Burmin, a veteran of the first Russian war with Napoleon and the battle of Austerlitz in 1805, returns from there not quite the same as he was. The young landowner begins to be tormented by strange attacks: the sense of smell becomes aggravated, the body ceases to obey, and then unconsciousness follows. He spends years in seclusion, hiding his transformation. A chance meeting with a former love awakens an old feeling in him - and Burmin returns to the world. Nothing seemed to have changed in Smolensk society, but a vague foreboding of the impending war hung in the air: everyone is talking about it, but they don't know that it is already on the threshold. In the new book, Yulia Yakovleva masterfully rethinks the tradition of Russian prose of the 19th century, combining a great Russian novel and a fantastic thriller. The world of 1812 she presented is "a world of so far hidden, but terrible social tension in society. Someone is squeezed by serfdom, someone by the norms of generally accepted decency. The war will release this tension and show who is who in reality.
