The narrator of Dusk of the Gods of the Steppe attends classes at the Gorky Institute in Moscow, alongside many Soviet writers. He interacts with young Russian girls, such as Linda, whom he loves. The deterioration of Albania's relations with the Soviet Union, the Pasternak affair, and a smallpox epidemic will tear apart the facade of phenomena and pretenses, revealing that 'the time of deceit' has arrived.

After summer in Riga, where the narrator spends his holidays in a retreat with a group of elderly writers who play ping-pong, he follows the gilded leaves of autumn in the outskirts of Moscow, the Muscovite winter, a cemetery, the stifling chaos of wine drinking in this Tower of Babel, at the Gorky Institute - where dust increasingly covers the weak light of the lamps every day - the imposed isolation, death, real or symbolic.

In Red Square, the motionless, stout silhouettes of the Soviet leaders, the gods of the steppe, are shattered within the cold. [Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]