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Just after the turn of the century, a poet marries an ardent student. Their love, at first so passionate, turns bitter, as the poet continues having affairs and goes off carousing. He even infects his young wife with syphilis. Finland is still a part of Imperial Russia, and the poet is involved in the independence movement. He has an affair which is sufficiently serious that his mistress and his wife have a fight in his wine cellar, destroying much of his prized wine collection.