The second half of the 60s. XIX century A young man who was opposed by service in the College of official salaries (this is what the ministry is called) is burning with a desire to benefit society. He meets Struve, the venerable journalist from the opposition Little Red Riding Hood, and asks for his advice and help: from today on, he, Arvid Falk, quits public service and is fully committed to literature. The experienced Struve dissuades Arvid: if he lives now to work, then, studying literature, he will have to work to live, in other words: a hungry person has no principles. But Struve’s words - and both sides understand this - are in vain. Youth strives for the impossible - the liberation of the world, no less. Struve, having carefully listened to Arvid’s stinging story about the ministerial order and wrote something on the cuffs, the next day he prints an article from his words and earns a tidy sum on this, without saying a word for the whole time of the conversation that for several hours before she had already exchanged the liberal Little Red Riding Hood for the conservative newspaper Gray Cloak, where he was promised more.

This is only the first of the lessons of a new free life, the main content of which is - naturally, in addition to freedom - lack of money and want. Arvid tries to get hold of the money from his brother Karl-Nikolaus Falk, the owner of the store and the rich man, but he, in a fit of righteous anger, only calls him a fraud. Did Arvid not give him the last time he borrowed a receipt that he had received in full all that was due to him from his father's inheritance?

Having destroyed his younger brother morally, Karl Nikolaus comes in a great mood and offers to take him to a restaurant for breakfast. But Arvid, frightened by such unexpected generosity, immediately, without saying goodbye, disappears on the street. He has a place to go. He goes to the suburban town of Lille-Jans, where his friends and acquaintances live and work - short sculptor Olle Montanus, talented painter Sellen, unprincipled juir artist Lundell, skinny and dull as a pole, philosopher-writer Igberg and a young baron from an impoverished noble family Renelm posing for artists instead of a sitter. This impoverished brethren spends all their free evenings in the Red Room - the hall of the Bern restaurant - where there are Stockholm youth who have already left their parental shelter but have not yet acquired their own roof over their heads. For the sake of a delicious dinner, modest drink and friendly communication, Arvid's acquaintances are ready to say goodbye to the latter - a jacket, boots, even sheets - preferably not their own, but a friend.

Yes, a restaurant needs money - blood pulsating in the veins of a huge and infinitely diverse organism when you get to know it in the nearest future. This is exactly what Arvid Falk is now doing as a correspondent for Little Red Riding Hood. Impressions are depressing. At meetings of the Riksdag, Arvid is surprised at the zeal with which parliamentarians discuss trifles, and their indifference to crucial issues for the country; at the reporting meeting of shareholders of the Triton insurance maritime company, he was amazed at the ease with which, it turns out, the company was organized by several scoundrels who were then penniless (and, in fact, in unfavorable circumstances, they didn’t make up for the injured were going to - the state’s debts would have taken the public in any case). Already a little familiar with the newspaper business, Arvid was indignant at the hidden springs and rods that had been uncovered upon closer examination, with the help of which businessmen from journalism and literature control public opinion: the publishing magnate Smith, for example, at his own discretion creates and destroys writer's reputations (“The other day I said to my Friend Ibsen: “Listen, Ibsen, - we are with you,” listen, Ibsen, write something for my magazine, I’ll pay as much as you want! “He wrote, I paid, but they paid me”) . And previously skeptical of religion, Arvid is amazed at the sheer volume of purely commercial operations that take place behind the signs of religious and charitable societies.

The theater is not the best of all (the theater world in the novel was not shown by the author through the eyes of the main character, but by his spiritual counterpart - the young Baron Renielm, who also decided to become an actor out of ideal motives). Attempts by the famous tragedian Falander to dissuade him do not stop Renelm, who also managed to fall in love with the sixteen-year-old actress Agnes, who also likes him. “Well,” Falander advises him, “let her take it, enjoy her life” (“love like birds of the air, not thinking about the hearth!”). No, the young moralist decides, he cannot marry Agnes now (as if they were asking him about this), spiritually he is not worthy of her yet.

Renelm’s theater career does not work out, he is not given a role. The director of the theater (he is the owner of a match factory, he is a great playwright) also does not give the role to Agnes, extorting love from her, which, as it turns out, has already been given to Falander, who is experienced in heart affairs. But Falander is not the main thing for Agnes either: a role is needed - and the director is doing his job. Wounded to the core, Falander opens his eyes to Renelm. In the morning, he invites Agnes, who spent the night with the director the night before, and at the same time Renjelma - in essence, he arranges a confrontation with them. The young baron cannot stand this scene and flees from the city where the troupe is touring, back to Stockholm, abandoning his first role as Horace in Hamlet, which he was supposed to play in the evening.

Meanwhile, Arvid Falk continues to uphold the lofty ideals of humanity and social justice. He attends meetings of the Riksdag and church councils, boards of church societies and charitable organizations, is present at police investigations, and happens at festivals, funerals, and public gatherings. And everywhere he hears beautiful words that do not mean what they should mean. So Falk develops an “extremely one-sided view of man as a lying public animal.” The discord of ideal with reality is his friends, artists and writers, solve in an original way and each in his own way. Igberg, for example, tells Falk that he has neither conviction nor honor, he only fulfills the most important duty of man - to survive. Sellen, a true talent, is completely immersed in solving his artistic problems. Medic Borg generally despises all social conventions, asserting will in their place - the only criterion of his, Borg, personal truth. Lundell, having become a fashionable portrait painter and having forgotten about all the problems, adjusts to the circumstances, and although his soul is black, he lives, trying not to look into his soul.

But one more thing remains. Once, having overheard the argument of the joiner with the ladies from his charity who visited his house, Arvid learns about the discontent ripening among the people. The carpenter directly threatens: for hundreds of years ordinary people, lower classes, beat the kings; next time they will hit loafers who live off other people's labor. So maybe the future belongs to the workers? Having achieved some recognition by this time as a poet, Arvid Falk leaves the festive table in his brother’s house, preferring to him the meeting of the Morning Star labor union, where, however, he hears only truths about the patriotism of the Swedes that are tired of him, the real worker, just that carpenter that Arvid heard did not give a word. A friend of Arvid Olle Montanus is also being dragged from the rostrum: he would have, because he had encroached on the “sacred cow” of the Swedes - patriotism! Olle argues that there is no national identity in Sweden: in fact, the south of the country always gravitated and gravitated to the Danes, the west, headed by the city of Gothenburg, to the British, the Finns live in the Finnish northern forests, metallurgy always founded it in Sweden in XVII century Walloons, and the gene pool of the nation was destroyed by military campaigns of the famous Swedish monarchs - Charles X, Charles XI and Charles XII. So long live internationalism! Long live Carl XII! And let Georg Shernelm - the creator of the Swedish literary language! If not for him, the Swedes would speak German understandable to all Europeans!

Arvid Falk leaves the insufficiently radical "Little Red Riding Hood" in the "Working Banner". But here he feels uncomfortable: contrary to the simplest common sense, the newspaper editor extols “everything is just a worker”, he runs the newspaper, forgetting the democracy he praises as a dictator or tyrant, not stopping even with corporal punishment (the editor beat the delivery boy). Moreover, and most importantly, it is also corrupt. Arvid is on the verge of despair ... And at that moment, the newspaper men from the Viper tabloid pick him up, from the embrace of which Borg, the most original and honest person, helps him out, recognizing nothing but his will. The Borg takes Arvid on a yacht to the skerries, where he treats him from cringing before a simple person ("from the habit of breaking his hat at the sight of any redneck"). The medical treatment of Borg gives brilliant results. Having lost faith in all of his ideals, Arvid Falk surrenders. He goes to work in a girls' gymnasium and serves freelance at the College of Cavalry Regiment Supply with Fresh Hay, as well as at the Distillery College and the Department of Taxation of the Dead. Falk also happens at family dinners, where women find him interesting, and from time to time he tells them nasty things. He also visits the Red Room, meeting there with Dr. Borg, Sellen and his other old acquaintances. The former rebel completely got rid of dangerous looks and became the most pleasant person in the world, for which his bosses and comrades love and respect him.

But nevertheless, Borg writes a few years later to the artist Sellen in Paris, it is unlikely that Falk calmed down; he is a fanatic of politics and knows what will burn out if he lets the flames go up, and therefore he is trying hard to extinguish the smoldering fire by persistent studies of numismatics (Falk is now doing this too). Borg does not exclude that Arvid already belongs to one of the secret societies that have arisen recently on the continent. And further. Falk married, having forcibly obtained an agreement for the marriage of his daughter from her father, a former military man.