The two share a group of friends who, together, explore concepts of sexuality, social pressure and revolution, as well as life and death as fellow student Semenov battles with the fatal sentence of consumption.
Characters wrestle with and spar by using a variety of in-vogue philosophies, including egoism, nihilism, Tolstoyanism, Christianity, utopian socialism, and middlebrow morality.
Colin Wilson wrote about Sanin:[2] "The book's hero sneers at the unhealthy moral preoccupations of most Russians, and preaches a doctrine of sunlight and frank sensuality.
According to Czech scholar and president Tomas Masaryk, "Saninism" absorbed some of the energy that tsarist repression prevented from expressing itself politically, inspiring a "crude hedonism" in a "section of the intelligentsia" and prompting the formation of student societies promoting "free love.
They put their efforts to discrediting the book, whose references to the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and whose precipitation of the dramatic changes in the morality and political life of the following decades were, in their view, dangerous for the Russian people.