A provincial boy discovers the gift of seeing the world through someone else's eyes and, as an adult, ends up in the St. Petersburg House on the embankment opposite the Savior on Spilled Blood. This house also stands on the blood and suffering of the Soviet writers who lived there, but the ruthless accuser Felix calls this house the Chicken Coop on the Ditch, and portrays the history of its famous inhabitants as a story of cowardice and opportunism. But for the main character, who has to go through their suffering in a phantasmagoric world, Soviet literature appears in the image of an albatross in a chicken coop. The novel has many vivid sketches from the past and present, there is life, and tears, and love, there is the shock of the father, who saw an adult for the first time son, there is a monument to the Soviet era that has flown away, the novel combines everyday authenticity and fascination with a strong symbolic and phantasmagoric beginning. What is more valuable: truth or mercy? Melikhov's novel, with all its bitter truth, is not a merciless tribunal, but a search for understanding.