It seems that Gogol laughed at the readers by offering them not the dead souls they were waiting for. But what if he couldn't tell everything as it happened? What if he was forbidden to talk about sorcerers who subjugate the dead, about statesmen influencing the minds of the living, and about the fact that beliefs do not lie: there is the light of God and the darkness of the devil, angels and righteous people who protect through prayer, and devils, sorcerers, witches and sinners who lead people astray? Here, in Bessarabia, they revive the dead, and no one can resist it. But young Nikolai Gogol, who had just published his first story “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” and was preparing for publication its sequel “The Night Before Christmas”, his Brotherhood in the person of Pushkin, Zhukovsky, young Lermontov and Pletnev and the secret adviser to Count Benckendorff, the chief detective The third section of the Guro Imperial Chancellery, despite their enmity, work together to fight the forces of darkness to protect the Motherland.