A film from the series The Game of Fate.

The first rector of St Volodymyr's University of Kyiv (now Taras Shevchenko University), Mykhailo Maksymovych, was a scholar of encyclopaedic knowledge. He devoted himself to science, leaving a significant number of works on botany, zoology, physics and philology, geography, ethnography and philosophy, history, and archeology. At first, his personal life did not work out. Mikhail was not destined to marry the girl he dreamed of and called "nymphaea candida", or "white lily". Because she was already engaged. But before she died, the "nymph Candida" made him promise to marry her virgin daughter, who was 30 years younger than he was.