The narrator of "The Dawn of the Gods of the Steppe" attends classes at the Gorky Institute in Moscow, along with many Soviet writers. He socializes with young Russian women, such as Linda, whom he loves. The deterioration of Albania's relationship with the Soviet Union, the Pasternak affair, and an epidemic of blessings will rupture the fabric of appearances and pretenses, revealing that "the time of deceit" has arrived. After spending the summer in Riga, where the narrator spends his vacation at a retreat with the company of elderly writers playing ping-pong, the golden autumn leaves follow on the outskirts of Moscow, the Moscow winter, a cemetery, the suffocating chaos of drunkenness in this tower of Babel, in the dormitory of the Gorky Institute - where dust increasingly covers the weak light of the lamps every day - the imposed isolation, death, real or symbolic. On Red Square, the motionless, stout silhouettes of the Soviet leaders, the gods of the steppe, shatter in the icy cold.