V. Yesenkov's novel tells about that period of F. M. Dostoevsky's life when the writer and his young wife, hiding from creditors, were forced to live abroad (summer-autumn 1867). Constant worry about money does not stop the work of the writer’s creative thought. Readers will learn how Dostoevsky’s first novel “Poor People” was created, will witness the birth of the idea for the novel “The Idiot”, and will see how the writer’s relationships developed with his great contemporaries - Nekrasov, Belinsky, Goncharov, Turgenev, Ogarev.