Performance at the Maly Theater from the novel by the Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.

The plot is based on the story of the English provincial newspaper "Northern Light", which was able to hold its own in the face of tough competition from large newspaper monopolies...

The director's story about his life in the Soviet Union before his departure to Israel in 1971. The movie interweaves chronicle-documentary footage and fragments of Mikhail Kalik's films.

In the boarding house of Wanda Ogrodskaya and her younger sister Anna, live the rich widow Sophia Parmen with her governess Yanina and the young lawyer Pyotr Bukovich, with whom all the women of the house are in love. Mrs. Sophia invites the lawyer to marry her, but is refused - Peter loves the dowry-free Anna. In revenge, Sophia gives a rich dowry to her governess, and Peter marries Yanina.

Alexander Chatsky returns from three years abroad, hoping to rekindle a romance with his childhood sweetheart Sophie. In the meantime, however, she has fallen in love with Molchalin, her father's scheming secretary. As scandal erupts, Chatsky is met with accusations of madness.

A former front-line soldier, who worked at his post for a quarter of a century, local commissioner Lieutenant Semyon Mitrofanovich Kovalev, going to the department in the morning, was most sad that tomorrow he would no longer have to go to service: tomorrow he would be retired. But the last day of his service ended tragically.

Pensioner organizes a meeting of former classmates fifty years after graduating from school. Many are no longer alive, but those who came touchingly remember their distant childhood and youth, the joys and sorrows of bygone years.

The young composer Mikhail Glinka performs his new work at a soiree at earl Vielgorsky's house. However, the public is accustomed to Western music, and reacts coldly to the creation of the composer. This makes him very sad, but soon he decides to go learn the art of music in Italy. After returning from Italy, he is full of desire to write national Russian opera. Vasily Zhukovsky proposes a subject: a feat of Ivan Susanin. Tsar Nicholas I change the name of the opera to A Life for the Tsar and assigns a librettist - Baron Rosen. Acquaintance with the future co-author shocked Glinka: Rosen speaks Russian with a noticeable German accent. The premiere was successful, but Glinka was still not entirely happy with the libretto: "False words were written by Rosen". When Nicholas I learned that Ruslan and Lyudmila was written on Pushkin's subject, he sees it as sedition. The bitter experience of the composer brighten his supporters.

The monotonous life of a provincial town Verhopoli violates the arrival of the railway builders - engineers Cherkun and Tsyganov.

The film is a play about the collapse of the Vanyushins merchant family. The head of the family is a stranger to his children. The insight turned out to be cruel: sharp contradictions, anger, enmity, greed tear the family apart. Not finding a way out of this situation, he commits suicide.