Mikhail Vasilyevich Krechinsky, an avid gambler and cardsharp, loses a large sum of money. Creditors are closing in on him from all sides. The only way out is to marry a rich girl. To get his father's blessing and speed up the wedding, Krechinsky resorts to deception.

Fearing the Soviet Union, rich businessmen who want more influence in Europe decide to give the nation of Boufferia a new king, an easy to handle drunkard.

Young Maxim grows up under the czarist regime with his grandparents as guardians. Continually demeaned by his martinet grandfather, Maxim is drawn to his warm-hearted grandmother, who instills in him the willingness to pursue his writing muse.

Eugénie Grandet is set in the town of Saumur. Eugénie's father Felix is a former cooper who has become wealthy through both business ventures and inheritance (having inherited the estates of his mother-in-law, grandfather-in-law, and grandmother all in one year). However, he is very miserly, and he, his wife, daughter, and their servant Nanon live in a run-down old house which he is too miserly to repair. His banker des Grassins wants Eugénie to marry his son Adolphe, and his lawyer Cruchot wants Eugénie to marry his nephew President Cruchot des Bonfons, both parties eyeing the inheritance from Felix. The two families constantly visit the Grandets to get Felix's favour, and Felix in turn plays them off against each other for his own advantage.

Not being able to implement his invention in his home country, engineer Arrowsmith, the author of the patent for ore flotation, goes to the USSR to work at one of the flotation plants, where he soon learns that a group of Soviet engineers is conducting similar work.

It is May 1912. Thirteen political prisoners are being tried in a naval fortress of Kronstadt. They are sentenced to death by hanging. A clandestine Bolshevik organization decides to free the prisoners during their transfer to the place of execution. Vasily Panin, a junker of a school of naval engineers, is one of those entrusted with this dangerous task.

Katusha, a country girl, is seduced and abandoned by Prince Nekludov. Nekludov finds himself, years later, on a jury trying the same Katusha for a crime he now realizes his actions drove her to. He follows her to imprisonment in Siberia, intent on redeeming her and himself as well.