Nikolai Konovalov

Petty bourgeois Zhigalovs, whose daughter-in-law Dasha is being extradited, find out to their horror that the official Aplombov, who has been caring for Dasha all summer, has dined every day with them and has proved himself to be his bridegroom, is not going to marry at all.

A drab woman scientist, working on machine to harness solar energy, and a pert concert singer look-alike being courted to play her in a movie swap identities and find personal growth, professional success, love, and happiness.

Anton Ivanovich Voronov is a highly respected professor at the Moscow Conservatoire, who places the music of Bach above everything else and regards it as the ultimate yardstick by which other musical accomplishments must be measured. His daughter, Serafima, is an aspiring singer with great potential, and her father’s anger is aroused when she begins singing in the operetta composed by Aleksei Mukhin, thus abandoning what he considers the higher calling of opera. Mukhin’s work, however, demands a high level of ability from his soloist, and Anton Ivanovich is persuaded of the legitimacy of operetta as a musical genre when, in a dream, he is visited by Johann Sebastian Bach himself, who tells him that ‘people need all kinds of music’.

Tanya Morozova, an illiterate but industrious textile factory worker, finds happiness through her education and the Stakhanovite movement. She becomes a shock labourer and ascends through the Party ranks, ultimately being elected as a member of the Supreme Soviet.

August 1941. Residents of the Ural town escorted to the front of men. Left alone, women take on the most difficult cases, showing outstanding organizational skills and will. Together with the evacuated plant, refugees arrive in the town. The heroine of the Film Anna takes to her house a woman with children — her example is followed by the rest…

The famous actress Kruchinina graciously agrees to tour in a town with which she has heavy memories, and finds there a son, left by her due to circumstances many years ago. He has become embittered from his hard childhood, youth and young adulthood an insignificant and drinking like everyone else, an actor in the local provincial theater.

Talented cabbie with aspirations as a singer spends afterhours practicing with an amateur opera company, ignoring his sweetheart, the femme cab dispatcher.

Film deals with Stakhanovite movement. Old miners try to sabotage young man's plan to renew methods of getting coal.