Mikhail Sinyagin was born in 1887. He did not get to the imperialist war due to infringement of a hernia. He writes poems in the spirit of the Symbolists, decadents and aesthetics, strolling with a flower in his buttonhole and a stack in his hand. He lives near Pskov, in the estate "Calm", in the company of mother and aunt. The estate is soon taken away as the revolution begins, but Michel, his mother and aunt still have a small house.

Here, in Pskov, in 1919, he met Simochka M., whose father had died two years before, leaving his mother, an energetic pockmarked widow, and six daughters. Simochka soon became pregnant by Michelle (who seemed to indulge in such innocent activities as reading poetry and running through the forest), and her mother visited Michelle in the evening, demanding that her daughter be married. Simagin refused, and the widow jumped onto the windowsill, threatening the poet with suicide. Forced to agree, Michelle suffered a severe nervous attack that very night. His mother and aunt in tears wrote down his orders regarding Petals and Forget-Me-Nots and other literary heritage. However, the next morning he was quite healthy and, having received a note from Simochka with a prayer for a meeting, he went to her.

Simochka apologized to him for his mother’s behavior, and they got married without any objection from Michel and his relatives. But the aunt was still dissatisfied with the haste and forced marriage. Michelle's mother, a quiet, inconspicuous woman, died, and her aunt, energetic and hoping for a speedy return of the estate and generally of old times, decides to go to Petersburg. Petersburg, people say, should soon move to Finland or even become a free city as part of some state of Northern Europe. On the way, aunt is robbed, which she informs Michelle in a letter.

Michelle, meanwhile, is becoming a father. This takes him for a short time, but soon he ceases to be interested in his family and decides to go to his aunt in St. Petersburg. She meets him without much enthusiasm, because she does not need parasites. Without thinking of returning to Simochka, who was completely in love with him, writing letters to him without any hope of an answer, Sinyagin takes a modest clerical position in St. Petersburg, throws poetry and meets a young and beautiful lady, who is parodyed by the name of Isabella Efremovna.

Isabella Efremovna was created "for an elegant life." She dreams of leaving with Sinyagin, crossing the Persian border with him and then fleeing to Europe. She plays the guitar, sings romances, spends Michelle’s money, and he casually fulfills his official duties, to which he is deeply disgusted. But he is not really capable of anything; he exists on beggarly salaries and handouts of his aunt.Soon, he is kicked out of work, his aunt refuses to support him, and Isabella Efremovna is going to leave him. But then salvation comes: the aunt loses her mind, she is taken away to a madhouse, and Sinyagin begins to live her property.

This continues for about a year, and the aunt plunges deeper into madness, but suddenly she is brought home recovered. Michelle tries not to let her into her room so that she does not see the picture of complete ruin that he made there. The aunt, however, enters her room and at the sight of the devastation (for Michelle managed to live with Isabella Efremovna almost everything) finally moved her mind.

Isabella Efremovna all the same soon soon left Michelle, because he had no money left, and he did not know how and did not want to serve. So he began to beg, not feeling the full depth of his fall, for "a millionaire does not realize that he is a millionaire, and a rat does not realize that she is a rat." Asking for alms (the fear of such an end, like the image of a beggar, always haunted Zoshchenko), Sinyagin lives well and even allows himself to eat normally. To give himself an “intelligent look”, he always carries a canvas briefcase with him.

But forty-two years old, he suddenly understands the horror of his life and decides to return to Pskov, to his wife, whom he had not remembered for six years.

His wife, thinking that he had disappeared in Petrograd, had long married another, the head of the trust, an elderly and pale man. Seeing Michelle descending, dirty, hungry, who opens her gate with tears, the wife began to sob and wring her hands, and her second husband decided to take part in Michelle. He is fed a hearty dinner, and later they find a place for him in the management of cooperatives, where he works in the last months of his life.

And then he dies of pneumonia "in the arms of his friends and benefactors" - the first wife and her second husband. His grave is cleaned with fresh flowers. With this ironic phrase, the author ends his story about the fall of an intellectual.