About the book: 2002 / "...On a distant outskirts, in the province of Penza (God, what a wilderness it was!), there lived a landowner Semyon Smagin, the owner of six hundred shower. When Emelyan Pugachev appeared at his estate, Smagin was immediately hanged, and his wife and small children hid in a haystack, and there they sat quietly until the “Tsar-Father” moved to other lands... Varenka was only one and a half years old at that time…»