What do we know about the reign of Emperor Nicholas I? Most often, it is only that this monarch suppressed the Decembrist uprising and tyrannized both over his subjects and over all of Europe. An inventor from the 21st century built a time machine, with the help of which he and his friends managed to get to 1840 - the middle of the emperor’s reign Nicholas the First. They were surprised to realize that their knowledge did not coincide with what they had gleaned from Soviet history textbooks. And that the people who lived in those days were not at all like the victims of the “tyrant and despot” who ruled Russia in those years. In turn, people of the 19th century were very surprised by the morals and customs of our contemporaries. Love and hate, friendship and betrayal - these feelings were the result of the meeting of the past with the future.