At long last, King Dalimil and Queen Eliška have produced an heir, Princess Růženka. Consumed with envy, Eliška’s sister Melánie casts a curse: On the day Růženka turns seventeen, she will prick her finger and fall into a deep sleep together with the entire kingdom.

The story takes place in Italy, a country where terrorism and kidnappings are almost daily occurrences. Rampant banditry, injustice, coercion, and ultimately hopelessness stem from political events. Sunny Italy is no longer just a place of ancient monuments and tables laden with fine wine. Now it is primarily a place of ever-deepening social and political divisions.

The holidays of Vince Adamek, a student of the agricultural school in his native village in South Moravia, are purely working. He likes his job as a zootechnician so much that he seems to turn down an assistant position at the university...

The merging of reality with legend, the image of reality (Ruthenian Verkhovyna in the 1920s) and its reflection in people's minds - this is what characterizes the story of the modern Transcarpathian bandit Nikola Šuhaj, who "took from the rich and gave to the poor". Ivan Olbracht's novel from the 1930s, one of the artistic peaks of modern Czech prose, is a dramatic story about a war deserter, his love for the beautiful Eržica, a story about revenge for wrongs, persecution, betrayal and death. Šuhaj's fate merged with legends in people's memory. By combining elements of the past and the present, document and myth, the story turned into a ballad about how eternal and strong the human dream of freedom and happiness is.