Novgorod the Great

In Novgorod, a decaying Russian Imperial town south of St Petersburg, in August 1833, two travellers meet. One, a black merchant named Horatio, arrives from the south (Moscow) with two grand carriages; the other, a young widow, Ksenia, arrives from the north (St Petersburg), on foot. Putting up in a dilapidated inn for the night, where the inn-keeper is a dedicated enemy of poetry and paying guests, they are mutually attracted. During a pleasant evening together, they are alerted by an ancient resident of the town to the presence of a dying ‘foreign’ man, holed up in an abandoned tumbledown lodge. The pair go to investigate, and find a retired British army officer lying in squalor, surrounded by the memories of his life of dissipation. The two travellers are invited by the old nurse to watch over the dying man’s last hours; as they wait for the inevitable, all four of them relate stories from their past.