It is the year nineteen of the twentieth century, shortly after the revolution. A country estate in a Russian provincial town, whose first floor has been converted into a museum of the good life. The castle is inhabited by peculiar figures who have settled there: power-hungry upstarts taking advantage of the moment, survival-savvy peasants, an elderly governess now the caretaker of two remaining peacocks, and a gardener who tirelessly tends to the garden from which all the trees have long since disappeared. In this society, the village schoolteacher Alpatow is supposed to spread the light of education—a seemingly hopeless task amidst hunger, civil war, and superstition. Michail Prischwin was considered an apolitical author throughout his life, even until Perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall, known as a singer of Russian nature.