The village of Ukleevo is known for the fact that “at the wake of the manufacturer Kostyukov, the old clerk saw granular caviar among the appetizers and began to eat it greedily; they pushed him, pulled his sleeve, but he seemed to be stiff with pleasure: he did not feel anything and only ate. I ate all the caviar, and there was four pounds in the bank. ” Since then they said about the village: "This is the same place where the deacon ate the whole caviar at the funeral." There are four factories in the village - three chintz and one tannery, which employ about four hundred workers. The tannery infected the river and meadow, the peasant cattle suffered from illnesses, and the factory was ordered to close, but it works secretly, and the bailiff and county doctor receive bribes for this.

There are two “decent houses” in the village; Grigory Petrovich Tsybukin, a tradesman, lives in one. For the sake of keeping a grocery store, and earns on the sale of vodka, cattle, grain, stolen things and "what will happen." He is buying up the forest, giving money for growth, "in general, the old man ... resourceful." Two sons: the eldest Anisim serves in the detective department in the city; the younger Stepan helps his father, but there is little help from him - he is weak in health and deaf. Help comes from his wife Aksinya, a beautiful and slender woman who keeps up with everything and everywhere: “old Tsybukin looked at her cheerfully, his eyes lit up, and at that time he regretted that not the eldest son was married to her, but the youngest, deaf , which, obviously, does not make much sense in female beauty. "

Tsybukin widows, "but a year after the wedding, his son could not stand it and got married himself." He was lucky with a bride named Varvara Nikolaevna. She is a prominent, beautiful and very religious woman. Helps the poor, pilgrims. One day, Stepan noticed that she took two octopus of tea in the shop without demand and reported to her father. The old man was not angry and, with all, told Barbara that she could take whatever she wanted. In his eyes, his wife seems to take away his sins, although Tsybukin himself is not religious, does not like the poor and angrily shouts at them: "God give!"

Anisim is rarely at home, but often sends gifts and letters with such phrases as, for example: "Dear dad and mother, I send you a pound of flower tea to satisfy your physical need." His character combines ignorance, rudeness, cynicism and sentimentality, the desire to seem educated. Tsybukin loves the eldest, proud that he "went to the academic part." Barbara does not like that Anisim is unmarried, although he was twenty-eighth. She sees this as a disorder, a violation of the correct, as she understands it, course of things. Anisima decide to marry. He agrees calmly and without enthusiasm; however, it seems, I am pleased that he also found a beautiful bride. He himself is homely, but says: “Well, but I, too, am not crooked. Our family of Tsybukins, I must say, is all beautiful. ” The bride's name is Lipa. A very poor girl for whom to enter the Tsybukins' house, from any point of view, is a gift of fate, for she is taken without a dowry.

She is terribly afraid and looks like “she seemed to want to say,“ Do what you want with me: I believe you. ” Her mother Praskovya is shy even more and answers everyone: “What are you, have mercy, sir ... Many are happy with you, sir.”

Anisim arrives three days before the wedding and brings silver rubles and fifty dollars to everyone as a present, the main charm of which is that all the coins are new, as for selection. On the way, he clearly drank and with an important look tells how he drank grape wine and ate some sauce, and it cost two lunch and a half for a person. “Which men are our fellow countrymen, - and for them, too, two and a half.” They didn’t eat anything. Surely the man understands the sauce! ” Old man Tsybukin does not believe that dinner can be so expensive, and looks with adoration at his son.

A detailed description of the wedding. They eat and drink a lot of bad wine and disgusting English bitter, made "it is not known from what". Anisim quickly gets drunk and boasts of a city friend named Samorodov, calling him "a special person." He boasts that in appearance he can recognize any thief. In the courtyard, a woman shouts: "Our blood was sucked, Herods, there is no death on you!" The noise, the commotion. Drunk Anisim is pushed into the room where Lipa is stripped, and the door is locked. Five days later, Anisim leaves for the city. He speaks with Barbara, and she complains that they live not in a divine way, that everything is built on deception. Anisim replies: “Whoever is assigned to what, mother <...> there is no God anyway, mother. What is there to disassemble! " He says that everyone steals and does not believe in God: the foreman, the clerk, and the clerk. “And if they go to church and keep fasts, this is so that people don’t talk badly about them, and in case that, in fact, there will be a Last Judgment.” Saying goodbye, Anisim says that Samorodov entangled him in some dark business: "I will be rich or lost." At the station, Tsybukin asks his son to stay “at home, at work,” but he refuses.

It turns out that Anisim's coins are fake. He made them with Samorodov and is now on trial. It shock the old man. He mixed fake coins with real ones, cannot distinguish between them. And although he himself has been cheating all his life, making fake money does not fit into his mind and gradually drives him crazy. Son condemned to hard labor, despite the efforts of the old man. In the house, Aksinya begins to run everyone. She hates Lipa and her child, realizing that in the future they will get the main inheritance. In front of Lipa, she scalds the baby with boiling water, and he, having suffered for a short time, dies. Lipa flees from home and meets wanderers on the way; one of them says in consolation: “Life is long, there will also be good and bad, everything will be. Great is Mother Russia! ” When Lipa comes home, the old man tells her: “Eh, Lipa ... you didn’t save the granddaughter ...” She is to blame, not Aksinya, whom the old man is afraid of. Lipa goes to mother. Aksinya finally becomes the main one in the house, although the old man is formally considered the owner. She enters into a share with the brother-merchants Khrymin - together they open a tavern at the station, crank up frauds, walk, have fun. Stepan is given a golden watch. The old man Tsybukin sinks so much that he does not remember food, eats nothing for days on end when they forget to feed him. In the evenings, he stands on the street with the peasants, listens to their conversations - and one day, following them, he meets Lipa and Praskovia. They bow to him, but he is silent, tears tremble in his eyes. It is evident that he had not eaten anything for a long time. Linden gives him a pie with porridge. "He took and began to eat <...> Lipa and Praskovya went on and were baptized for a long time later."