Georgy Ivanovich Shilin (1896–1938) was a Soviet prose writer and a participant in World War I. His first book received a positive evaluation from Maxim Gorky. The height of his writing career fell in the 1920s–1930s, after which the author was forgotten for a long time. Shilin’s most famous novel is “The Leprous Ones.” The writer devoted himself to studying the fight against leprosy—this terrible, mythologized disease—because of his own personal story: when he came to his hometown for a time, he learned that his old friend was ill and placed in a leprosarium. That was the first time the writer found himself “in the sick yard,” and for several days he lived among lepers. Later, Shilin visited leprosariums in different cities of the USSR multiple times. For his novel, he studied available medical literature, consulted prominent specialists, and even took part in the work of a doctors’ congress for leprologists. In addition to a serious scientific foundation, the novel stands out for its vivid, lifelike characters: patients whose public lives ended, even though physically they continued to exist—often already without any hope of ever leaving the leprosarium; and doctors devoted to science and their calling with total self-sacrifice, unwilling to yield to one of the oldest known diseases of humankind.