In the year 1891, when the eleven-year-old Proshka lives in a village, famine strikes. Proshka loses his sister and parents. Somewhere in an N-th governorate there is his uncle Savely, and Proshka is obsessed with finding his relatives. He leaves the orphanage and goes in search.
But trouble is: Proshka can’t remember the address. Is the uncle in Petrovo? Pokrovka? Or Nikolaevka?
Proshka becomes a beggar and, one day, wanders onto a farmstead people call a bad place. He circles around the forest and can’t get out of that strange farmstead.