Based on the autobiographical book "Ya -sam" (I-myself) by Vladimir Mayakovsky the leading Russian Futurist poet of the beginning of the 20th century. He was born in 1893, into a Russian Cossack family in the Transcaucasian kingdom of Georgia, then part of Russian Empire. There he spent his childhood and boyhood attending a grammar school in Kutaisi. Mayakovsky moved to Moscow at the age of 14, after his father's death. He became a poet, an artist, an actor, a writer/director and public speaker.

Ivane, a Gurian peasant is struggling with social inequality, trying to feed an impoverished family, pay state and rent taxes with extreme physical exertion and timber production. There is little hope for the future.