The action of Maria Galina's new novel takes place in an ancient city, a kind of cultural capital of the borderland, connecting (and at the same time separating) Eastern and Western Europe. The hero, who has arrived from afar, is trying to restore the history of a long-standing production of a very strange, judging by the vague mentions of memoirists, performance - the opera “The Death of Petronius”. Turning to a long-forgotten episode of the twenties of the last century, the hero plunges deeper and deeper into the modern life of the city and its artistic environment, and the closer he gets to the solution, the more actively the City and its mysterious inhabitants react to his investigation.