The most vivid and most painful recollection of the hero of the novel (in the future we will call him the hero, because the narrator, a young journalist, a Russian emigrant in Paris, has no name, the novel is written in the first person) is a memory of what happened during the years of the Civil War killing. Once, in the summer, in the south of Russia, after the end of the battle, the hero rides a black mare along a deserted road, and most of all he wants to sleep. On one of the turns of the road the horse falls heavily and instantly at full gallop. Having risen to his feet, the hero sees a rider approaching him on a huge white horse. The rider throws a rifle to his shoulder. The hero has not had a rifle for a long time, but there is a revolver, which he hardly pulls out from a new and tight holster, and shoots. The horseman is falling. The hero hardly approaches him. This man - a blond man, twenty-two or twenty-three years old - is clearly dying, blood is bubbling on his lips. He opens his dim eyes, does not say a word and closes them again. A gust of wind brings the stomp of several horses to the hero. Sensing danger, he quickly leaves on the stallion of the slain. A few days before leaving Russia, the hero sells a stallion, throws a revolver into the sea, and from the entire episode he only has a painful memory. A few years later, when he had been living in Paris for a long time, he came across a collection of short stories by an English author whose name - Alexander Wolf - was completely unfamiliar. The story "Adventure in the steppe" amazes the hero. It begins with praise to the white stallion (“He was so good that I would like to compare it with one of the horses mentioned in the Apocalypse”). The following is a description of the scene experienced by the hero: an unbearably hot day, a winding road, a rider on a black mare, who fell with her. The white stallion continued to walk to the place where, as the author wrote, a man with a revolver stood with incomprehensible immobility. Then the author delayed the horse's swift move and put the rifle on his shoulder, but suddenly he felt a mortal pain in his body and hot darkness in his eyes. In his dying delirium, he felt that someone was standing above him, he opened his eyes to see his death. To his surprise, a boy of about fifteen bent over him, with a pale, tired face and distant, possibly sleepy, eyes. Then the boy walked away, and the author again lost his senses and came to his senses only many days later in the hospital. “The fact that he got into me,” wrote Alexander Wolf, “was most likely by accident, but, of course, I would be the last person to reproach him with this.”
The hero understands that the author of the book, Alexander Wolf, is the man he shot at. What remains unclear is how he could turn out to be an English writer. The hero wants to see Wolf. Once in London, he comes to the director of the publishing house that issued the book, but it turns out that Wolf is not in England.
In Paris, the hero must make a report on the final of the World Boxing Championship. An unfamiliar young woman asks to lead her to the match, and, the hero notes, such an appeal to a stranger is not characteristic of her. The woman is a compatriot of the hero. Their acquaintance continues. Elena Nikolaevna - that is the name of the woman - was recently widowed, her husband was an American, she herself lived in London for some time.
They become lovers, a feeling for Elena transforms the world for the hero - "everything seemed to me changed and different, like a forest after the rain." But something in Elena remains closed to the hero, and he is convinced that for a certain period of her life “some kind of shadow fell”. Once she tells him how in London, visiting friends, she met a man who soon became her lover. This man was smart, educated, he opened to her a whole world that she did not know, and “there was a raid of cold and calm despair on all this,” which she did not cease to resist inwardly. "The best, most beautiful things lost their charm as soon as he touched them." But his appeal was irresistible. On a long journey towards death, he was supported by the use of morphine. He tried to teach Elena Nikolaevna to morphine, but he did not succeed. This man’s influence on her was enormous: what seemed important and significant to her was irresistible and, as it seemed to her, irretrievably lost its value. With the last effort of her will, she packed up her things and left for Paris. But before that, Elena had done everything she could to bring him back to normal. In the last conversation with her, he said that she would never be the same as before, because it was unlikely and because he would not allow it. Having left him, Elena was convinced that he was in many ways right. She was poisoned by his proximity and is only now beginning to feel that maybe this is not irrevocable.
In a Russian restaurant, the hero catches his acquaintance, Vladimir Petrovich Voznesensky, who had previously told him about Alexander Wolf (in particular, that his lover, gypsy Marina, had gone to Wolf). Voznesensky introduces the hero to a person sitting next to him; it turns out that this is Alexander Wolf. The hero, having seen Wolf the next day, tells his part of the story described in the story. The conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Ascension, and Wolf and the hero meet again. Wolf mentions the purpose of his visit to Paris - this is "a solution to one complex psychological problem." Analyzing his impressions after meeting with Wolf, the hero realizes that Wolf brings death or goes towards it, personifying a blind movement.
The hero, writing an article about the sudden dramatic death of a Parisian robber, the "curly Pierrot," with whom he was familiar, feels longing and depression. The only person he wants to see is Elena. And, without waiting for four hours, when she promised to come to him, he himself goes to her, opens the door with his key and hears raised voices from her room. Then the terrible cry of Elena is heard: "Never, do you hear, never!" - and the sound of broken glass and a shot are heard. Pulling out a revolver, the hero runs into the room, sees Elena and the man with the weapon pointing at her and shoots him without aiming. Sees blood on Elena’s white dress - she is wounded in her left shoulder. Then he leans over the fallen man and - “time has deepened and disappeared” - sees the dead eyes of Alexander Wolf in front of him.
