No meteorites hit Earth, no terrorists put the world in danger, no atomic war was started, but something did go wrong. Contact between most towns on Earth has been severed. A small ring-like area in Eastern Europe still has electricity, and...

The year 1829. Nikolay Gogol, a young Third Section clerk, is desperate: his own books seem shallow and mediocre, so he keeps buying entire print runs just to burn them all. He is suffering from violent epileptic seizures and struggles to...