An action-packed work based on a documentary narration about the confrontation in Soviet science of the 1940–1950s between true genetic scientists and ignorant opportunists - supporters of the “academic agronomist” T. D. Lysenko, who assured that with proper care, rye can grow wheat; about how the former, in an atmosphere of complete domination of the latter and with the unexpected support of individual representatives of different social strata, secretly continue their experiments, putting on a forced guise of conformity and thereby explaining the phenomenon of total hypocrisy, the “double” existence of people of Soviet society. For this novel in 1988 the writer was awarded the USSR State Prize.