The gaping young man - the hero of A. Ilichevsky's novel "The House in Meshchera" - sensitive to the analysis of his perceptions and not really deciding what was happening around him, did not even have time to blink an eye when his companion, more susceptible to the state of things, made a brilliant career and felt what power was like over those whom she was ahead of in adapting to the upcoming circumstances. The heroine of the story, more of a “quiet” person than an Amazon, is a psychologist who works in a hospice where terminally ill patients are kept. The goal of the institution, founded in Russia by the American Cortez, is to prepare terminal patients for their fatal fate in an atmosphere of mental balance and alleviate the suffering of the “transition period.” This house of the doomed represents a complex ethical and architectural project, a system of remedies, medical and psychological, that Cortez developed and implemented throughout the world.