The Head of Shamil

In the Zubov family, for two hundred years there hasn’t been a single general. Colonel Sergey Zubov continues the tradition: discharged due to wounds, a prosthetic instead of a leg, and they no longer accept him to fight.

He falls asleep over a book about an ancestor—a Cossack, Fyodor Zubov, a recruit of the Caucasus Line in 1840. He wakes up as him.

Ahead are twenty-four years of war, which he knows from books. Beside him are scouts-plastuny, mountain forests, a flintlock rifle. And there is also Yusup, a Tatar, who keeps a list of his strange words and hasn’t yet decided what to do with them.