The 1974 Irina Tarkovskaya Russian family romantic melodrama starring Tengiz Archvadze, Tatyana Batrokova, Valentin Bogdanov, Pyotr Cherkashin, and Vera Golovina.

Film-play based on the novel of the same name by A.I. Herzen.

The heroes of the film are students of a pedagogical university, those who, after a year or two, have to carry knowledge to schoolchildren, "to sow the rational, good, eternal." In the meantime, student practice. True, the practice is not quite ordinary, because for the first time students leave far from the walls of their own university, for the first time they meet with students in the classroom not in the presence of their teachers, those with whom life encounters them daily at the institute, but with those who have been working for more than a year at school.

Spring of 1918. Tarakanov, managing the estate of Prince Tikhvinsky, with the help of a former court fencing teacher Marquess and a street kid Keshka, is stealing a collection of paintings and sculptures from the abandoned estate owners. Hoping to transport her abroad, criminals wander with a circus troupe, and in their wake goes a tireless criminal investigator — Makar Ovchinnikov.

The film is dedicated to the poet Komsomol member Sergei Chekmarev, who tragically died in 1933.