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 keep on working. Investigator Yakov Guro accidentally witnesses one such fit and realizes that Gogol's visions contain clues that could help solve actual crimes. Together, Gogol and Guro take on a particularly weird and baffling case that brings them to a small village of Dikanka, where everyone has a huge secret to hide.
The year is 1985. The unmanned Soviet space station Salyut 7, which is in low Earth orbit, suddenly stops responding to commands from the Control Center. If the space station - the pride of Soviet space engineering - falls from the sky, not only will it damage the image of the country, it could also be a disaster bringing untold casualties. To investigate the failure and prevent the catastrophe, people must be sent to the station. Yet no one in history has ever attempted to dock an uncontrolled vehicle in space. To this day, this mission is considered to be the most technically challenging in the history of space exploration.
Egor is a fearless state forest guard in the Siberian Taiga. He is a good family man, respected by his fellow villagers. He and his wife Natalia are expecting a second child. But one day Egor finds out that he has cancer and only two months left to live. No traditional medicine or shamanic magic can save him. Finally, left with no other options, he takes a desperate attempt to trick death. Egor chooses to take the identity of a woman as a way of fighting the disease. His family and the local society now have to accept his new self.