Burmin, a veteran of the first Russian war with Napoleon and the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, returns from there not quite the same person he was. The young landowner begins to suffer from strange attacks: his sense of smell intensifies, his body stops listening, and then unconsciousness follows. He spends years in solitude, hiding his transformation. A chance meeting with his former love awakens an old feeling in him - and Burmin returns to the world. In Smolensk society, nothing seemed to have changed, but a vague premonition of an impending war hung in the air: everyone is talking about it, but they do not know that it is already on the threshold. In her new book, Yulia Yakovleva masterfully reinterprets the tradition of 19th-century Russian prose, combining the great Russian novel and the science fiction thriller. The world she presents in 1812 is “a world of as yet hidden but terrible social tension in society. Some are squeezed by serfdom, others by the norms of generally accepted decency. War will release this tension and show who really is who.”