A new doctor from Moscow arrives at a provincial mental institution. His interest is the peculiarities of the psyche of a patient who believes that he is Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated the last Russian tsar. In the course of their conversations it transpires that the patient is a kind of philosopher, not without a gift for suggestion. In a while the doctor himself falls under his patient’s influence: he tends to relive that fatal night of June 16-17, 1918 when, without any investigation or trial, Tsar Nicholas II, who had recently abdicated, was murdered, together with his wife, daughters and incurably ill heir. Soon the doctor realizes that the tragedy of the last Russian tsar is in part his own tragedy, too…

St. Petersburg, 1860. After a member of the imperial family is assassinated, Fyodor Dostoevsky meets a man institutionalized in a mental asylum — who confesses taking part in the terrorist plot and reveals that his fellow conspirators are planning to kill another of the Tsar’s relatives. Plagued by debts and struggling to finish his latest novel, Dostoevsky must act fast to call off the attack.