A young reservist doctor sent by the government of Smolensk lands at twenty-four years in a remote corner he will lead the hospital. Terrified at the prospect of having to engage in an emergency tracheotomy on a three year old girl, less than two months after the end of his studies, the young doctor is prepared with cold to perform an operation ever conducted sweats. He opens the throat with a scalpel, spreads skins, sponge a stream of black blood. "From windpipe, no trace. My wound was unlike any burning." Literary narratives fed from personal experience from 1916 to 1917, the notebooks of a young doctor, long censored, were published in Russia after the death of Bulgakov in the sixties.