Nikolai, Leviathan's hotheaded main character, sees his life consumed by the fight to save his seashore property from the town's mayor. I'll kill him if he builds a palace here, shouts Nikolai, in a reference to current Russian leaders' proclivity for erecting garish monuments to their personal splendor Putin's Italianate palace on the Black sea, for example, allegedly cost more than 1 billion.