September, 1941. In a turn of events, young lovebirds Kostya and Nastya find themselves on board a barge that will evacuate people from the sieged Leningrad. At night the barge gets into the storm. When it starts sinking, enemy planes — but not rescuers — were the first to arrive at the scene.

This is a story of a blind girl who gets a chance of a lifetime. A rich man offers to her the precious gift of the eyesight, provided that she marries him blindly. This gift opens her eyes on the grim truth of life.

The relationship between Katya and her mother cannot be called simple anyway, but here, in the midst of the working day, Katya learns that her mother never flew with her friend to the resort, disappearing from the airport in an unknown direction. Having learned from the doctor the real reason for her mother's strange behavior, Katya not only reunites with her, but also reveals a lot of new things about her mother and herself.

A performance by the Alexandrinsky Theatre based on the eponymous play by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. The production is based on the stage version by Vsevolod Meyerhold and M. Korenyev (GOSTIM, 1926), directed by Valery Fokin.