Dear Honor

Once, the writer and historian V. M. Glinka, working with museum collections and archives, found an old engraving — a portrait of an officer with military orders on his uniform, leaning on crutches, with the inscription "Brave Colonel Nepesin"; and a few years later — a drawing of a leg prosthesis, designed by the famous inventor I. P. Kulibin for the artillery officer Nepesin. This extraordinary case intrigued the writer — thus began the work on the books about the outstanding Russian officer Sergey Vasilievich Nepesin. In the first book "The Tale of Sergey Nepesin," the reader learns about the childhood and youth of the main character, his studies at the Engineering and Artillery Corps, and his participation in the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1791.

The novel "Dear Honor" tells about the further fate of this extraordinary man. Losing a leg as a youth during the storming of Ochakov, Nepesin entered service as the commander of a guard company at the Tula Arms Factory, but he was later retired by Arakcheyev due to the fact that the prosthesis could creak during parade and thus disrupt the decorum of the ceremony, and he was appointed as the mayor of Velikiye Luki. With the onset of the Patriotic War of 1812, he volunteered for active service, soon becoming famous as a brave partisan commander (the leg prosthesis, created by Kulibin, allowed him to ride and even dance) and was transferred for distinction to the Semenovsky Guards Regiment, with which he reached Paris.