The tradesman Konstantin Mironov lives in a remote provincial city. When he was a child, his parents drank and often scandalized. At the same time, her mother was a religious person and went to a monastery for a pilgrimage. Father was known as an eccentric. For example, he was entertained by attaching wooden horns with rubber balls to the doors, which whistled disgustingly when the door opened. In general, the father tried to “drown out” the boredom of life with different sounds: he either listened to a music box that his mother once broke in his hearts, then brought home a globe, which, turning around its axis, played a “fawn-fawn” ... Before his father, his mother was married to his boss, who shot his father with a pistol. “Woe is it that he did not kill you!” - often shouted mother to father.

Konstantin Mironov is also an eccentric and a visionary. He dreams of going to Paris. He has never been abroad and therefore imagines Paris as a city where everything is decidedly blue: the sky, people, and houses. The dream of Paris and its “blue life” brightens up the boredom of a provincial city, but also disrupts Mironov’s connection with reality. People begin to notice something strange in him and shun him.

The first signs of madness make themselves felt when Mironov decides to paint his house in blue in order to at least partially realize his dream. The house is painted by a strange person - the Joiner, who is a bit like a boring provincial trait. Instead of blue paint, he uses blue, and the result is monstrous, especially since the painter with a yellow paint draws a creature on the facade that remotely resembles a fish. The townspeople of the city perceive this as a challenge to them, because no one paints their houses in a similar color.

At the same time, Mironov falls in love with Lisa Rozanova, the daughter of a man respected in the city. But he again “invents” the object of his love: Lisa is an ordinary bourgeois, she does not understand Mironov’s romantic dreams.

In the end, Mironov goes crazy. He is cured by a local doctor, and Mironov becomes an ordinary bookbinder, moderately businesslike, moderately greedy, etc. He meets a storyteller, to whom he tells the story of his madness.