It received its premiere at the State Opera House, Syktyvkar, the chief city of the Komi Republic, in the Russian Federation on 2 October 2009.
In 2008, Noskov began to rework an unpublished verse libretto by Albert Vaneev, originally written in 1984 and based on the life of the major Komi poet Ivan Kuratov.
It focused on Kuratov's career as a teacher in Ust-Sysolsk in the 1860s, where he promoted Komi culture in the face of opposition from the local Russophile and tsarist authorities.
Noskov's solution to these problems was to extend the action to cover Kuratov's childhood as well as his old age in Kazakhstan and to translate parts of the text into Russian.
The premiere was produced by Ija Bobrakova; it was difficult to find performers with sufficient command of Komi to sing the roles and some had to have the words with them on stage.