Elena Mihailovna, having worked all her life in the only school of a provincial town, lives modestly in retirement. Unexpectedly she learns of a fatal diagnosis, which can at any moment end her life. Instead of an unbearable anticipation, she resolutely begins the preparation for her own death, in order to simplify the procedure for her son. She has not seen her only son for over five years because he worrks in the capital. Oleg is constantly busy, and he does not have time for his lonely mother. At the same time with all the new problems, the heroine receives as a gift a huge carp, which changes her life.

In Petersburg during perestroika there are two people, Alya and Nika. She is a little funny Petersburg intellectual; he is a French architect. They cannot live without each other, but they cannot together, either in the ancient Lyon castle, or in her communal apartment inhabited by colorful neighbors. Next to Alya is her childhood friend - Mitya, whose love she does not notice. He uses Ali's ridiculous mistake and Niki's jealousy to separate them for years.

A story of a successful businessman who falls in love with a silent movies actress and starts to look everywhere for a woman who looks exactly like her.

Dovlatov charts six days in the life of a brilliant, ironic writer who saw far beyond the rigid limits of 70s Soviet Russia. Sergei Dovlatov fought to preserve his own talent and decency with poet and writer Joseph Brodsky, while watching his artist friends got crushed by the iron-willed state machinery.