Gogol Syndrome

1925. A half-abandoned city. Professor of psychiatry and forensic medicine from Moscow, Konstantin Fyodorovich Grenikh, after the revolutionary events and the Civil War goes to retrieve his daughter lost from an orphanage, adopted by foreigners, but on the way the stagecoach breaks down. An father who secretly longs for the old regime and a willful ten-year-old girl who passionately wants to join the pioneers are drawn into a series of mysterious incidents…

The son-in-law of the chairman of the local executive committee, writer Koshelev, arrived from Moscow hoping to reclaim his father-in-law’s factory. An eccentric decadent and a bully, he quarrels with the secretary of the local newspaper: everyone tries to please the new authorities, but one shines in the capital’s literary circles while the other languishes in the province. Koshelev tells Grenikh that he is sick with narcolepsy, and the next morning the writer is found dead…