Lev Snezhnitsky

About the life of the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka.

Major timber merchant Yegor Bulychyov is terminally ill. In his house, he is surrounded by insignificant and greedy people, impatiently waiting for his death. Clever and insightful Yegor understands that he lived his whole life with strangers. He protests in his own way against the dissimulation and hypocrisy of the "masters" - the clergy, liberals, against the foundations of the bourgeois society that is going to collapse. Bulychyov's dying curse drowns his class in the powerful sounds of a revolutionary song.

A youth brigade at one of Kyiv's factories is competing for the title of Communist Labor Brigade. They are assisted by an old worker, Yakov Sereda. However, two people actively interfere with the Komsomol members: the rogue Yevgeny, who pretends to be a self-taught inventor, and the careerist engineer Kamensky...

Bolshevik Mravin, under the name of engineer Pyotr Ivanovich Lednev, risking his life, takes V.I. Lenin’s “Letter to the American Workers” to America. With the help of John Reed, he publishes it in one of the newspapers.