Anatoliy Larionov

On a gloomy March 1881, an old, sick man was dying in the Nikolaevsky military land hospital in St. Petersburg. Delirium tremens had done its dirty work: there was no hope for recovery. And this “old man” had just turned 42 years old, and it was the great Russian composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. Who knows what visions, what memories swarmed in his fevered imagination in rare moments of enlightenment?

Police are detaining an opposition newspaper journalist on suspicion of murder. The prosecution's evidence is scanty and fragile. But a dirty political fuss has developed around this case. The fate and life of a person become the stake in the struggle for power.

A group of young men bursts into a hotel where several guests are already staying, not long after they had run over a motorcyclist and his passenger with their car. Brandishing a knife, they demand that the guests give them a car.

In the capital of a European country, two people have gone missing. One of them is Theodore Amsted, a successful official, a family man, and a fairly wealthy person. The other is Michael Moginson, a strange, reclusive oddball living in poverty. Soon, a body is found at a military training ground, the victim of a bomb explosion. The police begin an investigation...

About the life of the Russian biologist Ivan Michurin. 1912 year. Having rejected American offers to work abroad, Michurin continues his research in the Russian Empire, despite the fact that his ideas are not perceived by the tsarist government, the church and idealistic science. Michurin is supported by prominent scientists of the country and he continues to work hard. After the October Revolution, a small Michurin garden in the city of Kozlov (the biologist's homeland) becomes a large state nursery.

The hero saw among his colleagues a man whom he had met during the war in the dungeons of the Gestapo. This man reported that a thief from the same cell was trying to escape. The “thief” was shot, and later it turned out that he was the leader of the underground...

October 1941. The young surgeon Vera Treshnikova is forced, in the name of saving many lives, to become the head of a German hospital for civilians, where she continued her underground struggle against the Germans. And now, after the liberation of the city, she is suspected of aiding and abetting the Nazis.

The plot is based on the story of the English provincial newspaper "Northern Light", which was able to hold its own in the face of tough competition from large newspaper monopolies...