A gloomy winter day, not long before Christmas: a new owner arrives for a health retreat at his big country manor house, recently inherited from his late grandmother. He is a 28-year-old unmarried nobleman, Sukhumov-Podgrudsky…
The story’s hero, Leonid Platonovich, could not expect that his grandmother’s diary, her ancestors’ portraits, legends about a treasure, ghosts, the methods of a zemstvo doctor, the influence of the local priest’s teacher and family—ALL of it would change his life so drastically…