Set in a quasi-Russian dreamscape, the blackly comic, darkly beautiful poems and fables contained in this vast volume chronicle, in an elaborate symphonic arrangement of recurring themes and motifs, the miscellaneous travails of several interacting characters—ballerina, chess master, opera tenor, cabaret chanteuse (if not, too, the odd street urchin, idiot, or organ grinder)—all under the vigilant glare of the anarchically violent, subversively vulgar Petrushka puppet thwacking away savagely at his various adversaries with his beloved slapstick. By turns elegant, satirical, and absurd, the collection, like its namesake, revels throughout in the perverse and grotesque, yet always with mischievous wit and rhetorical invention.