Young scientist Ilya Dubnov, a U.S. citizen, after a difficult divorce, goes to the Caspian, to the places of his childhood. There, on the outskirts of the former Soviet empire, he meets a school friend, Hashem Sagidi, a man from Iran. A man of his nature, he lives in a preserve and teaches falcons hunting. In the steppe, together with gamekeepers, he organizes a kind of phalanstery—the Apsheron Regiment named after Velimir Khlebnikov—carrying the seed of a new faith…