Volume II of Tammsaare's monumental pentalogy portrays Indrek's education and his shift to the polyglot city from the countryside which was the Estonian heartland at the time. This new environment is a vortex of prejudices and national rivalries nevertheless held together in practice by a strange and very human tolerance.

"This second volume of A.H. Tammsaare's monumental pentalogy portrays the education of Indrek who emerges here as the protagonist and will remain so throughout the next three volumes. ... Indrek is the story of moving to the polyglot city and abandoning the countryside which at that time was the heartland of the Estonian language. This new environment is a vortex of prejudices and national rivalries nevertheless held together in practice by a strange and very human tolerance. The boarding school is as dysfunctional as any Dickensian one, but it is a great deal more benevolent. Russians, Germans, Poles, Latvians and Caucasians mix with the Estonian majority, and somehow compromises are nearly always arrived at in spite of--or possibly because of--some extraordinary theatrics, in which Mr Maurus must outperform not only all the other characters in the book but all other celebrated headmasters created by European literature over the centuries. Indrek not only has to come to terms with this world so utterly unsuited to his shy and innocent rural upbringing, but he also has to deal with his first encounters with love and death."--