink, revel, cause scandals, waste life, and of course, play: some on a grand scale, others on a small one, but always at great risk, betting everything they have. Dmitriev shows us the humorous in the mundane and foolish. He brings to the stage Skuf - a superfluous person, bloated both physically and spiritually. The adventures of the characters are absurd and grotesquely humorous, but they are overshadowed by fate: each gets what they deserve.