A slice of life among Russian intelligentsia on the eve of WWII. A haunting reminder of Stalin's psychotic purge of 1938 and the nightmarish German siege of Leningrad.

The film consists of five short stories that reflect five stages (1947 — 1950 — 1957 — 1967 — 1982) the action programs of the heroine of the film, from the age of fifteen, rushed to a typical goal for that time — to smile from the front page of a central newspaper. Her fate is not simple: unhappy love, life with the unloved, a labor colony, love again, then love in return, earthquakes, fires, devastation. The heroine is getting closer to the goal and nothing can stop her..

One day in the life of a modern St. Petersburg woman, a woman of post-Balzac age, with whom something is happening. Either a spiritual crisis or a momentary obsession...

The head of the Pervomaiskaya Railway, at the first stage of perestroika, having accidentally learned that they want to fire him from his job, decides to carry out an experiment he had long planned - to put a super-heavy train on the tracks...

Vasily Kutuzov, the namesake of the famous commander, ends up in a mental hospital because of his talent for making up jokes. Everyone in his family had this gift, and many suffered because of it. The authorities didn't like that the Kutuzovs were bothering people. Vasily's neighbors in the ward are all famous people who left a mark in history. So he amuses them until the doctors decide to cure him of this "disease"...

A story of a Moscow's apartment building that is slowly falling apart, literally. First, the hot water has been cut off by an old man from Asia, who could not stand it being wasted. Then the roof is starting to collapse. Finally, the electricity has been cut off. All the tenants of the building, no matter how different they were, find themselves in the same situation.