Performance based on the novel of the same name by Yuri Olesha with the participation of actors from the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theater of M. Gorky.

Tractor driver Pronka Lagutin comes to the city. Meeting the director's assistant unexpectedly turns into an invitation to him to play the role of a rural guy who moves to the city. Pronka rehearses with pleasure, but realizing that staying means never seeing her native village again, she runs away from the director.

The Commissioner of Police has been tasked with conducting an investigation into the threat of a terrorist attack in the building of the press concern. During the investigation, he learns about the existence of the 31st department, created by the management of the concern with the aim of eliminating the opposition press.

In "Dead Souls" Gogol posed the most pressing and painful questions of modern life. The very title of the poem had enormous revealing power; it carried, according to Herzen, “something terrifying”, “he could not name it otherwise; not the revisionists - dead souls, but all these Nozdryovs. Manilovs and all those like them are dead souls, and we meet them at every step..."

Leonid Pleshcheyev returned from the war blind. Against his will, he became a dependent. He drowns his grief in unrestrained drunkenness, thereby tormenting his wife Mariya and his teenage son Lyonka. Mariya finally decides to take her son and leave for Altai, but the boy runs away and returns to his father. So, together, they eke out a half-miserable existence until Grigoriy Shalagin, Pleshcheyev's longtime friend, returns from the army. It is he who awakens in Leonid the extinct self-esteem and pride of a soldier. Pity aside, he helps him get back to work.

A high-schooler named Valentin Kuzyayev is invited to appear on a TV show about youth. When he is given a questionnaire, Valentin finds himself unable to answer the simplest questions. To sort himself out, he starts to keep a diary.

A new chairman arrives at the Zarya collective farm with the firm intention of creating a model farm there. But from the very beginning, his work is complicated by his difficult relationship with the young agronomist Svetlana Nikitina.

The film takes place between two revolutions - 1905 and 1917. There is no agreement in the family of the Kolomiytsev brothers, bankrupt nobles. The elder brother Yakov is mortally ill. The youngest, Ivan, a gendarme colonel, is completely confused and does not know how to get out of the situation created in the family.

1917. The eve of the October Revolution. Having returned to St. Petersburg from exile, the Bolshevik Vaulin, despite police persecution, joins the Bolsheviks.

A stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises", first staged for Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater and later reworked for Leningrad Television.