Jack London, as part of his Nordic Tales series, raises a problem that is difficult to articulate clearly. This is a situation when a person is faced with the inevitability of a terrible painful death. A choice arises before him, which is worse: to accept a painful end, clinging to life until the last breath, or to die voluntarily. The peculiarity of the story is that the main character is a citizen of the Russian Empire, a participant in the Polish uprising, exiled by the tsar to Siberia.
