A young artist, Oswald Alving, who is beginning to become famous, is forced to abandon everything: art, his friends, his joyful life that promises happiness, because he is threatened by a terrible disease – softening of the brain… He is oppressed by the knowledge that he himself is to blame for everything, that by not particularly normal pastimes he has erased himself from life… He went to the estate to his mother, hoping that even if she does not look after him, she will give him at the right moment a poison powder that will immediately free him from the humiliating existence of an animal.
When the mother learned of her son's misfortune, her despair knew no bounds! Oswald, removed from home since childhood, barely knew his father and had grown accustomed to considering him an ideal man, especially since his mother always spoke only well of him... But she alone knew what a dissolute life her husband had led, what it had cost her to restrain him, and what a death he had died!... And now the unfortunate woman, left for her son with a depraved, perpetually drunk man, understood that her boy was being punished for his father's sins!...
All her attempts to instill in Oswald's heart hope for a favorable outcome of the illness, that all this was exaggerated, were futile... He did not believe in salvation and begged his mother to give him poison when it was all over for him... And she promised!... But when the terrible moment for both arrived and Oswald turned into a wreck before his mother's eyes, maternal love prevailed... she could not kill him!...
