Still bearing scars from the gulag, a freed POW wanders across Russia to an industrial town in Eastern Europe. In its massive Hotel Savoy, he meets a surreal case of characters - the dancer Stasia, a former factory owner obsessed with winning the lottery, and a host of cigar-puffing plutocrats and Slav revolutionaries - waiting in vain for something to happen: the return from America of a tycoon named Bloomfield. Like Europe itself in 1932, the hotel is the stage upon which characters follow fate to its tragic destination.