In April 1905, the hero of this book, Russian nobleman Nikolai Blinov, tried to stop the Zhytomyr Jewish pogrom and died at the hands of the pogromists. There were other events in his life: a trip to the “famine” of 1899, “soldiership”, participation in the Combat Organization of the Social Revolutionaries. A documentary novel by the St. Petersburg writer and scientist Alexander Laskin, written on the basis of miraculously preserved personal archives, tells about the short but extremely eventful fate of Blinov, about his enemies and like-minded people.