Dark room on the top floor of the house. Down there, Ivan Shatov has been sleeping for a long time. However, his good friend Alexey is still awake, and is unlikely to sleep anytime soon. Probably he won't sleep at all.

He sits almost motionless, staring somewhere at one point. A couple of minutes ago he was wandering back and forth around the room and drinking tea. Now the hour had cooled down and remained unfinished on the table.

Kirillov didn’t even notice that someone's here.