On a sunny day in the mountains of Kazakhstan in 1937, the year that became known in Russia as the Year of Terror, a group of archaeologists stare in wonder at fragments of a gold diadem, the chance find of local fishermen. On the same day the love of chief archaeologist Georgi Zybin"s life rings him after a three year silence; Fathr Andrey puts the finishing touches to a treatise on the trial of Christ; Vladimir Kornilov, Zybin"s assistant, puts two bottles of champagne to cool in a mountain stream; while down in the ancient city of Alma-Ata, ambitious NKVD officer Yokov Neiman dreams of a show trial to rival those taking place in Moscow...For all of them life is about to change utterly. The disappearance of the witnesses and the gold gives Neiman his opportunity: he arrests Zybin as the linchpin in a conspiracy to sabotage the work of the museum and steal Soviet property. Now the interrogation can begin. A nightmarish Kafkaesque comedy; the tragedy of Russia under Stalin; the romance of a man beloved; a duel between Soviet expediency and humanist values (The Faculty of Useless Knowledge of the title); an apocryphal retelling of the passion; a deadly serious debate about the nature of justice - Dombrovky"s masterpiece is all these things, but above all it is a subtle and complex novel, packed with characters as unpredictable as life itself.