[1][2][3][4] The events of Pelevin's early period story take place in Soviet times (judging by the line "we've had so much incomprehensible stuff these seventy years" – in the second half of the 1980s).
[6] The morning after the hangover it turns out that the idea is rooted in the soul of its inventor in the form of a strange word "uhryab", Russian for "ухряб".
[3] The hero begins to see the ubiquitous "uhryab" everywhere: in the sounds of chopping meat, in a hidden form in works of classical literature, as an acrostic in slogans («Успеха участникам XI международного фестиваля за разоружение и ядерную безопасность!», "Success to participants of the XI International Festival for Disarmament and Nuclear Safety!
The mania leads to the hero's voluntary death – outside the city in a snow-covered pit, which appears to him to be "an uhryab in its original form," which is the natural end of the story, the last, ninth chapter of which consists of one sentence: "They found him two days later – skiers, by a red sock sticking out of the snow.
Uhryab in its pure form is "a long snowy hole with two rather tall, half the height of a red deer, icy ridges on the edges.