In a cramped peasant hut, a family fractures under the weight of ruin. Michael drinks away what little they have, while his aging mother Akulína watches her son vanish into bottles and rage, and his long-suffering wife Martha carries the weight of survival on her shoulders. When a wandering tramp accepts their hospitality for a night, a pocket watch goes missing, and the family must decide whether to condemn a stranger or confront the truth about themselves. Tolstoy strips away all ornamentation to show how poverty, drink, and helplessness corrode love into something almost unrecognizable. The title poses a question that haunts every page: what is the real cause of it all? The drink? The hunger? The centuries of oppression that leave a man with nothing but exhaustion and rage? Tolstoy refuses easy answers, offering instead a devastating portrait of people trapped in systems larger than themselves, fighting each other while the real enemy goes unnamed. This is Tolstoy at his most raw and uncompromising, a moralist who understood that the hardest questions yield no heroes and no victories.
