Siberian convicts and St. Petersburg aristocrats, gold miners and swindlers, Narodnaya Volya and Cossacks, loyalty and deception are found together on the pages of this novel. In 1882, nobleman Pavel Petrovich Domogatsky shot himself in St. Petersburg because of debts. The large family was left completely without means of subsistence. The mother of the family hopes to improve matters through the advantageous marriage of her eldest daughter, the favorite of her late father, sixteen-year-old Sophie. But Sophie herself has completely different plans. Unrequitedly in love with the charming swindler Serge Dubravin, she runs after him to Siberia, where she eventually ends up in the small town of Yegoryevsk, filled with hidden passions. Among others, gold miner Ivan Gordeev lives here, who, knowing about his imminent death, conceived a cunning intrigue: to write a poor nobleman-engineer out of St. Petersburg and, according to calculation, to marry him for the dowry of his lame daughter Masha. Masha knows nothing about this father’s plan and is going to go to the monastery. After experiencing many disappointments, Sophie finds herself at the center of local events and, lo and behold! - suddenly she recognizes in the arriving engineer Opalinsky her missing lover Dubravin... In the end, Sophie returns to St. Petersburg, and based on letters to her friend, she composes a novel about her Siberian adventures, which has an unexpected success.