Overview
A writer in his sixties is obsessed with Gogol's burning of his last great novel before his death. He imagines the dark fantasies, images from the horrific tale Viy, passing through Gogol's mind, recalls other instances of writers and other artists destroying their work or having their work destroyed by others, and tries to come to terms with the possible futility of his own life's work. A dark and complex investigation into the nature of creation and its relationship to destruction.