The air inside the salon was thick with the slow decay of tobacco smoke and forgotten dreams. The room, dimly lit by flickering gas lamps and the dying glow of a dozen candles, seemed to exist outside of time itself — a sanctuary for the restless minds and broken souls of Moscow’s intellectual elite. Velvet drapes, heavy and moth-eaten, hung over tall windows that no one dared open. The scent of stale wine, burning wax, and wet wool mingled with the bitter aroma of cigarettes, staining the air with something almost tangible, something that clung to the lungs and the soul alike.

In the corner, beneath the weight of shadows that the dim light could not reach, sat Alexei Nikolayevich Rozhkov.

He did not speak. He never did in such places. He came not for conversation, nor for the hollow laughter of poets and failed revolutionaries who filled the room with words they themselves did not believe. He came to observe, to absorb, to dissect — like a surgeon cutting into a corpse long since cold.

Before him, on the cracked wooden table, rested a small leather-bound notebook, its edges worn and stained with ink. The pages within were filled with scrawled fragments of thought, half-finished sentences that bled from a mind that refused to rest. By the dim light of a candle slowly drowning in its own wax, Alexei wrote with the deliberate slowness of a man who understood that words, once released, could never be taken back.

’To think is to suffer. To see the world as it is, stripped of its illusions, is to stand naked before the void and feel it staring back.’

The ink bled slightly as he dragged the nib of his pen across the fragile paper, his hand steady despite the tremor that lived in his bones. He paused only to tap ash from his cigarette into a cracked porcelain dish, the ember briefly flaring before fading to black. Around him, men spoke of revolution — of tearing down the empire, of blood in the streets, of justice that could only be born from violence. Yet their words lacked conviction- realism.