A young man arrives in a village to visit his uncle, a retired colonel, and finds the local community "enslaved" by a man who, according to him, "will remain in history." The situation develops into a tragicomedy and takes on elements of phantasmagoria.

On one May day in 1864, N. G. Chernyshevsky, a writer and revolutionary democrat, was declared a state criminal and sentenced to hard labor in Siberian mines. A group of young people, raznochintsy, is seeking to include them in the expedition of the Russian Geographical Society with the secret goal of organizing Chernyshevsky’s escape...