The Curse of the Hyacinths

In the village where Lera Onegin grew up, there is a superstition about a certain stone: whoever finds it will become a wanderer. Lera finds a red tourmaline—and the superstition comes true. Lera is avoided by her peers because of her beauty, pursued by both married and unmarried men. And one day they even try to rape her. She is saved by the stepmother of her classmate Larissa. The stepmother offers the girl to marry her stepson and move to Moscow. Lera is forced to agree. If she only knew what lies behind Larissa’s obsessive “nobility” and the cloying beauty of her fiancé Mikki, she would have stayed in the hated village…

Writer Alena Dmitrieva, by the will of fate, encounters all these people at the art exhibition of Zhuzhka—Mikki’s friend and a talented artist devoted to classical plots. Seeing his painting where Apollo mourns the hyacinth he killed, Alena is forced to interfere in Lera’s fate. Dmitrieva knows for sure: delay is as good as death…