Arkadiy Sirenko

The villagers dreamed of the happy days to come, but the war came and the men went to defend their land.

The saleswoman of the village store Pasha Nikitina generously distributed all the money from the proceeds to the villagers in debt, when they were left without a salary through the fault of the Chairman. The audit appeared suddenly — and Pasha began to demand money back. Not having received debts, the heroine turned for help to her brother, who immediately responded to her misfortune: he sent money and came himself…

Events take place in the White Sea, 1942. New recruit Andrei Bulygin is assigned as an assistant machine gunner on a small ship that delivers soldiers and weapons to the front line. On the way back, German fighters sink the ship, leaving only Andrei alive. Having got out on the ice, he enters into an unequal battle with the cold and the German pilot von Bettger attacking him from the air...

Second half of the 1960s. Novikov, an employee of the apparatus, is a charming and successful functionary, married to the daughter of a former party leader. His life is a success — he has a status, a family, two children, as well as a young mistress — student Tanya, for whom he will never divorce... During the conflict at a youth construction site in Siberia, which he must repay, Novikov shows himself as an experienced dodger and a provocateur. Tanya's father, a war veteran and an honest worker, Ivan Dronov considers himself entitled to punish this scoundrel...

After his wife left him for another man, Andrey unsuccessfully tried to found a new woman. Meanwhile, he found an orphan which was looking for his mother.

Young agronomist Viktor Nozhov makes an extraordinary decision - he leaves a successful state farm and becomes the chairman of a backward collective farm in his native village...

Sofya Petrovna, a typist from a publishing house in Leningrad, has her only son repressed. In her publishing house, managers and ordinary employees were repressed. And Sofya Petrovna begins walking around the offices, trying to explain that a mistake has occurred.

The story of a writer who accidentally stumbles across the elixir of immortality and in doing so encounters the small group of immortals who have jealously guarded this secret for centuries. Once the writer has knowledge of this elixir, called 'Mafussalin', the group of five immortals give him a stark choice: either join them, with the price of admission, being a duel to the death between the immortal who accidentally gave the secret away or death at the hands of the group. As the writer makes up his mind, sometimes aided and at other times opposed by the ever shifting alliances from within the group, we discover how the other immortals became this way, their true ages and what they have done with this 'gift'.