USSR, early 1970s. An old, once provincial town several hundred kilometers from Moscow. Anna, a PhD student in art history who recently defended her dissertation on the works of the icon painter Dionysius, learns that a sixteenth-century icon has disappeared from a nearby monastery. Anna sets off in the footsteps of the missing image of the Savior, not realizing that these are traces of blood. Alexey Smirnov von Rauch (1937–2009) made a lasting impression on the regulars of the Yuzhinsky circle in the 1960s with his prose and on connoisseurs of modernism in the Czech Republic and Germany with his paintings. Having severed ties with the outside world, Smirnov spent thirty years within the walls of churches and monasteries, restoring frescoes and observing the parallel life of Soviet society, where the surviving descendants of nobles, fugitive monks, enterprising foreign tourists, declassed elements, and the ubiquitous KGB were all entangled in a stifling struggle. The gripping, truthful, and all the more brutal novel, 'The Tablet of Dionysius,' was written in 1976 and shelved with no prospect of publication. A lost masterpiece of Russian literature, it convincingly demonstrates that the central questions of life in Rus' have not changed in fifty or five hundred years.