Major timber merchant Yegor Bulychyov is terminally ill. In his house, he is surrounded by insignificant and greedy people, impatiently waiting for his death. Clever and insightful Yegor understands that he lived his whole life with strangers. He protests in his own way against the dissimulation and hypocrisy of the "masters" - the clergy, liberals, against the foundations of the bourgeois society that is going to collapse. Bulychyov's dying curse drowns his class in the powerful sounds of a revolutionary song.